Today’s gospel reading comes at the end of a series of challenges to Jesus’ authority. After the chief priests and scribes fail to lure Jesus into blasphemy and sedition, the Sadducees try to trip him up with a question about Mosaic law. Since the widow of a man who dies without a son “shall not be married outside the family to a stranger” but instead remarry her late husband’s brother (Deut 25:5-10), whose wife would a woman married to seven brothers be “in the resurrection” (Luke 20:27-33)?
It’s what we nowadays call a “bad faith” question. The Sadducees don’t even believe in the resurrection of the dead. They’re just trying to back Jesus into a legal corner.
He deals quickly with the marriage issue, but then moves us on to the more important question: Why are the Sadducees wrong to disbelieve in the resurrection in the first place?
Of course, Jesus will give the best answer to that question with his very body, not so long after this interchange. But here he points the Sadducees right back to Torah:
[Jesus said to them] “…the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Luke 20:37)
At first glance, it doesn’t seem like much of an argument. When God speaks to Moses in Exodus 3, doesn’t he invoke the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob simply to underscore that he is indeed “The LORD, the God of your ancestors” (Exod 3:15a)? Isn’t his address to Moses just an extension of his earlier address to Jacob: “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac” (Gen 28:13)?
This is God’s “name forever,” his “title for all generations” (Exod 3:15b). But it’s more than that, says Jesus. For the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, is “God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive” (Luke 20:38).
We don’t know if this was enough to change the mind of the Sadducees.1 But “they no longer dared to ask [Jesus] another question” (Luke 20:40).
Now, Christians have continued to ask Sadducee-like questions about the precise nature of the resurrection. Even a theologian as great as Augustine of Hippo spent a good chunk of his greatest work pondering such imponderables: What age will we be in the resurrection? Will deceased infants be raised in the adult form they never reached as mortals? Will we all be Jesus’ height in the resurrection? What happens to a human body eaten by an animal and digested?
We may as well try to figure out the mechanics of a bush that can be “blazing, yet… not consumed” (Exod 3:2). But whatever the unknowable details of the resurrection, we can know the overriding, astonishing truth: the God of all generations is “God not of the dead but of the living.”
I can’t think of better news to proclaim on this Sunday, when many Protestants pause to remember their loved ones who have died in the past year — yet to God are alive. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. To God, all of them are alive. The first followers of Jesus, who heard these words in person. To God, all of them are alive. Those whom we remember today, who heard them as scripture. To God, all of them are alive.
Thanks be to that God. Amen.
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 98; Isaiah 12; Luke 21:5-19; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13.
According to the same author, they still didn’t believe in the resurrection years later, in Paul’s time.