The poor woman. Imagine waking up on resurrection day to the life everlasting and finding that she had seven husbands! The poor thing. She would die on the spot if that sort of thing could have still happened!
Absurd. Resurrection is absurd. It leads to crazy things like that poor woman with all those husbands. That was how the Sadducees saw it. It was just silly.
The Sadducees were probably the most conservative group in a wild assortment of Judaisms. In the first century most Jews and the early Christians considered what we call the Old Testament and the Apocrypha to be scripture. Most. Everyone except the Sadducees.
Well the Sadducees only followed the Torah, the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. They did not care for the innovations of the Prophets, and never mind to the new fangled other Writings like Job, or Daniel or the Psalms.
They stuck only with the old timey religion of Moses and his five books. Nothing else was to be trusted. And Moses said nothing about Resurrection. And that’s why the Sadducees came up with the whole silly story of the widow with the seven husbands, to show how silly all these new writings and ideas were.
Resurrection is simply preposterous and absurd wishful thinking.
Jesus responds by quoting from the Torah, something they could all agree on, when Moses met the God at the burning bush who spoke of being the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that meant that they must still be alive because God is God of the living.
And marriage ends at death because in the resurrection there is no need for marriage, because death is ended there is no need for procreation, and companionship is lived out in a new way.
It is actually deeper than it sounds. All life is from God and to be known by God is to be alive always because God never forgets us. To be known by God is to be held in life.
It all seems kind of esoteric to us now.
But there is something important going on here.
The Sadducees’ understanding of faith could only look to the past. Anything new was treated with ridicule and scorn.
So often that is a pitfall of faith, and of life in general that we still fall into, letting the past control everything. Enslaved to what has happened before.
We are children of the resurrection. We are not to live in the past, rather we live life looking forward, living time backward from the future coming back to now.
What will be is now already because God is God of the Living, God of the Resurrection that will be but is now already because God is always. God’s presence makes what will be present right now.
What does it mean to live with this hope of Resurrection?
How do we practice resurrection in this life this day?
It is an absurd way to live and think. The Sadducees were kind of right. It is a weird sort of spiritual time travel.
Rather than a religion of faithful memory that is lived out in scorn and mockery we are called to practice random acts of resurrection and senseless hope.
The absurdity of the children of the resurrection-imagine waking up on the great resurrection day where God is a surprise, where something new and unexpected is bound to happen.
Imagine waking up this moment to that which will be that is already here, right now.
Somehow the Resurrection changes us now, not just someday. The adventure is in figuring out just how that is.
This is much more than blind optimism.
It is a belligerent and contrary hope, that where there is death and dead ends we practice resurrection because we are the children of resurrection. That is where we come from. They are our people.
Practice resurrection. Be absurd.