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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost

June 21, 2023

Invitatory

Lord, open our lips.

And our mouth shall proclaim your praise.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: Luke 20:27-40

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 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.” Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For they no longer dared to ask him another question.



Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

If you’ve actually read the full text appointed for today before beginning this meditation, you’ve got a lot of fortitude. I get three verses in and my eyes begin to glaze over. This is due, in part, to the fact that the problem the Sadducees presented is entirely too much like the logic questions that used to be part of the standardized tests required for applications to college. I remember them well: seven canoes are going down river, and Alan won’t ride with anyone who’s wearing a red shirt, and Lisa will only sit in the bow, and Ted’s sister has an aversion to sunscreen… so who’s in the fourth canoe?

Had Jesus answered the Sadducees’ query by stating that the woman in question would find herself married to her first or last husband, or that a little-known verse in Leviticus puts a cap on the succession of husbands, and she would be forever paired with the fourth, well, then, a great argument could have ensued. People could have taken sides, and the Sadducees could have insisted that Jesus answer be “on the record,” and those in disagreement with him could have claimed that he was now completely discredited. And so on. (This process should all seem all too familiar).

But Jesus didn’t answer in the way the Sadducees had expected. He very methodically put more and more distance between his response and the terms of their question. They had wanted a definite and binding reply or, absent this, the concession that the resurrection cannot happen because it cannot be aligned with the law. But Jesus happily drifted from their distinct focus, with observations that had less and less – or no – connection with the question itself. He didn’t provide an answer or an argument; it was more a fabulous diversion. He countered the Sadducees not by standing in opposition to them but by offering a series of comments that, in fact, served as a caricature of their very form of reasoning. As a result, they no longer dared question him any further. Jesus had a knack for showing that their seriousness was actually silly.

We should take this to heart. For we often mine the Biblical texts for what we’re already absolutely sure they must contain: some sort of teaching about the absolute order of the world and our absolute responsibility to form our lives accordingly. But this isn’t the function of the text or the Bible as a whole. Often, the text itself is subversive, undermining what has come before and, no less, the very claims we feel most inclined to cite as religious truth. Ultimately for the Sadducees, they ended up with no questions that they dared put between Jesus and themselves as a theoretical buffer. They had to face him directly. The text may be asking the same of us.

Prayer

We will stand before you, O Lord, at the last,

And we will know as we are known,

And we will see what we have failed to see;

Open our eyes to see and know

That we stand in your presence now,

That you are here before us

Seeking our response of love;

Grant that we may respond now in such a way

That we may be prepared to stand before you at the last.

The Rev. Christopher L. Webber

Give Us Grace