Job 19:23-27a Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thes.2:13-3:5 Luke 20:27-38
Legal precedence is using past juridical deliberations to inform in a deliberation on a present legal situation.
There was a time in Judaeo-Christian development when a belief in the resurrection from the dead was regarded by some to be an unacceptable innovation in what could be believed.
In religious and rabbinical scholarship during the first century, the innovation that became known as the resurrection was a topic of conversations. Parties within Judaism disagreed upon the meaning and the validity of holding to the view of a resurrection into an afterlife.
The two major parties within Judaism in the early first century the Pharisees and the Sadducees disagreed about the meaning and validity of the resurrection.
The Sadducees did not believe that there was proper precedence for supporting the belief in the resurrection.
It was not a matter of whether one wanted to believe in it; it was a matter of how one used the written authoritative writings to establish the validity of a belief.
So why did the Pharisees and the Sadducees disagree about the validity of the resurrection? It mainly had to do with the accepted canon of Scriptures used by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees accepted the Hebrew writings of the Psalms, the history and wisdom books, as well as the writings of the prophets. They found in the prophets precedence for believing in life after life, such as the Ezekiel vision of the dead bones coming back to life.
The Sadducees school of thinking only permitted the use of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. They were "originalists" who challenged what they believed to be doctrinal innovation.
Imagine now the dialogue presented with in the communities which read the writings of the Gospel of Luke. These communities were resurrection communities; they believed that they existed because of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ.
But there persisted in the dialogue between Christ-communities and synagogues profound differences about the resurrection beliefs of the followers of Christ.
This difference is re-visited in a presentation of a Jesus story in a rather Socratic dialogue with some members of the Sadducees.
Now if the Sadducees did not believe in future subjective immortality as is implied with the Christian tradition of the resurrection, what did the Sadducees believe about a person's after life?
A person could be objectively immortal in what a person leaves in this world after death, and most importantly, in one's offspring. One becomes objectively immortal in one's offspring.
And so the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection, presented to Jesus a riddle to stump him about his resurrection thinking.
To stump Jesus, they used some minutiae from the Torah. Levirate marriage was a rarely used requirement of a brother to marry the widow of his brother and the children of that marriage would be designated as offspring of the deceased brother. So seven brothers died and all had had the same woman as their wife. "Jesus, you believe in the resurrection, tell us who this one woman will be married to in the resurrection, the one that we don't believe in?"
Ironically, none of the seven brothers who died left any offspring for themselves or for their previously deceased brother.
Jesus gave an answer which might not be satisfactory to us. He said that in the resurrection there is no marriage because people will be more like angels, children of God. We may want the afterlife to be a more exact continuity of the situation we are in when we leave this life.
What might be the function and purpose of the presentation of this interchange within the early churches?
The early church believed that resurrection life was a different kind of life, continuous in some ways with this life, but significantly discontinuous in other ways.
The experiences of the Risen Christ for the disciples was significantly different than the experience they had with Jesus before he died. The stories of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ indicated that the Risen Christ is continuous with the life of Jesus before he died, but these appearances are also an indication of the differences between the Risen Christ, and Jesus before he died. The Jesus of Nazareth had surpassed himself significantly as he became known as the Risen Christ. Jesus of Nazareth was limited to one place in space and time; the Risen Christ could be known by anyone and anywhere.
The words of Jesus further expand upon the nature of God. Resurrection life goes with a belief in an inclusive Ever Living God. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived and believed in a living God, then that living God still includes their continuing lives.
The gist of the Gospel message for the early members of the communities where Luke's writings were taught is this: Believers in Jesus Christ are those who have had experiences of the Risen Christ and those experiences are connected and continuous with Jesus of Nazareth, but those experiences are spiritual experiences, Holy Spirit experiences, which means they are different from the experiences of those who lived and walk and talked with Jesus of Nazareth.
The early churches believed that the experiences of the Risen Christ provided an expansion of the meaning of the ancient confession of God as the God of the living. A God of the living includes the lives of those who have died.
For us today, this Gospel is a message of hope because it is the proclamation of an endless future, a different future for both those who live and those who have died. At the same time it is an affirmation of the connection between this visible life and the life of the future, between those who live and those who have died.
The Gospel invitation for us today to expand our belief to confess God as a God of the living, and to follow Jesus in his Risen Life of that same God of the living. Amen
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