Be Careful What You Ask - Reflections on Luke 20:27-38. Pentecost 22, Year C

by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, July 2, 2025

         Each of the four writers of the Gospels knew all too well how their stories were to end. Each had special literary and cultural concerns, different audiences, and unique interests that shaped their compositions, but there was no doubt what needed to be said at the end of each narrative: the prophet Jesus would go to Jerusalem, would enter the city in some sort of triumph, would in a few days be rejected and left alone by those who had been following him, would be tried in a sort of kangaroo court, sentenced to a horrifying Roman death, and then would rise from that death into a new life. That outline needed to be followed, and each writer did exactly that, albeit in fresh and wonderfully different ways. Luke is, of course, no different; his tale will echo that prescribed trail, too. 

         Yet, as we have seen during our journey through Luke’s account, he expresses the necessary Jesus story in particular and deeply memorable ways. Again and again, he focuses his attention on Jesus as prophet of God, especially concerned with the use and abuse of material possessions, emphasizing how a proper use of those possessions, particularly in the giving of alms to the poor, models the essence of faith and the gift of salvation. Today’s text suggests another central Lukan theme: the near-constant debates that Jesus has with the religious leaders of the time. In fact, though we hone in today on the controversy with the Sadducees concerning the levirate marriage laws as they relate to the afterlife, that debate is embedded in a long series of such verbal struggles, encompassing Luke 20:20-21:4. Luke employs this material at this point in his narrative as a way of indicating that the pressures on Jesus are increasing, as he publically confronts his adversaries, resulting in the kind of rage against him that leads straight to his trial and death.

         Jesus’s opponents in this vignette are the Sadducees, the only time they are mentioned in the Gospel, though they do appear in Luke’s second volume, Acts. The Sadducess derive their name from David’s priest, Zadok (2 Sam.8:17), that leader of the temple who took over full authority when his fellow priest, Abiathar, was banished by king Solomon because he backed David’s eldest son, Adonijah, as David’s heir, instead of Solomon, who became king after his father. In fact, the Zadokite priesthood continued as chief priests right up until the exile in the 6th century. All the information we have concerning the Sadducees unfortunately comes from those outside the sect; we have no Sadduccaic writings. Most of what we do know comes from Josephus, not always the most reliable source.

         Sadducees held very different beliefs than Pharisees: they denied personal immortality; they rejected determinism, that is the conviction that God had prefigured all things, and they ignored the validity of tradition, although not with real consistency. Those general ideas indicate that their argument with Jesus about marriage and resurrection was specious at best and completely spurious at worst. Luke indicates the foolishness, or emptiness, of their debate by saying clearly that “ they deny that there is a resurrection” (Luke 20:27). Well, if that is so, then why argue like this at all? 

         The entire thing sounds rather like an elaborate joke, though Luke 20:26 may be the motivator of the entire charade: “They were not able to trap him verbally in front of the people.” What we are about to read is likely a trap, however poorly the trap may be laid, given the Sadducee’s stated beliefs. They begin with an absurd play on the tradition known as Levirate marriage, found in the Torah at Deuteronomy 25:5f. In short, if the husband of a woman dies, she is enjoined to marry a close relative—brother, cousin, etc—in order to insure children for the deceased brother’s line. These Sadducees string the idea out fully to seven deaths and subsequent marriages. Then, after the woman finally dies, they ask, “in the resurrection (which they do not believe in!) whose wife will the woman be,” for all seven had her as wife (Luke 20:33)? 

         If they imagine that this elaborate scenario will make Jesus out to appear stupid in public, they are deeply disappointed. Jesus first acknowledges that in the world in which all currently live, people marry and are given in marriage (Luke 20:34), but those who have been resurrected “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20:35). That is so, he says, because “they are no longer able to die,” making marriage and the creation of life quite beside the point (Luke 20:36a). Besides, “they are like angels, and because they are children of the resurrection, they are children of God” (Luke 20:36b). Of course, at this point the Sadducee’s use of the “resurrection” in their long scenario, is shown to be spurious; since they have no belief in resurrection, nor probably in personal immortality, Jesus’s reply moves thoroughly beyond their ken.

         But Jesus has one more claim to make. “Even Moses has shown that the dead are raised, as he says at the bush, ‘The Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Now, (you must agree!) God is not a God of dead people but of living people, because for God all are alive” (Luke 20:37-38). Of course, the great patriarchs are all dead, but if God remains their God in the time of Moses, then surely they must still be somehow alive in God, that is through God’s power they have arisen. This argument may sound weak to our modern ears, but in the first century it was certainly a mode of argumentation fully acceptable to the religious leaders. In short, the Sadducee’s denial of the resurrection flies in the face of their own witness in Torah, including the great Moses himself.

         The response to all these debatable ideas is typical: “Some of the scribes responded (note, not the Sadducees!), ‘Teacher, you have spoken well!’ For they were no longer daring to question him” (Luke 20:39-40). And so the tension builds, as the authorities fail to humiliate and silence the prophet Jesus, and he continues on his inexorable way to Jerusalem and his cruel, yet triumphant, destiny.