Today is Easter Sunday. After 40 long days of preparation and reflection, we arrive today to discover that the tomb is empty and that life, not death, has the final word. We gather, just like the women, giving witness to the Resurrection of our Lord.  But what does it mean to be a witness to this event? And to borrow Jesus’ own words, what does it mean to be “children of the resurrection”?

 

Interestingly, these words are not spoken by the risen Christ. Instead, Luke reports that shortly before his trial and crucifixion, Jesus utters these words in a conversation with the Sadducees, who did not believe in the Resurrection. Yes, there continue to be many “sadducees” in our world today…some even in the Church.

 

As Luke’s Gospel winds down in chapter 19, Jesus makes his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He then enters and clears the Temple, and later he spends his week teaching and sharing prophecy in and around that area. His actions on Palm Sunday infuriate the religious leaders, and we are reminded shortly thereafter that they begin to plot for a way to kill him. The chief priests, the scribes and the other religious leaders also begin to challenge him openly, hoping to trip him up, to catch him saying something that would allow them to bring charges against him.

 

In Luke 20 we discover that these religious leaders include the Sadducees, the first and last time that they are mentioned in Luke’s Gospel. What do we know about these men? The writer tells us here only that “they say there is no resurrection” from the dead. In Acts – the second volume of Luke’s two-part story – we discover in the 23^rd chapter that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, in angels or in spirits, three things believed and taught by the Pharisees, a group with whom we are usually more familiar.

 

From other ancient writings we know that the Sadducees were one of several religious and political parties at the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. While the Pharisees were more popular with the masses, the Sadducees were a close-knit group of aristocratic priests who worked hard to maintain warm ties with Rome. The Sadducees’ primary role was to oversee the Temple cult. As such, they, unlike the Pharisees, believed that Jews could only truly worship Yahweh when they made their periodic pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

 

Often the Sadducees and the Pharisees are lumped into the same group, but actually they held very little in common. The Sadducees only recognized the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, and they did not adhere to the other writings of the Prophets or the detailed teachings and interpretations passed down by the Pharisees and scribes. And because the Torah did not mention explicitly the Resurrection, the Sadducees did not believe in it. While the Pharisees believed in and hoped for a Messiah, the Sadducees did not, probably because such a Messiah would have created much disruption to their ordered lives. It is fair to say that the Sadducees were more political than religious, more conservative than radical, more interested in maintaining the status quo – which benefited them greatly – than in seeing any revival led by a Messiah.

 

So probably with a sense of nervous curiosity, the Sadducees one day pull Jesus aside to ask him a question.

 

“Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother…you know, so that his brother’s name might be carried on. Now Jesus, let’s assume that there are seven brothers who all die having been married to the same woman who never gives birth to any children. Finally, the woman dies.”

 

After outlining this scenario, an improbable one but also one that is addressed in the Torah law, the Sadducees, maybe giggling by now, pose the question intended to stump Jesus – a question that sounds like something you’d hear on the Maury Povich show. “At the resurrection, Jesus, whose wife will the woman be – the first brother’s, the second brother’s, the third brother’s, the fourth brother’s, or the seventh brother’s - given that at one point in time she had been married to each of the seven brothers?”

 

Knowing their hearts just like he knows ours, Jesus knew that their question had little to do with marriage per se, but mainly with the resurrection, something that the Sadducees found heretical, if not comical. For this reason, Jesus responds with only one sentence about marriage before talking about the reality of resurrection.

"Those who belong to this age marry, and...are given in marriage.  But those who are considered worthy of a place in that age - the Resurrection age - they neither marry or are given in marriage.  Indeed...for you see, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God...in fact, they are children of the Resurrection."

 

Jesus then explains to his Sadduceen skeptics – those who only revered the first five books of Moses – that God has always been the God of the living, not the God of the dead. Using stories from the Torah, Jesus argues that when Moses speaks in the burning bush story of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, he makes the claim, implicitly if not explicitly, that the three have been or will be raised by God. Why? For God is always a God of the living, and in the eyes of God all three of them are alive.

 

Bewildered, the Sadducees remain quiet. Jesus had just shown them that resurrection has always been part of God’s nature, even since the time of Abraham. Luke then tells us that some scribes, people who knew their Bibles from cover to cover, spoke up. “Teacher, you have spoken well.” This bizarre story concludes by telling us that they – probably the Sadducees – no longer dared to ask him any more questions.

 

Surprisingly, throughout the Biblical and extrabiblical record, we find no mention of a Sadducee becoming a follower of Jesus. While other important Jewish religious leaders did convert, apparently none of the Sadducees ever did. And with their influence tied to the Temple cult, the Sadducees disappeared from history when the Temple was destroyed several decades after Jesus’ death.

 

Of course, all of this begs the question: Why did the Sadducees not believe in Jesus? Or, using the language from Luke 20, why did they never want to become children of the Resurrection?

 

There are probably a number of reasons. For starters, the Sadducees were very wealthy, and surely they must have heard about Jesus’ prophetic teachings against the perils of wealth. The Gospel of Luke is filled with such stories, including the story of the Rich Young Man, the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the parable of the Rich Fool to name a few.

 

Second, and maybe more significantly, the Sadducees were also very powerful, and we all know how difficult it is for someone in power to relinquish, or even share, that power with someone else. I am sure that the Sadducees had a hard time believing in someone who preached that those who now humble themselves before God will one day be exalted, while those who exalt themselves will one day be humbled. Such concepts would have left them befuddled…or maybe scared to death.

 

We could name other reasons, but I believe that the Sadducees were not willing to become children of the Resurrection for one simple reason: they were afraid to die. They were afraid to die. And to be a child of the Resurrection, you must first die. You know the end of the Gospel story.  Death always comes before Resurrection. Good Friday always comes before Easter Sunday. To become a child of the Resurrection, we first must die. 

 

Of course, all of this begs yet another, more personal question: Do I want to be a child of the Resurrection? Or am I content with living the dead-end life of a Sadducee?

It could be said that the life of faith is a process of dying. Dying to old habits. Dying to old ways of thinking.  Dying to the idols of this world that we believe might save us. Every day, Christ calls us to die. And why? So that we might live. Remember what Jesus told his disciples at Caesarea Philippi. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, while those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of gospel, will save it. For what will it profit us to gain the whole world, and yet still forfeit our life?”

 

Now I don’t know how God is calling you to die today – maybe it’s to an addiction that has had a strangle hold on you for years. Maybe it’s to an attitude of negativity and pessimism. Maybe it’s to a feeling of worthlessness or despair.

 

While I don’t know how God is calling you, I do have a sense of how God is calling me to die. I know that my prideful self needs to die. I know that my need to be in control needs to die. I know that my need to do-do-do needs to die. I know that I need to die in many ways, so that I might be raised into the newness of life that God desires for me, so that I might become a true child of the Resurrection. How is God calling you to die?

 

Recently I read a book on congregational development, and the title of the book connects well with this theme: You Only Have to Die. You see, not only do we need to die as individuals before we can experience Resurrection living, we must also die as congregations before we can experience Resurrection living. In what ways does your community of faith need to die today so that you might become all that God desires for you? In what ways are you, individually and corporately, just like the Sadducees - playing it safe, not willing to let go of the past, not willing to believe, not able to trust the Resurrection power of God?

 

Are you interested in being a child of the Resurrection? Is your community of faith interested in being a church of the Resurrection? 

On the other side there is the promise of new life…we only have to die.

O to be a child again,

lane

Rev. C. Lane Glaze
Director - Clemson Wesley Foundation
Campus Minister - Clemson UMC
PO Box 1703 Clemson SC 29633
864-207-9135 (c) or 864-654-5547 (o)
www.clemsonwesley.com

Feel free to forward this email to a friend. The Clemson Wesley Weekly Devotional is a ministry of the Clemson Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist Church’s ministry to students on the campus of Clemson University. The purpose of this email is to look at issues relevant to the life of Clemson students through the lens of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you would like your name added to this list, email Rev. Lane Glaze at glaze@clemson.edu.