In God's Grip--November 10, 2025

In God's Grip--November 10, 2025

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord 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 him all of them are alive.” (Luke 20:27-38) 

Jesus keeps showing us that God's vantage point is likely to surprise us. Quite often, he says, the view from the edge of the eternal takes our usual perspective and turns it completely upside-down.

We saw that last week when we looked at Jesus' statements of blessing and woe from the Sermon on the Plain, to be sure.  In a world where conventional wisdom says you know you're blessed if you're rich, and you know you are under God's disapproving scowl if you are suffering, Jesus turned the tables and announced, "Blessed are you who are poor" and "Woe to you who laugh now."  Underneath those individual statements is the reminder that God's view of reality is often the opposite of our human perspective.  And of course, Jesus' intention is to change our vision--so that we will no longer settle for the "conventional wisdom" version of things and instead let our perspective be shaped by God's way of seeing the world, the most vulnerable people around us, and ourselves.

Now today in this passage, which many of us heard this past Sunday as our Gospel reading, Jesus does it again.  This time Jesus shows us that from God's vantage point, even those who have died remain alive and present to God.  As Jesus talks with this group of Sadducees, he insists that God is not bound by our limited understanding and our finite mental categories. These religious leaders have come to Jesus with a question cobbled together from a Bible verse (a commandment from the Torah) and their own reasoning, which to their minds disproves the possibility of resurrection from the dead.  They take the commandment from the law which directed the brother of a deceased man with no children to raise children with his widow to keep the family line going and provide for the widow in a time where there were no other structures of a social safety net.  So they imagine a hypothetical in which a whole family of seven brothers had all been married, in succession, to the same woman, and then they ask Jesus whose spouse she would be in the resurrection, since she was married to them all.  Their assumption is that because they cannot imagine how to sort out these matters of marriage in the resurrection life, therefore resurrection must be impossible.  And even though they don't say so explicitly, the underlying assumption of these Sadducees is, "If I can't understand how resurrection would work in categories that make sense to my mind, then it can't be true."

Jesus' response is interesting, not so much because he gives them a logical argument to prove metaphysically how the dead could be raised, but because ultimately he grounds his conviction in the character and identity of God rather than in some rational proof or quantifiable scientific evidence.  In the end, Jesus' confidence in the hope of resurrection comes down to saying "God is the God of the living, not of the dead."  Therefore, Jesus says, from God's vantage point, even those who are separated from us by death remain alive to God.

For Jesus, the critical issue is not, "How can I prove to another person that resurrection is possible?" but rather, "Who is God?"  And for that answer, Jesus hearkens back to the classic refrain of ancient Israel, that theirs is the God "of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (and, of course, the God of Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel, as well).  But, of course, those patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel's earliest memories had lived hundreds of years before even Moses, who was remembered as the one who wrote down the commandments of the Torah.  Jesus, however, says, that since God is "the God of the living" these patriarchs and matriarchs of many generations past must still be alive to God.  Somehow in God's presence, in God's perspective, they have never been lost--not even for an instant.  Jesus once again insists that God's vantage point views things quite differently from the human perspective.  To us, those who have died are gone, leaving us to mourn and make into trick hypothetical questions to trap Jesus with.  But to God, those who have died have never been out of God's grip.  

I am reminded of how Robert Farrar Capon describes God's power to hold onto our lives, as the late Episcopal theologian described the story of the biblical Lazarus (whom Jesus revived from the dead in John 11).  Capon writes, “Jesus says that as far as his way of holding Lazarus’s life is concerned, Lazarus was never unplugged at all—that when Lazarus died, he lost only his own power to hold his life. He emphatically did not lose Christ’s power to do so.”  We are once again back at the question of whose vantange point really counts in the end.  By human accounting Lazarus is dead and all hope is lost for him.  The same would be true of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, too, I suppose, along with everybody else who has shuffled off this mortal coil.  From our vantage point, death gets the last word over all of us, and there is nothing we can do by our own reasoning or power to stop it.  But from God's vantage point, none of us have ever been out of God's view, God's grip, or God's power to give life. Even after I lose the ability to hold onto my own life, God keeps holding onto it with God's own grip.  That's the hope--even when we don't know how to prove it, diagram it, or proof-text it.

The challenge on this day is to let Jesus shape our view of the world this way--in the confidence that God never lets go of any of us, even through death--and even when it flies in the face of what seems obvious to our senses and "common sense."  Today, we are invited to see our lives, as well as the lives of every face that has ever been, held in the tireless grip of the God of the living, the God before whom all of us come to life.

Lord Jesus, help us to see our lives and our world in light of your resurrection promise.