Married to the past

Read Luke 20:27-38

And check out what Sarah and Bill have to say about this passage before you read my stuff.


Little Suzie comes home one day and tells her mom about Snow White: how Prince Charming saved her from death with his kiss. “You know what happened then?” asked Suzie. “Yes,” replied her mom, “They lived happily ever after.”

“No,” said Suzie, “They got married.”

We think of marriage as this static institution – something we think all people should aspire to. Most societies see marriage as the foundation of their respective cultures. So important is this institution that many will defend its integrity with all their might accusing those who question it of being heretics, terrorists or even devils.

Yet it is interesting that marriage is by no means a static institution and, furthermore, Jesus himself joins the ranks of those who questioned his culture’s assumptions about marriage and family.

Looking at today’s passage we see just how much marriage has changed and just how much Jesus undermined its importance.

Looking at the enmity between Sadducees and Pharisees I am reminded of the divide between conservative and liberal Christians today. At the risk of being overly simple in drawing the parallels, it seems to me that much of what passes for popular Christianity today bears a great deal of resemblance to the Sadduceean emphases of Jesus’ time.

The Sadducees had a more limited view of scripture than their Pharisaic cousins. For them only the Pentateuch was scripture. The Pharisees enlarged their scripture by including the prophets and other bits and pieces. This allowed the Pharisees a great deal more freedom in innovation: particularly in making the Jewish faith accessible to the commoners by wresting control of the faith from the Temple elite and putting it firmly in the hands (or hearts in point of fact) of ordinary people.

The resurrection was one such innovation designed to help people deal with the apparent contradiction between what they might read in Proverbs and their own lives. Proverbs often counsels its readers that the wise and faithful will prosper when in fact most people experienced the very opposite - and still do. For the Pharisees, resurrection offered the hope that in the life to come, justice would be served.

The Sadducees, finding no justification for this belief in their Bible, attacked this Pharisaic innovation. Hence their clever question to Jesus. Jesus comes back at them on their terms, using the portion of the Bible they held in common (remember that Jesus was a Pharisee). He points out the conversation between God and Moses where God is referred to as the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” These are dead dudes, so the implication is that they must still be living in some sense.

Jesus is very naughty here. Instead of respecting the text, looking for its inherent meaning, trying to discern the intention of the author, he instead overlays it with his own meaning, reading into the text a meaning that surely was not part of the original author’s intention! At university this would have meant an F in an exegesis exam. But Jesus gets away with it because how can you argue with this logic… The Sadducees can’t very well assert that in fact Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are definitely dead and buried.

Furthermore, Jesus does not get caught in the logic trap of the Sadducee’s argument about resurrection. Instead he simply undermines the importance of marriage. This is revolutionary stuff. He suggests that marriage and consequently, family, are of no ultimate concern. Marriage was even more important in Jesus’ society than it is in western culture today so this suggestion must have sounded shocking even to Jesus’ fellow Pharisees.

Two things strike me as important arising out of this:
God speaks new meaning into new times, innovating the Gospel for each new age.
God sees each person as much more than merely their family heritage.

I have referred before to NT Wrights idea of the Bible being like a 4 act play in which the fourth act is being written in the present. While the first acts already written are important for background and formation of the plot and values of the play, it is the present act that is of greatest significance. So too with the Bible which can be said to be the basis upon which the current story of God’s Kindom unfolds but cannot be held as more important than the unfolding drama of God’s action in the present.

Like the Pharisees, and indeed Jesus, we are called to understand the scriptures in their context, but to innovate the values and message we find there for a new age so that the Gospel remains alive to new situations.

It is telling that the Sadduceean movement died shortly after the first century AD. The Pharisaic movement by contrast continues in both the modern Jewish and Christian faiths - both of which have proved highly adaptive to new times, despite those who have tried to hold them back.

Just as the faith is larger than its heritage, so too are the people who hold to it more significant than their heritage. While people then and now see themselves as a product of their family heritage, God sees us as much more. I can see my family as an excuse for my lack of imagination, my stunted ability. I can see my family as the reason for my existence, an investment in the future, my one basket holding all my eggs.

Or I can see myself as God sees me: a father, brother, friend and son to a thousand more people than can ever be my blood relations. I can see the scope of my family, the range of those who I care for and who care for me as far beyond the boundaries of my limitations. I can enlarge my horizons to the full breadth and length, height and depth of God’s love…

Back to Suzie and Snow White: perhaps the fundamental problem with marriage is that every age has tried to attach sexuality to its limited perspective on the truth. So a previous generation may have made marriage all about cementing family birthrights and political ties or of ensuring control over procreation. Our current age, with its infatuation with romantic individualism has attached marriage to the values of romantic comedy – with tragic consequences. Religiously our “family values” entrench the idea of the heterosexual, often patriarchal nuclear family. While this seems very attractive it ignores the fact that most families do not conform to these standards yet often function more healthfully than this ideal.

Jesus’ idea of marriage and family seems to have been more prosaic. Marriage and family were seen by Jesus and the early Christians as temporary states of being that would soon be terminated by death or the second coming of Jesus. So marriage had no ultimate significance as an institution through which society may be transformed or even preserved.

However, marriage could be seen as a good place to practice Kindom values. Paul calls women to submit to their husbands but calls husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church – i.e. mutual submission with the man (the dominant member) called to become a servant – sacrificing self for the beloved. Thus, the fundamental construct of procreative control in a patriarchal society becomes the principle means by which the early Christians practice their discipleship by inverting power relations!

Similarly the Christian view of family becomes radically expanded to include all God’s children, such that one cares for the stranger as if that person were one’s own brother or sister.

What might such a radical notion mean in a supposedly Christian dominated country like South Africa? Surely if the Christians took this seriously the state would not have to worry about the flood of orphans everyone predicts… Alas, the Sadducees may not be so extinct after all. I hear calls for “family values” and “back to the Bible” and all about the world slowly descends into hell for want of the care of the sleeping Body of Christ.

Let those who hear the Good News in new ways rise up and take their sisters and brothers in.