Luke 30 27-38

I am going to talk about how today’s reading I think it helps us In three ways?

One it shows us how to approach people who have a different world view on religion?

Secondly, it shows us the thing that’s coming next.

Third it does what I am going to do today which is leave you with a question

To explain some of what’s occurring, we have to get that this reading shows us how strange Jesus’s world was to our eyes. We have to work with the strangeness to understand what’s going on

In today’s reading, The Sadducees use their understanding of the world to try and catch Jesus out.

The Sadducees were really the aristocracy of the Jewish world, powerful people. In their world view they wanted peace with Rome and the Romans (who wants to rock the boat when life is good). They also did not believe in Jesus version of the resurrection. In their view the world sort of got reconstructed by God with the haves and the have nots still well in place (again why worship a God that rattles a world that’s working for you).

So when they speak to Jesus about divorce they are coming at it from a perspective of what was called levirate marriage. That looked after the women who would have been left with nothing if the husband died.

She essentially got passed down like an inheritance to the next nearest relative who already may have a wife and now he had another one. The sadducees wanted to know whose wife would she be at the day of the resurrection if this had been going on for 7 brothers dying. That way the poor woman when she’s resurrected won’t be any worse off. The world still works for them, justice is served because, She will still belong to someone, they just want him to work out who?

Essentially trying to catch Jesus out on a point of law, but seen from their world view. This is why they call him teacher. If you’re a teacher solve this riddle.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who thinks everything that we believe in is dangerous nonsense. It can be hard going, the two worlds sort of collide and you can only state your truth and see what happens, This is essentially what’s happening here.

This is Jesus showing what to do when we encounter a strange worldview. Simply state our case and make it clear, where we differ. That’s what Jesus is really showing us today. How to work with encounters with views that are so strange and so opposed to what we as Christians think. Just state your view, as truth,

Quite often we start from a place of ours being a truth, one among many. Jesus response shows his starting place is, his is the truth. Not one among many, his response shows he thinks the Sadducees simply mistaken and states the sole truth. There’s no apology, no equivocation , no heat, just his truth stated as truth.

That’s how to explain our faith thank you Jesus,

We need to learn from that

Then

there’s something else

I think more importantly, he gives one of the clearest descriptions of what happens to us when we are all resurrected on the last day.

He points out that all those that have become followers of him will be resurrected as children of God his term, but not as man and wife, not under the sort of societal laws that we have. These ideas of man and wife are no longer relevant as we are all essentially now true children of God, the same God treats Moses, . Like Angels as Jesus says. They can’t die, they won’t marry or be married (people on the living in love and faith course that was take note)!. The new reality is very different . The social structures are broken when we rise with him, even marriage is gone.

This is him describing what the source of Christianity here is. This is the thing that we often relegate to the postscript of our faith, the things that’s going to happen after we get through all this toil and trouble. This is Jesus describing the afterlife. It’s one of the very few places this happens

So we need to take special note here because Jesus rarely explains this. This is as clear as it gets .

We will be God’s children, as Jesus says great term the children of the resurrection

That we will become and I quote, people who no longer die; we will be like the angels. To God nobody dies, they simply join him, they are alive now to a god that’s alive and they are alive later a god that’s alive. To the same God that’s alive and with us when today when we are living and dead. He makes no distinction. As far as god is concerned your alive now and alive then.

We live with that promise and that’s something which should make our faith joyous because that’s what’s and that’s what’s here now because of our faith in him. Grace enables us to access this.

Everything we experience is experienced light of this fact. Like our children and grandchildren who live in the excitement of Christmas, and nothing can alter the crescendo of Christmas day. That’s what our lives and our faith is about. This hope doesn’t just exist tomorrow it exists today. Because the same Jesus who makes this promise real is alive today, and the promise of his present and future with us is our present and future with him.

However the next part of the journey with him is not like this one. In the new reality nobody dies, we are children of God. As he says He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.

if you have that hope, that certainty know that sole truth. What joy every day really is , what transient our troubles when we have a future of being like angels, that never die, when that’s what’s in store?

Jesus stated these things as a simple truth today. A simple truth, for Jesus, that I think would never lie to us.

If what Jesus is telling us IS the truth?

Here’s the question

What would you do for that?
What does that do for your daily lives?
It should affect it, but the question for today is that I would like to leave you with is.

How?