“Needing ALL the Answers” Colchester Federated Church, November 9, 2025, Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (Luke 20:27-38)

Today in Luke’s Gospel we observe the Sadducees asking Jesus questions about life after death.  Jesus, the Pharisees, and probably most of the Jews in Jesus’ day believed that someday God would raise the dead, judge the wicked, and reward the righteous with eternal life.  However, the Sadducees (who were the Temple leaders) didn’t believe in resurrection and didn’t hold to the more ancient Jewish view that the dead stayed eternally in Sheol (the underground dwelling of the spirits of the dead.)[1]  So they come to Jesus with a specific scenario to prove their beliefs while simultaneously questioning Jesus’ beliefs. 

The Sadducees remind Jesus that Moses taught that if a man’s brother dies (leaving a widow with no children), then the brother must marry the widow and raise children for his brother.  That was called a levirate marriage where the living brother marries the widow (though the widow’s children were considered the dead man’s descendants and would inherit his property.)  Let’s imagine (the Sadducees tell Jesus) that there are seven brothers in a family.  The first man marries a woman and then dies childless.  Same with the second and third all the way to the seventh brother who married the same woman and they all died without having children.  Finally, the woman died as well.  This poor woman!  Anyway, in the resurrection—whose wife will she be?

Jesus responds by reminding the Sadducees that people who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage.  Though in the age of the resurrection from the dead, people won’t do that.  The Sadducees are scoffing at the belief in resurrection because they are assuming that Moses’ Law will be enforced in the afterlife.  They are assuming that the afterlife will be the same as life on earth now.  The idea of seven brothers all living with the same woman as a wife would not at all be what Moses had in mind.  Therefore, there is no resurrection the Sadducees believed.

Jesus reminds them that in the resurrection people won’t die.  But will be like angels and we’re all God’s children.  As the scholars who edited the Common English Bible Study Bible helpfully analyze this text, Jesus’ answer is explaining that people will live eternally.  Jesus takes it a step further saying that even Moses demonstrated that the dead are raised when he referred to God as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  Jesus is saying that these ancestors of the Jewish people (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) are already enjoying the blessings of God’s presence.  So yes, resurrection is real.  Though to apply these earthly, human categories of how we live here and now on earth to what God will do with all of creation for the rest of eternity doesn’t make sense. 

Now this passage doesn’t mean that there’s no possibility of reunion with our loved ones after we die.  That is a deeply held and comforting belief for many Christians.  Last Sunday was All Saints Sunday where we remembered those we have loved and lost in the past year.  We wrote down the names of the saints in our lives and were grateful for those who have given us hope in times of hopelessness, for those who have given us courage in the face of discouragement.  We live in a society that too often denies death and looks to keep aging at bay however we can (even though that is ultimately impossible).  Therefore, one of the gifts of the Church is being a place where we acknowledge in community that none of us will be here in these bodily forms forever.  Knowing that life on earth is finite can have an effect on how we live day in and day out.  Hopefully not living in fear of God who judges us harshly every time we fail.  But instead living with hope, because every single day is a gift.  We can live into Christ’s invitation to be his hands and feet here on earth, helping to bear one another’s burdens so that we co-create heaven on earth with God.

So, will eternal life be exactly like life on earth?  Jesus seems to be telling us no.  Yet his answer to the Sadducees’ question may leave us with more questions when we would rather have ALL the answers!

Whether we fully understand this passage from the Gospel according to Luke or not, whether we know exactly what we believe about the afterlife or heaven or resurrection or not—the comfort in today’s story may be in people coming to Jesus with the questions on their hearts in the first place.  Granted, the Sadducees did so in a rather aggressive way.  However, one can’t help but wonder if these were genuine questions and their genuine questioning is wrapped up in the ego’s need to be seen as super smart.

Having questions and being brave enough to voice those questions is a good thing.  Sometimes teachers will remind students that if you have a question, chances are that one of your fellow classmates may be wondering about that too.  When you voice that question you may be helping others more than you know!

Though anytime someone offers an answer to every single religious question or specifies that everything is black and white and there is no grey in matters of faith—please beware.  That makes me want to sound a danger alarm or something!  Because these questions we are pondering together in this Gospel story are questions about life and death and life eternal.  These are questions about ultimate meaning.  These are questions about our purpose and our destiny.  Sometimes we want everything to be nice and neat and wrapped up with a bow.  If only that’s how life worked! 

Sometimes the trick to going deeper and farther on our faith journeys is to be patient and to give ourselves time to live the questions.  We are invited to be patient in not having all the answers (as hard as that can be).  It was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who famously advised:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. 
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  
And the point is, to live everything.  
Live the questions now.  
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”[2]

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] Footnote 20:27 from The Common English Bible Study Bible with Apocrypha, 154 NT.
[2] Rainer Maria Rilke Quote, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/717-be-patient-toward-all-that-is-unsolved-in-your-heart

Photo by Rev. Lauren Ostrout.