Third Sunday before Advent
“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
Overview
What is Jesus talking about this morning? Are we children of this age? Or children of that age? Children of God? Children of the resurrection?
The Sadducees, in Luke 20:27-38, come to him with a strange question attempting to disprove the possibility of resurrection. Like a canny politician, Jesus does not seem to be answering their question. They are speaking at cross purposes: for the concept of resurrection, of an afterlife, arose when there seemed no possibility of justice in this world.
If God is just God then there would have to be an afterlife in which justice was done. For Jesus the resurrection starts not in an afterlife, but now, in this life. When we become part of God’s family, children of God, we become part of that movement towards justice and peace that God yearns for.
Today we baptise Imogen and Toby: a symbolic moment when they are claimed as children of God, children of the resurrection, children who (together with all of us) will not wait for the next life to work for the kingdom of God to come in this life.
GOSPEL
Luke 20:27-38
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.’
Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’
