Sunday 32 C (2016)

Jesus has arrived.

Luke's gospel has Jesus journeying determinedly towards Jerusalem.

Last week's gospel had Jesus nearly there,

entering Jericho and transforming Zacchaeus.

Now we have skipped forward a chapter,

skipped past Jesus coming to Jerusalem on a donkey,

past him crying over Jerusalem,

past him clearing traders from the Temple.

Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem, to show who he really is.

We are just heard one of several significant confrontations

in the week before the crucifixion. This one is with the Sadducees.

The Sadducees seem to have been

the religious and political establishment, responsible for the Temple.

They were the upper-crust,

with religious beliefs significantly different from the Pharisees.

In the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament,

there are a variety of views expressed about what happens after death.

The commonest view is that there is a shadowy zone, Sheol,

that the dead occupy,

where they are cut off from everything, including God.

Some probably saw this as very weak kind of immortality,

for others it was probably just a metaphor for 'death is the end'.

In a few late writings in the Old Testament,

there is a change in view,

raising the promise of resurrection and eternal happiness for the just.

That perspective was in our first reading, from Maccabees,

written about 100 years before Jesus lived,

where we heard

the King of the world will raise us up,..., to live again for ever.

The Sadducees had no time for this or other developments.

Their perspective was that

what was written in the first five books of the Old Testament,

the Torah, was all mattered,

and they didn't find grounds there for these 'modern' beliefs.

Jesus is very much in the tradition of the prophets,

writings that are not part of the Torah.

In his preaching and in his person,

he is at odds with the Sadducees' perspective on the Torah:

today's gospel illustrates the clash.

The Sadducees don't question Jesus to gain understanding:

they do it just to ridicule the notion of bodily resurrection.

The rule the Sadducees invoke,

which of course can be found in the Torah (Deuteronomy 25:5),

of passing a wife to a brother when the husband dies,

is about begetting children 'for' the dead man.

The Sadducees' question, at is core, is a very physical one:

when the dead are raised, who can have children with this woman?

Jesus answer is that they have the wrong idea about

the resurrection from the dead:

getting married and having children are part of this world,

but are not part of the next world.

He goes on to challenge the Sadducees' belief that, at death,

people are cut off from God,

using the Torah, their definitive source.

He tells them that God is named as

the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

God's name itself implies these people cannot be cut off from God,

cannot be forever dead, in Sheol.

In the Apostles Creed we express our faith in the

'resurrection of the body and life everlasting'.

Today's gospel, and indeed all of scripture,

says rather little directly about this mystery.

Indeed, St John said in his first letter,

we are already the children of God

but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed.

There is much that we do not, and probably cannot, know.

Questions we cannot answer.

However, Jesus' resurrection appearances,

the root of our hope, do provide some insights.

From them, I mention three things:

that Jesus is embodied, but mysteriously,

that Jesus' personal relationships continue: he relates to his friends

that Jesus has the marks of his suffering: the effects of love persist.

Jesus resurrection underpins our Christian faith that,

at death, life is changed, not ended.

This is a gift from God, and so we thank him for it.