Progressive reflections on the lectionary #89

Monday 3rd November 2025

Luke 20:27-38: 'Resurrection' is not what you think it is

This might be one of the single most important stories in helping us understand who Jesus was, and what he was about. In this week’s story some Sadducees ask Jesus what life will be like “in the resurrection…” meanwhile, the writer of the story has already told us that they don’t believe in resurrection. But what does this mean? I talk about the little we actually know about Sadducee beliefs, and how we know it - and suggest that far from being a story about “life after death” this might actually be a story about “life after empire.” Jesus’ answer to their question reveals how different his liberative view of the world is from theirs, which is built on hierarchy, and the power to control.

The lectionary rolls us through the most familiar of the New Testament stories, and this week the wheel turns to the crucial moment when, as Luke reports, some Sadducees come to see Jesus, and ask him about ‘resurrection.’ How we understand what happens in this story radically shapes what we understand Christianity to be about.

Their question as we read it is, basically: “If a woman gets married and her husband dies, so she marries his brother, and he dies, and so on until the whole family is dead, then who will be her husband ‘in the resurrection’?”

And Jesus responds that, effectively, “silly question, it doesn’t really matter.” And then he says that, anyway, Moses proved resurrection at the burning bush, and then he says that God “…is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”

On the face of it, it’s sort of a weird story.

That’s because most of come to it with a preconception about what resurrection is, what this story is about, and perhaps if we have a little Bible knowledge - who the Sadducees were, and what they thought about it all. The thing is that we could well be wrong about all of those things.

Let’s start with the Sadducees, who, we are assured: “didn’t believe in the resurrection.” How do we know this is the case, or indeed what it means?

There are no surviving writings from the Sadducees, they left nothing behind when they were wiped out, so we’re reduced to reading what others wrote about them, unfortunately none of those others were unbiased. In the New Testament the Sadducees are baddies - an elite priestly caste, conservative in nature, working with the empire. It is, though, the New Testament that has the most to say about them -apologies to any literalists who might be reading this (dude, why bother?) but New Testament authors are unreliable narrators, you can’t afford to read them uncritically.

The other primary, or almost primary, source about what the Sadducees believed is the first century Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus. Born into a Pharisee family around 37CE, he fought against Rome initially and later adopted the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach, and became a Roman client. A good source, but hardly, we’d have to say, unbiased.

After that it’s rabbinic writings from later history, and the rabbis were, effectively, the inheritors of the Pharisaic tradition. Again, not an unbiased set of observers.

So we’re told that the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection, and that might be true - but if it was, then what did it actually mean?

The first thing to understand is that resurrection wasn’t just ‘coming back to life.’ I know we’ve all be taught that’s what it is, but it’s actually a much more complex idea. In a variety of apocalyptic and historical writings, including Daniel 12, 2 Maccabees, and some stuff in 1 Enoch, resurrection meant God’s vindication of the righteous, often in the face of imperial violence. As the much more conservative voice of Tom/NT Wright put it, resurrection amounted to: “the reversal of death, its cancellation, the destruction of its power.”

At least one version of the idea was, then, the idea that the people who were crushed by empire would rise - that there would be justice for those who suffer. It was a vision of history being overturned, the desperate - final - hope, if you like, of the downtrodden.

So when we’re told that the Sadducees rejected resurrection, it doesn’t mean that they denied the possibility of an afterlife. It means instead that they were refusing to countenance any alternative to the status quo - the power over life and death wielded by the empire. They refused to accept that the present order, the status quo, the ruling powers of empire, temple, and the rule of the elite, would not be the last word.

Would this make sense? Well (of course I’m going to say this) yes it would. These were the people on top, they were the people with power, they were closely aligned with Rome. They were focused on ritual purity, priestly control, and maintaining the status quo. Also, one thing we are pretty sure of is that they were Torah purists, which meant that they weren’t interested in the prophetic writings that Jesus, and others, drew on so heavily.

Rejecting resurrection in those terms meant: no sense of ultimate judgment for the wicked, no hope for the oppressed, no threat to the powerful.

And they had to think that way, to think the opposite way was to imply that, actually, Rome doesn’t win, and that the God of Israel sides with the dominated, exploited and crushed. Why on earth would they accept that idea?

So when Jesus gets asked this apparently silly question, he speaks of a life that exists beyond marriage, beyond death, and crucially beyond the boundaries of empire. He quotes Exodus (part of the Torah, so their accepted text) to demonstrate that God is the God of the living, even when the world says that they are dead.

It’s not the sort of theological rebuttal that it’s often depicted as - it’s not an argument about ‘what will happen when we all die?’ Instead it is a radical reframing - a change of emphasis. Believing in resurrection isn’t about believing in reanimation or in harps and clouds, it’s about declaring an allegiance to a God who refuses to let death, injustice, or empire have the final word.

So why the question about marriage - what part does that play in this? Again this is about maintaining a certain position - marriage (well... “Biblical marriage (TM)”) is an economic matter. It’s about the safe passage of wealth and property. That’s why children were important, that’s why adultery was illegal, etc etc. It’s about a ‘well ordered, conservatively governed, society.

Although it’s couched in a kind of mocking way, the question is really something like this: “If your idea of God’s justice is true - where the empire falls, the poor are vindicated, and the old structures (like the patriarchy) collapse… then what happens to our orderly society?”

And Jesus responds: “In God’s justice, the world you call orderly (a world in which you control who inherits and who belongs) is not preserved - it is overturned and transformed. The resurrection is a revelation of God’s new reality. In that reality, people are no longer defined by ownership, inheritance, or control. They are children of God, alive in a way that your categories cannot contain.”

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Image: Resurrection: it’s not about harps & clouds. Photo by Kaushik Panchal on Unsplash