We’ve been looking at how things could turn so quickly for Jesus between the cheers of, “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday to the shouts of, “Crucify him!” on Good Friday.  Upon a closer look at the Gospels we discover that on Monday and Tuesday Jesus pretty much deconstructed any ideas that he was the champion of the causes of any of the religious groups of his day.  The Zealots were a group committed to reestablishing an independent theocracy or at least a religious monarchy, where Rome would be expelled from the vicinity.  The Pharisees were the letter of the law, righteous leaders of the synagogue who were intent in being the religious sheriffs of the world.  The Essenes were separatists who preferred to live apart from the world and its influences.  Then there were the Sadducees.  The more I learned about this group of leaders, the less comfortable I became with them.

The Sadducees were aristocratic, well-educated, open-minded, and well adapted to their environment.  They were comfortable, as long as the Temple was not being threatened.  For the most part, they seemed like very nice people to me – a white guy with a graduate degree who lives in suburban America and serves as a Senior Pastor. 

There was a certain smugness about the Sadducees, which you could probably detect in the scripture that was read.  They loved being right and had grown accustomed to the “Yes!” feeling of winning debates.  When they came up to Jesus with the intent to expose the inferiority of his undeveloped theology, they were confronted by a Christ who advised them, “Of course, you could be wrong.”

How comfortable are you with this possibility?  We live fairly comfortable lives like the Sadducees.  We are religious and have some rather firm convictions.  How open are we to some uneducated person confronting our long and closely held beliefs?  Let us heed the lesson given to the Sadducees in today’s scripture; Of course, you could be wrong.
 

You could be wrong if you try to teach Jesus.

The Sadducees were masters of humiliation, though apparent novices at humility.  They approached Jesus with arrogance.  They employed the age old debate technique that has its own Latin name – reductio ad absurdum.  Literally translated, reducing to the absurd, but more accurately rendered, I’m going to make you look like an idiot.  Matthew alerts us to their disbelief in the resurrection, even before they speak.  They place a straw man before Jesus who was married and dies childless.  There is a law in Deuteronomy 25, known as the Levirate law, that declares in such a case the brother of the deceased is to marry the widow and name the first born son, after the dead man.  I took a fresh look at this law and determined that its language is too rich to leave buried in this book that most of you are unlikely to read this week.  So take a listen to the law from Deuteronomy 25:
 

⁵When brothers reside together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall [take her in marriage], ⁶and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel. ⁷But if the man has no desire to marry his brother’s widow, then his brother’s widow shall go up to the elders at the gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to perpetuate his brother’s name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of a husband’s brother to me.” ⁸Then the elders of his town shall summon him and speak to him. If he persists, saying, “I have no desire to marry her,” ⁹then his brother’s wife shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, pull his sandal off his foot, spit in his face, and declare, “This is what is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.” ¹⁰Throughout Israel his family shall be known as “the house of him whose sandal was pulled off.” 

The Levirate law does not seem to have been practiced all that much.  There is one instance in scripture, Genesis 38, where it was attempted, but that was before Moses and, therefore, before the Law of Moses.  But the law was not the issue here, it is the resurrection and the Sadducees want to teach Jesus that there is no such thing.  In fact, I think it is safe to say that if Jesus continues to teach about the resurrection, he will leave the Sadducees no choice but to proclaim, as the Zealots did in last week’s sermon, “This is not my Messiah.”

We need to be careful when looking at this passage, not to dismiss it too quickly as those crazy Sadducees.  There is something in each of us that wants to dictate to Jesus what my Messiah should look like.  It is not too far from the realm of possibility that we would go to Jesus and attempt to teach him something about how we think he ought to act in a particular instance.  Of course, you could be wrong whenever you try to teach Jesus.
 

You could be wrong if you don’t know the scriptures.

The Sadducees knew the scriptures, at least part of them.  They really only regarded the first five books, the Torah, as authoritative.  The other 34 books in the Old Testament were seen as commentary and the Talmud, or rabbinic traditions, were less authoritative than that.  This is another place where the Pharisees, the champions of the synagogues, and the Sadducees, the champions of the Temple disagreed.  They also disagreed about the resurrection.  The Sadducees get a little more press in the Bible than the Zealots that we addressed last week.  They are mentioned fifteen times in the New Testament in six different episodes.  Three of these episodes are in the Gospels and three in the book of Acts.  It is the last mention of them, in Acts 23 where we learn the most about them.  Paul was before the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews in the Roman Empire.  He noticed that some of them were Pharisees and some were Sadducees.   So he slyly stated that he was on trial concerning the hope of the resurrection of the dead.  Luke parenthetically recorded in Acts 23:8, “(The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three).”

It’s curious then that Jesus tells the Sadducees that in the resurrection we are like angels in heaven.  He was confronting their misdirected convictions to the core.  Not only is there a resurrection, but there are angels and they are in heaven.  To those of us that are happily married this passage presents a problem.  I don’t think Jesus is saying that there is no reunion with our spouses in the resurrection.  I do think that he is saying that we will be like the angels, in that, our central interest will be on communion with God and that there will be no need for procreation in heaven, where life is eternal.  R. T. France does note in his commentary on Matthew that the problem posed with cynicism by the Sadducees raises a real question for those who have been widowed and remarried.  He wrote, “Jesus’ reply points them to the possibility of fulfillment of these relationships in the risen life which the exclusiveness of the marriage bond in earthly life would have rendered unthinkable.  Jealousy and exclusion will have no place there.”  I am not sure what all that means, except that to conjure up an image of heaven as earthly life without the problems, may not be taking the resurrection to the full extent. 

So Jesus introduced a scripture on which he and the Sadducees could agree – Exodus 3:6.  Moses had been keeping sheep for his father-in-law when he was intrigued by a bush that was burning, yet not being burnt up.  It was there that Moses received his call to go back to Egypt and set his people free from the oppression of Egypt.  God introduced himself, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  Jesus pointed out that God continues to be their God, which implies that they continue to be.  Jesus saw in this scripture a testimony about the God of resurrection.

How did he see something in this familiar passage that the Sadducees missed?  It is possible that the scriptures had become lifeless pages to the Sadducees.  They may have stopped meditating on them and inviting the Lord to speak through them.  The scriptures had become an aged, toothless lion in the zoo rather than a magnificent king of the jungle in the wild.  They had attempted to domesticate the Word of God.  It is possible that we would attempt to do the same thing.  Scholarly investigations known as higher criticism and lower criticism can be worthwhile studies as we dig into these ancient and authoritative texts.  However, at the end of the day, we must allow the scriptures to be the Word of God.  If they become lifeless ancient texts to us, then of course, you could be wrong.
 

You could be wrong if you don’t know the Power of God.

Jesus response to the Sadducees of any era could be reduced to one statement found in verse 29, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.”  This is not all that uncommon for people with all the power dynamic on their side.  The Sadducees did not need the power of God, or so they thought.  They were affluent, so they did not need to pray for God to provide manna or daily bread.  They had a workable relationship with the Roman authorities and Herod, the puppet governor of Israel, had funded much of the Temple restorations.  They were a mainline group with all the rights and privileges and did not need the power of God to deliver them from evil.  They were content with the way things were and those who want the status quo to remain the status quo, do not require or even desire the power of God that could actually mess everything up.

Moses was not in that situation in Exodus 3.  He knew the power of the Pharaoh.  He had grown up in his household.  He had seen the widespread oppression of the Israelites and the hardness of the Israelites themselves.  Oppressed people are not always the most congenial.  R. T. France stated that the purpose of God’s revelation is “to assure Moses of the active, saving presence of God, with his people to rescue them from Egypt… To be the God of implies a caring, protecting relationship which is as permanent as the living God who makes it.”  Contrast that to how Josephus, a first century Jewish historian described the Sadducees, “The Sadducees … take away fate entirely, and suppose that God is not concerned in our doing or not doing what is evil; and they say, that to act what is good, or what is evil, is at men's own choice, and that the one or the other belongs so to every one, that they may act as they please. They also take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul.”  They had forgotten the power of God that gave birth to the scriptures that they held so dearly – the books of Moses.

We may not forget as much as we desire to harness.  We believe in the power of God, but often we try to dictate how it must act.  That was Sam Gardner’s dilemma in Philip Gulley’s novel, Just Shy of Harmony.  Sam was a Quaker pastor in the fictional town of Harmony, Indiana and one of his parishioners was dying of leukemia.  Sam believed that God could heal Sally and had the rare experience on Easter morning when he felt sure God had spoken to him, “I will give you a miracle”.  While the pastor prayed for healing, one of his parishioners who was a fan of a slick televangelist, the Reverend Johnny LaCosta (a cross between Benny Hinn and Liberace), had written three letters to the preacher of the airwaves and sent some contributions along with her requests for healing for her friend, Sally, who had leukemia.

The Wednesday after Easter Sam drove to the hospital expecting to see a miracle.  However, Sally was as sick as he had ever seen her.  He knew that it was only a matter of days.  Then Wednesday night came.  The Hour of Truth came on the television and the Reverend Johnny LaCosta spoke to those in TV Land about a woman whose name started with an ‘S’.  After a few tries he came up with it, “Sally”.  She was suffering from a disease that started with an ‘l’ and soon he said it “leukemia”.   Then the good reverend, who was portrayed in the novel as a huckster, said it, “Sally has leukemia, but by the power of God she is being healed right now.”  Well, to make a long story short, Sally was healed and her pastor was furious.  He was happy that Sally was healed, but as he stood in the hospital witnessing the transformation, “Sam reached for a chair to steady himself.  Oh, Lord, why would you use Johnny LaCosta?  Of all the people you could have used, why did you use him?”

Sam confessed to one of his congregants that he thinks the Reverend Johnny LaCosta is a bozo.  His parishioner replied, “So do I.  But apparently God uses bozos too.”

I love the teaching in Matthew 22 that God is a powerful God, whose caring, protective relationship with us is as permanent as the living God.  However, I must confess that, like Sam Gardner, I want to tell God who to use and how to use them.  When I do that I am not sure that I know the power of God.  And when you don’t know the power of God, then, of course, you could be wrong.

Those poor Sadducees missed it all.  There they were in their comfortable little world and they missed the Son of God standing right in front of them, they missed the scriptures that they had read so frequently, they missed the power of God.  The more I learn about this group of leaders, the less comfortable I become with them.  Amen.