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Image Credit: Peaceable Kingdom by John August Swanson. From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN, retrieved November 4, 2025. Estate of John August Swanson. The artist has granted permission for the non-commercial use of this image with attribution.
Proper 27 (32), Year C
9 November 2025
Haggai 2:1-2:9 and Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21 or Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
I think it was in 2006 when the CBC interviewed me regarding the exhibition of skinned human bodies at Science World. I lived the Fraser Valley then, in Abbotsford – or as a friend calls it – the buckle of the Bible Belt. My concerns were human rights and the objectification of human beings, for we don’t usually put our dead in a travelling road show. But the reporters had made up their mind: Because of where I lived, I must be a fundamentalist and be opposed to science. It didn’t matter what I said.
The way the Sadducees approach Jesus is very much like the reporters who assumed that religion and science could not possibly go together. It is reductionist, and mocks a caricature rather than seek an earnest conversation. Not unlike the so-called New Atheists from a few years ago, who critiqued religion that didn’t actually exist because they knew nothing about religion. It was a straw man that they sought to take down.
And so the Sadducees, who Luke tells us did not believe in the resurrection, do not seek a serious debate. They seek to ridicule a belief, a theological position, and the people holding such belief.
I think we all have not only encountered our own positions dismissed in such casual way, but may have been tempted to do the same with the convictions of others. And if we did so, we were aided in it by an internet and media culture that thrives on headlines and lacks interest in complexities. The reason Jesus warns us against judging others is because we’re so good at it, because we do it all the time, often without noticing.
Ron and I attended a training session for the Being With course. There is a second book now available with a number of different modules. Coincidentally, two of my friends are in the same cohort, and Dan who is well versed in poetry reminded us of the word by W.H. Auden that we are here on earth to do good unto others and that what the others are here for, Auden does not know. Now, Auden may well have known, but what Dan suggested is that the way we perceive the world is that others are part of a story of which I am the centre. We perceive the world with ourselves at the centre. And yet, we are part of the stories of others, a perspective we often miss. And if you think about it, what a gift and responsibility it is to be a part of the story of others!
And such de-centering is necessary for Jesus to be the centre of our lives, instead of ourselves. Such de-centering is necessary for us to imitate the disciples who left everything to follow Jesus.
The Sadducees see themselves at the centre of their story and others, including Jesus, are extras. And that is how they can be so certain that they are right.
It may be helpful to know that the Sadducees only held to the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, together called the Pentateuch, and that belief in the resurrection developed later in the Jewish faith. Think of it as a developing understanding of God in the same way that you and I start somewhere and our faith and our understanding develop, based on God revealing Godself to us.
Think of prayer as talking and of prayer as listening, of making room for God.
Think of the Bible as an instruction manual which must be obeyed literally (except the parts about wealth and judging) and thus our obedience to the Bible taking the place of God, i.e. we believe in the Bible and not in God, and then think of a faith that understands that the Bible is not the object of our worship but that the Bible’s purpose is to witness to the God revealed in Jesus.
Think of how Martin Luther’s early faith was characterized by the fear of a vengeful God and how his faith turned into the love of a gracious God.
Think of the ordained ministry having long been tied to sex and gender but now being tied to vocation that transcends sex and gender.
The Sadducees’ insistence on faith as static and their refusal to see it as evolving explains the ridiculous case study they bring forward. If all you have is the Mosaic law and if your only understanding of marital relationship is for the purpose of procreation, then you end up with a story of seven brothers who all fail to procreate.
If the free market is all you have and the magic of the market regulating itself, then all you get is some very very rich people and some very very poor people with little in between, and without any sense of social solidarity.
If you think that our only purpose is to take the letter of the Bible literally then it is no surprise that the world God loves is turning into an ecological wasteland.
In fairness to the Sadducees, procreation was important to preserve the clan. And I think that this continued at least in Western societies for a long time in the desire to preserve the family name, when women gave up their name to assume their husband’s name.
The Sadducees were the centre of their own story, I believe, in part because they lacked imagination and empathy. They also were the centre of their own story because life was easier that way. If I am the centre of my own story, everything else somehow has to conform to me and to my beliefs. In such a set-up challenges to my beliefs do not exist.
Maybe ten years ago the little book “Heaven is for Real” had enormous popularity. I did not read it, though I understand its appeal, after all we believe in that which we do not see, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (11:1) So, if somehow there was evidence for what we believe, it may make believing easier, only that then it would no longer be faith if faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.
Yet Biblical faith is not that we are all-knowing but that God is. When Jesus invited the disciples to follow him, they did not know where he was going. And so having faith is not about knowing all things, it is about relationship more than it is about knowing. That relationship is established by God in Jesus Christ and is made manifest in the community of the Church and even beyond the Church, though not without it. What you have done to the least of me, you have done unto me, says Jesus. We encounter God even in the world.
At the beginning of the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes, 17I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, – this is a dynamic understanding of faith – 18so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
While a romantic book, perhaps the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, who said to the Little Prince, that it is only with the heart that one sees rightly because what is essential is invisible to the eye was informed by the reading of St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, where Paul prays that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, (…) may give [us] a spirit of wisdom and revelation as [we] come to know him, 18so that, with the eyes of [our] heart enlightened, [we] may know what is the hope to which he has called [us], what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.
The Gospel reading wraps up with Jesus making a theological argument not only about the afterlife being different from this life as there will be no need for procreation, but using the Pentateuch – the Sadducees’ frame of reference, and showing that the resurrection is already accounted for when Moses at the burning bush encounters the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, concluding that God is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.
But Jesus’ reply, is not just a theological argument, logically coherent. It is more. It is an invitation to let our lives be ruled not by certainties but by God, so that God may surprise us along the way, for God is God of the living and not of the dead.
Let us pray:
O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
