“Life After Life”

Text: Luke 20:27-40

Have you ever wondered what heaven is going to be like? If you have, you’re not alone. For instance, back in the early years of the Christian faith, one question that many people wondered about was this: What are people going to look like in heaven? Or more specifically, what kind of clothes are people going to wear in heaven? And back in the early years of the Christian faith the answer they came up with was that in heaven everyone would be naked. Their thinking was that since Adam and Eve were originally naked and didn’t wear clothes until after they sinned, that in heaven, since there wouldn’t be any sin there, people would be naked there as well. I guess depending on who you think is going to be in heaven, having a bunch of naked people in heaven could be something really great or something really scary.

One day a group of Jewish people known as the Sadducees came to Jesus with a question about heaven. But the thing was the Sadducees didn’t really believe in heaven. They didn’t believe in resurrection. You see, the Sadducees were a group that accepted only the first five books of the Bible as their Scriptures – only Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. No Psalms, no prophets like Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos. Only the first five books, the books they believed that had been written by Moses. And so the Sadducees figured that since there was nothing written in those first five books about resurrection, that it must not be possible.

And so the Sadducees came to Jesus with a kind of trick question in order to try to trip him up. They said to Jesus: “Teacher, Moses wrote that if a man’s brother dies, leaving his wife but no children, that man should marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now let’s say that there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, whose wife would that woman be? After all, all seven brothers had married her.”

What the Sadducees were talking about was something called levirate marriage. The basic idea was that a person only really lived on after death through their children and grandchildren and through subsequent generations of descendants. The basic idea was that a person only really lived on after death if they had future generations of their family that were there to remember them. And so, in accordance with that belief, in the first five books of the Old Testament something called levirate marriage was established.

And what the levirate marriage laws said was that if a married man died without having any children, his brother or next of kin had a legal obligation to take his widow and have children with her. And then those children were considered to be the dead man’s children so that his name and his memory would be able to live on. And so when those Sadducees came to Jesus and tried to trip him up, they were saying, “Hey, what if a married man dies childless, and each of his six brothers in turn marries that same woman and dies childless, and then the woman dies. If there’s a resurrection like you say, Jesus, how’s that going to work out? Because obviously that same woman can’t be married to seven different men at the same time.”

But Jesus responded to them by saying, “You Sadducees are thinking about resurrection the wrong way. You’re looking for answers in all the wrong places.”

It’s like a police officer who was walking down a street one night, and he saw a fellow standing under a streetlight, who was stooped over and looking down at the sidewalk. The policeman asked the man what he was doing. The man said, “I lost my keys, and I can’t find them.” So the policeman offered to help him search. But after several minutes of looking around and not finding them, the policeman said, “Are you sure you lost them here?” The man said, “Well, I think my keys are actually over there,” pointing out into the darkness, “but I thought I’d keep looking in this spot because the light is so good here.”[1]

What Jesus was trying to get the Sadducees to see was that they were looking for the resurrection in the wrong spot. What the Sadducees were doing was they taking what they were familiar with in this life, and figuring that if there was a resurrection, if there was a heaven, that it would have to be pretty much identical to this life that we currently know. It’s similar to today when you hear people say, “The thing I like best about life is golfing. And so if there is a heaven, the thing I’m going to look forward to the most is all the great golf courses they’re going to have in heaven.”

But Jesus comes along and says to those Sadducees and to us, “There is a heaven. There is a resurrection. But the words and the categories and the laws that we’re used to in this life, they don’t necessarily apply to that new age, to that new creation, that God is going to bring about. But what I can tell you,” Jesus says, “is that our God is the God of the living. And even if it might not seem to make sense, even those who have died are alive to God.”

A woman had decided to spend some time at a monastery, learning from the monks who lived there about how to deepen her relationship with God. After she had spent quite some time at the monastery, one of the monks said something to her that she thought was rather odd. The monk said, “It’s time for you to meet the rest of the community.” The woman thought to herself, “What does he mean? I’m pretty sure I’ve already met all the monks who live here.” But the monk proceeded to walk her outside the monastery and showed her their cemetery.[2]

What that monk was bearing witness to is the fact that our God is the God of the living, so that even those who have died are alive to God. What that monk was bearing witness to is the fact that just as we who are alive today enjoy and experience a relationship with God, in the same way – even though we may not be able to fully understand how it’s possible – even those who have died continue to enjoy and experience a relationship with God. Even those who have died, even those who for the time being are physically separated from us, we still are part of the same community, the community of all those, from every time and place, who belong to God.

And so on this day that we call All Saints’ Sunday, we give thanks that in life and in death, we belong to God. On this day that we call All Saints’ Sunday, we give thanks that not even death is able to separate us from the love of God. And on this day that we call All Saints’ Sunday, we give thanks that the ultimate sting of death has been taken away, for Jesus Christ has conquered – because he lives, we will live also.