A PRAYER TO START
Faith has a history in our scriptures and our practices. It also has a trust in the power of God who is seen and is guiding both. Let us pray this prayer from John Ballie together today for this faith that gives us confidence to live well…
Almighty and most merciful Father, your power and love eternally work together for the protection of your children. Give me grace today to put my trust in you.
O Father, I pray—
for faith to believe that you rule the world in truth, justice, and love;
for faith to believe that if I seek first your kingdom and righteousness, you will provided for my needs;
for faith not to be anxious for tomorrow, but to believe that the love you have given me in the past will continue in the future;
for faith to see your loving purposes unfold in all that is happening in our time;
for faith to be calm and brave in the face of any dangers I may meet with while doing my duty;
for faith to believe in the power of your love to melt my hard heart and totally remove my sin;
for faith to put my own trust in love rather than in force, when other people harden their hearts against me;
for faith to believe in the ultimate victory of your Holy Spirit over disease and death and all the powers of darkness;
for faith to learn from any sufferings that you call me to endure;
for faith to leave in your hands the welfare of all my dear ones, especially _____ and _____.
O Father, all my ancestors were justified in their trust in you. Rid my heart of all pointless anxieties and paralyzing fears. Give me a cheerful and buoyant spirit, and peace in doing your will; for Christ’s sake. Amen.
GETTING THOUGHTFUL
What gives you confidence that you are living faithfully? You know, enjoying a life of connection with God, a life that pleases God, a life that gets you what you want from religion?
We have been journeying through Matthew’s gospel for several months now and have met all kinds of people: insiders and outsiders to the faith, sinners and saints, rich and poor, male and female, adults, children, foreigners, and fishermen. Hardly a descriptor we use to differentiate left out of the mosaic that makes up the people drawn to Jesus and whom Jesus reaches out to. One such tesserae was the group referred to as the “Sadducees”.
While we don’t know a whole lot about this group, what we do know is quite telling. Their name was a derivative of the name of the high priest at the time of the greatest king David and his son Solomon whose reign saw Israel as a nation of power and wealth. They can trace their heritage back to the time when Israel was truly great. These Sadducees were descendants of the ones who connected God to his people in way never repeated in Israel’s history. They were, by all accounts, an aristocracy, a privileged, powerful and noble class that found their confidence in their history and in their unique and strict claim the Pentateuch (the first five books of the bible known as the law of Moses) was the only writings of God worth dedicating one’s life to. These books outlined for them how to live a good and abundant life, even amidst foreign powers. This is where their confidence in faith came from; following the very practical rules and regulations of life together in these texts.
Over time, their confidence in the first scriptures led many in this group to reject the importance and/or expansions found in later books of what we call the Old Testament. They saw revelation in the Pentateuch alone, and interpretation, even speculation, following. One way this was seen is in their rejection of the idea of resurrection which shows itself in full color in the book of Daniel, chapter 12, verses 1-4, which read…
“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end…”
Needless to say, Daniel seems otherworldly, like a scene from a sci-fi film. It’s easy to see why the earthy nature of the law of Moses, while including such specular divine interventions like the Flood and the Exodus, was nonetheless appealing to people wanting confidence to live a life of faithfulness. To know what to do, when to do it, and that our obedience leads to our prosperity is a rather mind-easing way of faith. Especially when the alternative is so dramatic, and well, out of our control. Don’t you think?
And so these confident in their faith, confident in the practical nature of relating to God through the ordinances and traditions of their written heritage, challenge Jesus and the absurdity of a faith in something requiring so much divine interaction.
Read Matthew 22:23-28.
This exchange may seem a bit weird for us, but the point of story of one woman and seven husbands would not have escaped Jesus and the majority of those in ear shot. The story comes from a writing called the Tobit, which shares the tail of women Sarah who had been married seven times but on the wedding night of each marriage an evil demon would take the life of her husband before the marriage could be formally consummated. Tobias, who is he hero of the book, is told to marry Sarah for the sake of God’s plan going forward, but is obviously hesitant to do so! Another, otherworldly story!
In a way they are making fun of Jesus, or at least the idea of divine power in him, by asking him the question with this story. For they who held so tightly to the law of Moses, believed that the proliferation of the people of God forever was to be through descendants, “Death would be thwarted by the production of heirs.” (Garland, 207) No need for divine interference. Simply do what is commanded in Deuteronomy 25 and then life will continue.
I think they expected Jesus to take on their challenge the traditional way, by appealing to other scripture to prove his argument for resurrection, which as you know, Jesus had been foretelling his own rising on the third day event for some time now. Perhaps they even thought they could get him to argue the details or the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the book of Tobias. Regardless, they receive in reply what they did not expect.
Read Matthew 22:29-30.
Jesus responds to the heart of their confidence in the Scripture they hold so dear but which has hardened them to the power of the God they assume to worship. When Jesus say, “For in the resurrection they neither marry or are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven”, he is saying…
The state of resurrection is not some restoring life to what you already know, some longer life on earth in the same patterns you already know. Living resurrected is entering into a new kind of existence with God, living into the image you were created, the divine nature which was shared with you. A nature “no longer subject to death” (Chamblin).
At the core of idea of resurrection is that there would be a day when God would judge sin, and from that day when sin is abolished, “our alienation from God and from each other” would also be abolished and thus, “spouses shall become capable of relating to one another with…greater freedom and intimacy than is…even imaginable” (Chamblin). This “day”, would bring intimacy, freedom and unity in ways we only dream we could live.
In John’s gospel, Jesus makes a profound statement when speaking of his impending encounter with a wooden cross, “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (12:31-32).
Jesus’ death is the day of judgment. Let that sentence seek in for a moment. The death of Jesus is the judgement of this world. The cost of sin shown clearly, the grace of its weight paid by the one undeserving. And, Jesus is the first of many to be resurrected into a new reality, a world in which the power of God allows them to experience “the unity, freedom and intimacy [demonstrated by marriage as the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead] will flood all relationships among the people of God” (Chamblin). After all, is this not the way of relating to one another what Jesus came preaching and teaching is already for those living in the kingdom since Matthew 5? A way of “righteousness” as we help one another obtain the “unity of faith” and the “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” until we grow up into full mature faithful, as Paul reminds us in Ephesians 4:13.
The very scriptures that the Sadducees hold so dear testify to this grander reality that they try to avoid. A reality in which we live because of divine interaction, because of divine relationship in our obedience and love. Jesus’ responds with an ironic question, “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’” Of course they have read it! It is from Exodus 3:6 when God gives his name to Moses at the burning bush. This is the core of their foundational text. A text in which God says that As I live, these too live. He is not the God of the dead but of the living. Abraham lives. Isaac lives, Jacob lives, and as we saw just a few chapters earlier, Moses too lives. God has always been in the business of bringing life, new life, not just a continuation of life in the midst of death as we settle for it.
Peter says it this way in Acts chapter 2,
“People of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” (2:22-24)
The unity, intimacy, freedom, and, as Jesus will say in just a few verses to follow, a love of God and neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:34-40), is our to experience now and forever because the pangs of sin and death could never bind the love of our Father from reaching us, from keeping us separated from him. Sin and death cannot “disturb the communion” (Chamblin) that we have with God and one another because of Jesus’ resurrection.
The question was asked, “What do you have confidence in that you are living faithfully?” If it is anything less than resurrected Christ who allows us to share in this resurrected life, then we are much to be pitied. The Sadducees underestimated the power of God, and thus misunderstood their scriptures. Let’s not be same. Let’s be ones whose confidence to practice resurrection is because we know the resurrection as the foundation of our faith—even it requires us to believe something so—otherworldly.
REFLECTION
Jesus’ exchange with the Sadducees in Matthew 22:23-33 gives us an opportunity to reflect on what we rely on in this life of faith. Are we ones whose confidence is in our history, or even the history of our faith heritage? Perhaps our confidence is in our ability to know and keep the “rules of faith”. Maybe you lack confidence. The resurrection that Jesus has been proclaiming, and to which in a few chapters will be witnessed, is the event that gives you and I the confidence that we can live a different life, a faithful life. Do you believe it?
Use the questions in the section below to help you prayerfully reflect individually and/or discuss as a DNA group.
When you feel like you are living this life of faith well, where does your confidence / assurance come from in those seasons?
When you feel like you are struggling to live faithfully, what do you try to do, think, believe, etc.; in order to gain confidence?
Why is Jesus’ rebuke “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God”, so convicting?
What about the resurrection should give us confidence to live a faithful life?
Describe what a life lived in the “new” relationship with God, the life you were created to image, could look like.
What keeps you from living this way?
What about those you love and share life with?
ECHO
According to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, the hope of history building through the years now hangs upon a cross, sinks deep into the rocks and then awakes to a promise land long coming. This is the story that we arise within each morning. Let us sink our teeth into life resurrected! May these words from Eugene Peterson’s poem, The Tree, echo in your heart, in your mind, upon you lips and in your actions this week.
.
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
Isaiah 11:1
Jesse’s roots, composted with carcasses
Of dove and lamb, parchments of ox and goat,
Centuries of dried up prayers and bloody
Sacrifice, now bear me gospel fruit.
David’s branch, fed on kosher soil,
Blossoms a messianic flower, and then
Ripens into a kingdom crop, conserving
The fragrance and warmth of spring for winter use.
Holy Spirit, shake our family tree;
Release your ripened fruit to our outstretched arms.
I’d like to see my children sink their teeth
Into promised land pomegranates
And Canaan grapes, bushel gifts of God,
While I skip a grace rope to a Christ tune.