This morning Luke thrust the Sadducees at us. We don’t know very much about the Sadducees. Anyone who mentioned them in antiquity was hostile to them— and that would include Luke in their one brief appearance in his gospel. From what we can glean from the evangelists and the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, they appear to have been aristocrats based in Jerusalem and allied to the Temple priesthood. They were the religious conservatives of their day. Their Bible was the Torah and the Torah only, and they had no truck with relatively new-fangled notions like the resurrection of the dead, a belief which arose during a period of intense persecution when Greeks ruled the Holy Land.

As Luke tells the tale, these Sadducees are out to bait Jesus, to them a simple country preacher. So they set up a straw man for him, just to watch him squirm, just to show their superiority to this rube from Galilee. Their conservative Judaism held that as long as a person was remembered by his posterity, that person had a kind of immortality. So they seize upon an old law from the Torah which says that if a man dies without children his brother is to marry the widow and thus preserve his memory, to keep the family line going, and also keep her and her property in the family. “So what if, in one family, this continues on through seven brothers? If there is, as you say, Jesus, if there is a resurrection from the dead, whose wife will that woman be?”

Jesus answers by saying first that the question is beside the point: there is no marriage in the resurrection, since there is no need to maintain property or provide for inheritance. The resurrected are like angels, they do not die.

More importantly, Jesus goes on to quote their beloved Torah back to them saying that in the story of the burning bush, God says he is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. But God, he goes on, is a God of the living, not the dead, so to God those patriarchs of old are still alive.

Modern scholars may not think much of the way Jesus uses scripture here to prove his point— it seems to hinge on what you mean by “is”— but it was just how the Sadducees interpreted scripture, and the Pharisees, and early Churchmen like Luke. So it seemed all good and proper to them; and the Sadducees, we have to assume, went away rather impressed and somewhat abashed and more than ready, when the time came, to throw their lot in with those who sought Jesus’ death.

What Jesus’ answer to them ultimately depended upon was his understanding of the power and love of God. He had himself always trusted in that power and love, and he was reaching that critical point in his career when that power and love would be put to the utmost test. If God was powerful enough to create all things, including his people Israel, and loving enough to preserve them through good and ill—and mostly ill— would he simply let death carry off all his beloved?

That is, after all, what our Christian hope is based on: the power of a God who gives us life and the love of God that pours itself continually over all his creation and over each of us, reaching out for us when we have turned away from him, reaching out for others when we have turned our backs on them, working through his Christ to make his creation once again new.

The resurrected, as the gospel says, do not die; rather, they are those who live in the fulness of God’s love and they share that love as God shares it, extravagantly, indiscriminately, recognizing no divisions of race or kind, blind to all bias and discrimination, always open and giving and embracing, not only those they have loved in this world but all the marvellous children of God.

Today’s story from the gospels is, at heart, one with St Paul’s ecstatic cry of triumph based on his own experience of Christ crucified and risen: “I am convinced that neither death nor life… nor anything else in all creation will be able to sparate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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