There is an old chestnut that often gets taught to Sunday School children regarding the passage we read this morning from the Gospel of Luke. When people reading this story wonder, quite naturally, who these Sadducees are, the explanation goes like this. The Sadducees were sad you see because they didn’t believe in life after death.

But there is something about that old saying that is not quite right. It implies that they didn’t believe because they were sad, because they were old spoilsports who didn’t want to believe in anything. It maybe even suggests that they were proto atheists who didn’t even believe in God.

Who were the Sadducees?

I just wanted to let you know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Do you want to know who the Sadducees were? They were members of the most elite and wealthiest families in that society. They had life pretty good. And far from being atheists, these families counted many priests and high priests among their numbers. They made their living serving and sacrificing to God. And, in fact, the reason why they didn’t believe in the resurrection was because they saw themselves, above all, as good Bible-believing Jews.

But here is the thing, the Bible, for them, was a very small well-defined thing. Most Jews at that time would have recognized, pretty much, the whole of the Old Testament as we know it to be scripture. But the Sadducees were far pickier. For them, only the first five books really counted as scripture – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – known as the Books of Moses.

No Resurrection in the First Five Books

And they had noticed that the notion of the resurrection just doesn’t come up in those books, like not at all. It doesn’t come up because nobody seems particularly concerned about it. People like Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses are completely focussed on this life and not on the next. God’s promises are also focussed on what happens here and now and in generations to come.

In fact, that is not just true of the first five books, it is actually true of a great deal of the Old Testament. The question of a meaningful afterlife just doesn’t come up. Oh, you can find it in a few places – the Books of Ezekiel and Daniel, for example – but those are books that were written quite late. In the oldest Hebrew literature, it is really just not there. So, in many ways the Sadducees were just trying to take the Bible seriously – something that we’re all supposed to do, right?

So Why did Everyone Else Believe?

But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the time of Jesus, the Sadducees were probably the only major Jewish group that did not believe in the resurrection. So, obviously, something had changed for most Jews by that point, but this change was not primarily based on what they were reading in their scriptures. So where did this conviction come from? Well, it turns out that I can tell you exactly where it came from. It came from a story.

Antiochus Epiphanes

About two centuries before the time of Christ, something terrible and horrible happened to the Jews living in the land of Judah. They were ruled over by the Greeks at that time. You have maybe heard of a famous fellow named Alexander the Great who conquered the world? Well, one of the places he conquered was the land of Judah.

And, generations later, the descendants of his generals still ruled over that land. And one of those rulers, Antiochus Epiphanes, was a bit of a jerk who was full of himself. And he had been having trouble with the Jews that he ruled over. And so Antiochus made a fateful decision. He decided that the problem was Jewishness itself.

Now, Antiochus did not set out, like certain other tyrants of history who shall remain nameless, to actually kill all of the Jews. His policy was not traditional genocide, but it was cultural genocide. He wanted to exterminate Jewish practices like circumcision and the Kosher diet and their strange exclusive worship of just one God. And so, he made all of that stuff illegal. But, much to his surprise, the Jews did not appreciate his policies. They resisted. And so, the king decided to up the stakes.

The Story of the Seven Brothers

And that leads us to the story that changed every Jew’s perspective on resurrection except the Sadducees. This story is told in the Second Book of Maccabees, a book that is not in our Bible but that is part of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bible. According to this book, the king arrested an entire family of seven brothers and their mother. They were arrested on suspicion of, well, acting Jewish. And so, the king brought them before him and demanded that they eat a little bit of pork. The brothers refused.

What follows is a story so bloody and graphic that I don’t really feel as if I could tell it to you. Look it up and read it for yourself in 2 Maccabees 7 if you really want to know it, but you have been warned! In the story, the king has all seven brothers tortured to death. And the torture is particularly physical as he cuts off body parts and roasts them over the fire. And so all seven brothers die. And the woman, their mother, dies as well.

The Faith of the Brothers

But the bloody details are not what are important about the story. It is the reaction of the family that stands out. They are there because of their faith and because they do not want to betray it in the face of the king’s decree. And they are there, above all, because they trust in their God who told them to live in certain ways to save them.

And at first, this faith leads them to believe that their God will save them from what the king wants to do to them. Because the promises that they know about God are all promises for this life. That’s what they have learned from their scriptures.

But, of course, that is not what happens. One by one the brothers are painfully put to death. One by one they all watch horrified as various body parts are lopped off and thrown into the fire. And God does not save them. And so, they are left with a choice. Either God’s promises have failed, or they are going to have to understand God’s faithfulness in a new way.

A New Understanding

The terrible holocaust they are being put through convinces them that if God is truly faithful, then God’s promises must also extend beyond this present life. And if their enemies are going to destroy their bodies because they remain faithful to God, then God’s faithfulness and justice have to mean that God will give them those bodies back again.

Basically, they believed that if God had been able to create them in the first place, then surely God would be able to raise them up and create them as new bodies at the end of all things. So, the belief in the resurrection became established when people heard the story of what that family had experienced. And by the time of Jesus, it had become accepted by the great majority of Jews.

The Sadducees’ Version of the Story

And that is what makes it so hilarious when this group of Sadducees come up to Jesus one day to try and convince him that he is wrong about the resurrection, and they do it by telling him a story about seven brothers and one woman who all died. Oh, I’m sure they thought they were being clever, but I’ll bet their story went over with the crowd like a lead balloon.

Everyone in the crowd knew the story of King Antiochus and the seven brothers; everyone in the crowd believed in the resurrection because of that story. But the Sadducees thought that they had found the one weakness with that story. If only one of the brothers had been married, they argued, then for them to be raised from the dead would have broken one of the obscure laws in one of the Books of Moses because it would have meant that that one woman would be married to all of them in the afterlife.

It was a ridiculous argument of course, and I am betting that Jesus and everyone else were laughing at them as Jesus gave his answer. But do you want to know what they got wrong? They were trying to do their best to respect the scriptures as they knew them. But they forgot one key thing.

The Greater Truth

The scriptures are there to point us towards the truth. But the truth that they point to is not merely certain doctrines or laws. They point to the greater truth of who God is. And, as Jesus said to the Sadducees, who God is is the God of the living. A God whose essence is found in love and life itself.

The complete knowledge of such a God could never possibly be contained within the pages of a single book, no matter how extraordinary. Instead, the book points us to the experiences that others have had of God and to the experiences that we could potentially have. For it is only through human experience that we can come to know God, because human experience is all that we have.

So, the experience of the Jews who lived through the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanies led them to the new insight that their God was a God who would raise the righteous from the dead. In the same way, when the first Christians experienced that Jesus was still alive and with them after he had been crucified, that also taught them to trust in the God who would raise them from the dead.

When we are limited to what we find in the written word, when we allow that to dictate our experience, we will never know the fullness that God wants us to have.

The Suffering of War

On this Remembrance Sunday, we remember all those who suffered through the horrible trauma of war. We remember those who never returned. We remember those who came back broken in body and in spirit. We mourn the terrible loss and destruction that have been brought upon the earth as a result of war and we recommit ourselves to doing whatever we can to build a just and peaceful world so that no one will resort to war. I hope we can also commit ourselves to learning the lessons of wars and conflicts past. After all, as they say, those who do not learn from such histories are doomed to repeat them.

In the fires of the terrible affliction that the ancient Jews suffered under the Greeks, they discovered something important about their God. They discovered that their God was committed to them, not only for this life, but also beyond it. They learned that the God who had created them would give them new life again.

What have we Learned?

What have we learned, I wonder, as a result of the wars, police actions and peacekeeping that we have been involved in? You would hope, of course, as a result of our involvement in World War II that we might have learned something about the dangers of building a sense of nationalism out of ideals of racial purity and excluding the ones who are different. You would hope that, but sometimes looking around I do wonder if we are forgetting that lesson.

You would hope, based on our tragic experience in Afghanistan, that we would have learned something about using religion – any religion – as a tool for motivating terror and hatred. You would hope so, but I sometimes wonder what we have learned.

Growing in our Knowledge of God

But the most important lessons, I would still insist, are the lessons we learn about our God. I know there are many who learned faith in God in the midst of the trauma of conflict. I also know that there are many who learned that the image of God that they had been given was totally inadequate in the midst of such trauma. Both of those lessons are equally valid and essential.

I believe that the error that the Sadducees made was to think that they had come to the end of understanding who God was. They had a wonderful book, but the problem was that they believed that that book limited who God could be. Jesus challenged them to open up their minds to new possibilities about who God would be for them, even in the midst of the worst traumas of their lives.

But I suspect that the Sadducees were a little bit too comfortable in their lives, they had too many things going their way, so they were not open to learning something new about God. And that is kind of sad, you see.

Psalm 145:1 5, 17 21

Posted by StAndrewsHespeler on Friday, November 4th, 2022 in News

One of our bible readings this week