MUC Family@10, 9 November 2025
Alison Sampson, reflecting on Luke 20:27-38
If you’re a fan of the musician Bon Iver, perhaps you know he takes his stage name from the greeting shared in the quirky tv show, Northern Exposure. Bon hiver! Good winter! In the show, a young urban Jewish doctor is sent to small town Alaska to pay off his medical tuition. There he encounters all sorts of eccentric inhabitants, including Maggie. Maggie’s a bush pilot whose boyfriends have all died in bizarre ways. Steve was hit by lightning. Harry ate tainted potato salad. Bruce had a fishing accident. Glen took a wrong turn into a missile test range. Dave froze to death on a glacier. Then Rick is killed by a falling satellite: and Maggie is somehow blamed.
Maggie’s mother tries to console her. ‘Men!’ she says. ‘They’re always dying! And we’re left to ship the body and clean out the closet …’ Then her mother lists all of her own boyfriends who have died suddenly and strangely, beginning with Leland, who has just dropped dead playing pool. Her morbid litany goes on and on, and because of the kind of show it is, it’s hilarious, but it’s also very mocking.
We encounter just this sort of mocking in today’s gospel selection. As the Sadducees don’t quite tell it, there’s this chick, right, and first she marries one bloke and oh, I don’t know, maybe he’s gored by a bull, anyway, he dies. Then she marries his brother, but he’s killed in an avalanche, and so on and so forth until she’s married all seven brothers turn and turn about. Finally, they’re all dead and she dies, too: seven times a widow and not one son to show for it. So tell us, Jesus: In the resurrection, which brother does she belong to?
Can you hear the dark humour, the snickers? Like Maggie’s curse in Northern Exposure, this is a story told to raise a laugh. There’s no concern for the vulnerability of women. There’s no acknowledgement of the terrible pain when a spouse dies, or the cruel whispers when a second marriage fails. Nor does it address the shame of childlessness in a culture where a woman’s worth is in her sons. In this story, the woman is simply an object passed from man to man to man, then used as an object to make fun of Jesus.
Because the Sadducees aren’t asking a genuine question. Their minds are already made up, and we’re told this at the beginning of the story. For they were a powerful and wealthy aristocratic group who controlled Temple worship and collaborated with the Romans to do so. They were doing pretty well; they didn’t need resurrection. In any case, it went against their theology. They accepted as scripture just the five books which make up Torah, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and that was it. Since resurrection isn’t mentioned in these five books, they rejected it. Instead, they believed that people live on through their descendants. This is the basis of the levirate law which the Sadducees were invoking. That is, in the law of Moses, if a man dies leaving no offspring, then his brother marries the widow and has children in the dead brother’s name to ensure the name continues and the property is passed down through the dead brother’s bloodline.
This is the context in which the Sadducees tell their tale and ask, ‘In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?’ In other words, who gets her? Clearly, the question isn’t genuine. They just want Jesus to look ridiculous, and his answer doesn’t matter at all.
But the question of resurrection matters to anyone who has lived this story, for example to anyone who has had multiple spouses. It matters to anyone whose life is dismissed or crushed by others, or whose identity is used by others to raise a laugh or prove a point. It matters to every one of us who has had to say goodbye to someone we love. And it mattered to the Pharisees.
Unlike the Sadducees, whose primary focus was the Temple, the Pharisees were concerned with weaving religious practice into daily household life. They could see the writing on the wall: Rome would soon destroy Israel. And in fact, tonight’s story wasn’t written down until well after Jesus was crucified, the Temple was torn down, and over half a million Jews were killed by the Romans as they crushed a Jewish Revolt. For Israel, it was yet another devastating episode in a long history of suppression by foreign empires, and so the Pharisees wanted to know: Where is God’s justice? Because it’s certainly not being delivered in this life now.
Like the Sadducees, the Pharisees accepted Torah as scripture, but they also accepted the Prophets and the Psalms. The prophets pointed to God’s coming age of justice and shalom. They declared that the day will come when the dead will be raised up body, mind and spirit, and God’s justice will finally be served. And so the Pharisees believed in resurrection.
We’ve heard the prophets and listened to Jesus; we can imagine this promised new age. It’s an age where women are no longer bought and sold in marriage, or defined by their father, their husband, or their womb. In this age, the curse of Genesis is repealed, and the patriarchy defeated once and for all. There’s good news for the poor, release for the captive, and recovery of insight and understanding. The oppressed will finally be free; all debt will be cancelled. There will be no more getting rich off other people’s poverty; no more selling sisters and daughters to settle debt, as continues to happen in many places even now.
In God’s new age, marginalised people will no longer be pawns in political games. Sexuality and race and class and gender will not be used to oppress; instead, everything will be turned rightside up, the poor will be raised and the powerful proud brought low. In God’s new age, there will be peace and justice for everyone. And this won’t be the peace of suppression, and it won’t be the fake justice of powerful Romans or aristocratic Sadducees or media titans or mining magnates or billionaires or kleptocrats or dictators. It will be genuine peace, with true freedom of speech and life-giving justice for everyone.
This is the resurrection which the Pharisees can envision, and which the Sadducees reject. So you can imagine the crowd pushing in, agog, as the Sadducees tell their story then taunt, So tell us, Jesus: In the resurrection, which brother does she belong to? And maybe some of the crowd are women or Pharisees or visionaries or dreamers. Maybe some of them are wondering, Will women always be the object of scorn, no more than a cipher or an empty womb being handed from one man to the next? Are oppression and suffering and sexism inevitable? Or will God’s new age be different?
They get their answer in Jesus’ reply, which rejects the very premise of the question. For those deemed worthy of resurrection from the dead, he says, marriage isn’t even a thing, and women will no longer be passed around like property. Then he mentions a story from Torah which even the Sadducees can’t reject, Moses and the burning bush. ‘The fact that the dead are raised,’ says Jesus, ‘Moses himself showed in the story of the bush, where he speaks of the Sovereign God as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to God all of them are alive.’ (Luke 20:37-38).
So Jesus takes the Pharisee line, but pushes it further than even they had dared imagine. The Pharisees trusted in an age to come, a future moment when the dead will be raised into divine presence and divine justice. Jesus is suggesting something bigger, something grander, something so wildly explosive that even now we don’t fully understand it; but in his own resurrection we get a glimpse.
For Jesus teaches that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all died, but to God they are all alive. And we know that Jesus himself later died, but that to God, and to us, he is alive. This doesn’t mean that his death is negated or cancelled by the resurrection; instead, his death is just one episode in his ongoing life. When we meet him on the road, he is wounded and scarred; yet he eats and drinks and breathes spirit into us; his crucified body is shockingly alive. So we learn that, to God, death is not the opposite of life. It’s part of life: but life doesn’t stop at death, and death doesn’t have the final word. Those who die in God continue to be alive to God; they continue to be held in God’s presence. And this is great news for those of us who grieve.
But the news gets even better. From the gospel according to John, we know that when we dwell in Christ and Christ dwells in us, we become part of his resurrected body not just in some future age, but right here and now.
This is the full and flourishing life into which we are called: and contrary to what the Pharisees and even many Christians believe, we don’t need to wait until we die to experience it. It’s a life which breaks open tombs now, and unites the living and the dead now, and fills the world with blessing now, and breathes new spirit into us. It’s a life which rejects the cynical claim that might is right or that God’s justice is nothing but a pipe dream. Instead, it’s a life which proclaims the power of vulnerability and self-giving love and insists on the full humanity of all people, now. It’s a life which seeks justice and shalom in this day and age, even as it looks to God’s future for completion.
This is what it means to be children of the resurrection. We dwell in Christ and Christ dwells in us so deeply that we become radiantly alive in God, now. We embody God’s love so fully that God’s kingdom is glimpsed among us, now; and, when we die, our living, our loving, and our experience of God’s overflowing abundance will only continue. For us, it doesn’t matter which side of death we are on, for God’s life is bigger than death, we have been swept up into God’s life, and this life will always continue.
In the gospel according to John, Jesus speaks plainly, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ he says. ‘Those who trust in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and trusts in me will never die.’ (John 11:25).
So let us trust in him and give our lives ever more fully to him, that we might embody God’s new age as we ship the bodies, clean out the closets, and remember our dead; and as we seek God’s justice, work for shalom and love one another. And let us celebrate this life that death cannot hold, the life that Jesus has shared among his community through the centuries and shares among us now, as we move into a time of prayer. God’s will be done: God’s love and life be shown: forever and ever but above all right now. Amen. Ω