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The Spoiler
Luke 20: 27 – 38 |
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Summary
The Spoiler Imagine, if you will, a fishing tournament where a latecomer who seems unprepared to fish takes home the prize. All of the big-name locals are there, and they are contending for the top prize. Everyone of them has his or her secret bait, and the real fishermen have modern bass boats, high-end fish finders and the best rods and reels that money can buy. By the time this guy enters the tournament, it looks like there is no way he can place much less win. All the tournament spectators shrug their shoulders as he calmly puts his canoe into the water and pushes off. Some of them even begin to laugh when they see that he does not even have a fishing pole just some ragged old bag. Yet the odd entrant calmly paddles out into the river and moves into an area where no one’s fishing. Just as the clock ticks down to the final minutes, he opens up the bag that he carried with him. Everyone is surprised, when he pulls out a half-stick of dynamite. He lights it and tosses it overboard. A few seconds later, there is a geyser of water near the point of entry. The latecomer then paddles to the spot and begins to collect the fish that have now floated to the surface because they were stunned by the explosion. Just before the closing bell, he paddles to the weigh-in station with a load of fish that is three times that of his next closest competitor. He sets a new tournament record. Sure there are shouts of protest, but a check of the rule book reveals that this method is not against the rules. It is simply a spoiler. In the gospels, Jesus is a spoiler whose teaching continually calls his hearers to make huge shifts in their lives. His instructions are counterintuitive, countercultural and counter status quo. Just when we think that we have figured Jesus out, he explodes the box that we have put around Him and He challenges us to a deeper life. Our scripture for today is a case in point. Jesus is confronted by a group of Sadducees who attempt to trip Him up with a question related to marriage and the resurrection. Now on the surface, Jesus’ conversation with the Sadducees may seem non-confrontational, but Luke 20 reports several challenges that Jesus receives from these religious leaders. Besides, the Sadducees as a group were well known for their denial of the resurrection. This was a point of contrast between the Sadducees and Pharisees. In other words, the very fact that the Sadducees even ask Jesus about life in the resurrection would suggest that there is an agenda behind their question other than mere interest. They offer Jesus a scenario in which a woman is married one after another to seven brothers, each of whom dies and is replaced by the next brother in faithful fulfillment of the levirate marriage law from the Old Testament in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. This law obligated a brother to marry his sister-in-law in the event that his brother died before producing children. The firstborn son of this new union would then be considered the offspring of the deceased brother. After posing this hypothetical situation, the Sadducees ask Jesus, “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” Our worthiness of resurrection life The Sadducees must have believed that they had handed Jesus an unsolvable problem. For the Sadducees, the very idea of the necessity of levirate marriage was proof that there was no resurrection. For them, a person lived on only through his or her offspring, so levirate marriage provided a means for a man who died childless to have offspring “from the grave.” But as Jesus often did, He skillfully sidestepped His way out of this apparent trap and used the question as an opportunity to explode the assumptions of the Sadducees and to point all within earshot to the deeper reality of God’s kingdom. In other words, Jesus demonstrates the irrelevancy of the Sadducees’ scenario and pushes them to confront the truth about God’s kingdom and the resurrection. Jesus moves the conversation away from the question of marriage and focuses on the difference between this age and the coming age of God’s kingdom. Some have taken Jesus’ answer as proof that marriage relationships are not part of the afterlife. But that is not the point of the passage. Instead, Jesus zeros in on the profound contrast between an existence focused only on one’s current life and one that is shaped by the future life of the resurrection. Notice that Jesus uses the language of “those who belong to this age” and “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection”. Through his use of the language of worthy, Jesus invites all of his hearers, including us, to ask ourselves, “What makes a person worthy of life in God’s coming future of resurrection?” Jesus does not directly answer this question for us in this context, but in Luke’s gospel, there are several recurring themes that serve as markers to this life: · Whereas Jesus offered several scathing rebukes of life in this age as “faithless and perverse,”. In Luke 7:31-32, 9:41, 11:29-32, 16:8-9. Jesus’ stories consistently portray a different mode of existence for those who will embody the way of God. · Jesus justifies eating with and associating with “sinners” for the sake of extending God’s grace to them in Luke 15. · He gives an expanded definition of love for neighbor and recognizes that our enemies may sometimes embody this ethic better than we do in Luke 10:25-27. · He exhorts his hearers to love others and show mercy extravagantly and indiscriminately in Luke 6:35-36. In other words, the way of Jesus turns cultural assumptions upside down. It overturns tendencies to assume those on the outskirts of society are excluded from God’s kingdom. The Sadducees belonged to the upper class and were among those invested in the status quo; they had the most at stake in the world as it currently operated. Their primary interest was in maintaining their own privileged position in society. So, Jesus’ use of worthy is a subtle critique of their assumption of exclusivity. The initial part of Jesus’ response is clear: The resurrection is real and each of us needs to be ready to enter into to it. It is not about marrying and being given in marriage it is about being a child of the resurrection. Interpreting scripture But Jesus is not finished. He pushes the envelope with the Sadducees by citing Moses. The Sadducees took great pride in their conservative approach to scripture. They believed a doctrine only if it was rooted in the text, and for the Sadducees, only the Law of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy, was recognized as authoritative scripture. Their rejection of the resurrection was based in their insistence that Moses had not written anything about the resurrection. Yet in verses 37-38 of our reading, Jesus refers to the conversation between God and Moses at the burning bush on Mount Sinai as proof that Moses believed in the resurrection. Jesus paraphrases Exodus 3:6: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” By speaking of these relationships in the present tense, Jesus suggests that God’s words imply an ongoing, beyond-the-grave relationship between God and Israel’s ancestors. Jesus’ words are bold and daring. He has challenged the Sadducees on their misunderstanding of the nature of resurrection and invited them to reflect on the character of their own lives. Now he clearly suggests that they do not even understand books of scripture they claim as authoritative! The spoiler This text is rebellious and deeply unsettling. As we reflect on our lives today, do we not find ourselves occupied primarily by the “busy-ness” of the world in which we live rather than learning to reflect, cultivate and embody the sort of existence that bears witness to the reality of resurrection? Jesus was a spoiler. His life, death and resurrection have changed everything. Are we willing to continually realign ourselves and our communities to reflect the game-changing life that God offers to those who follow Jesus? |
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