“Asking The Right Questions”

Text: Luke 20:27-38

© November 11, 2007 by Steven Werth at Crafton United Presbyterian Church

Here's a deep theological question for you: Can God build a rock so large that even God can't pick it up? Let's think about it.. God can do anything and create anything, so of course God can build a rock that big. But if God is all powerful then God would be able to pick up that rock. If we are to say that God can't pick up that rock, then God is limited in his power over physical things. The question really comes down to something that is very basic for Christians... Is God's power based in God's ability to create or in God's ability to intercede in our lives. So let's see a show of hands.... who thinks that God can build a rock so large that even God can't lift it? And who thinks that God can pick up any rock that is created? It's a silly question really, because it is a perfect example of the way that in attempting to define what God is, we miss how God is working in our lives right now.

Today's verse from Luke showed us what a cool guy Jesus really was.. I know, I know, of course he was a cool guy, he was Jesus! But sometimes we forget that. We like to build neat little boxes for our definitions of who Jesus was, and we never get outside of that. We like to think of Jesus in the way we see him in Children's Bibles. With birds on his shoulders and kids on his knees.. And that's great, it's a beautiful image that captures the loving compassion of God through Jesus Christ, but when we rely on that, we can forget pretty easily what his role was, what a sharp wit he had, and how quick on his feet he was. Luke 19: 47-48 says “Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.” They really wanted to trap him. He was shaking things up. That made the priests and the politicians mad. Here was this man, a Galilean, who is coming into the temple in Jerusalem every day and preaching to the people. He was no priest. He had no Political authority. The Sadducee's and Pharisees were priests. The Saducees were priests from the line of Zadok, so they were members and supporters of one of the highest and most respected priestly lines in Israel at the time. They were wealthy and had connections to those in power. Religiously, they only recognized the Torah, (the first 5 books of the bible. Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers and Deuteronomy) as authoritative. They rejected the authority of all of the prophets and all of the spoken traditions.

The Pharisees were priest also, but they were more religious and less political than the Sadducee's They accepted both the Torah and the prophets as authoritative scripture. And they thought that oral tradition was a good way to understand scripture. That made Jesus more of a threat to them. They were no where near as legalistic as the Sadducee's, so they couldn't just blow him off for not following their rules in the same way that the Sadducee's could. In the tradition of the Pharisees, what Jesus was doing was considered one of the more appropriate ways to understand and interpret scripture. The big difference, and the thing that bothered them, was that he wasn't a pharisee. He was a builder by trade, a common working man. Someone who, in their opinion, by no means should have had the authority to say the things that he was saying. But he was, and he was wildly popular. So they wanted to catch him and they wanted to trip him up. They wanted him to say something incriminating so that they could just call in the Roman Centurions to arrest him and get him out of their hair for good. And they tried.

Perhaps what sets the question from the Pharisees and the Sadducee's apart most from the question of the rock is that it is a question that is intentionally designed to catch God in a trap and lead God to do what we want him to. The aim is to direct God's will to our own goals instead of allowing God's will to direct us. It's pretty easy for us to condemn the religious leadership that was trying this on Jesus, but how much do we do this in our own lives today? Do we bargain with God? We do. Lord, if you'll just do this one thing for me, I'll be nicer to those kids down the street Do we look for loopholes that will allow us to get our way without actually having to give anything to God? We do. Well God, I know I yelled at those kids today, but they rode their bikes up on my lawn... and I don't really have to be nice when they're that disrespectful do I? I'm reminded of the movie Dogma. It isn't really good for kids, but if you grownups haven't seen it , and you don't mind some pretty strong language, it's very funny. In the movie, two angels are cast out from heaven and end up in Wisconsin for all the rest of eternity. In a rededication ceremony for a local cathedral, a bishop declares that all of the sins of whoever walks through the Cathedral doors will be instantly forgiven. These two angels set out to make their way to this Cathedral because they think that they have caught God in a loophole, having to honor the forgiveness of sins. But no matter how hard we try, we will never catch God in one of these traps. When we ask of God, God reveals himself to us, we just have to be able to look to see it.

The question from today's New Testament reading was actually the third question in a series that was aimed at him by the Pharisees and the Sadducee's In Chapter 20: 2, they asked him, “By what authority are you doing these things?” Jesus was quick, he played it right back to them. He responded to them by asking them a question. “Did John the baptist baptize by Divine or human authority?” They pharisees had to talk about this a little, If they said he baptized by divine authority Jesus would ask them why they didn't believe him. If they had said that he baptized by human authority, they might lose the support of the people, because the people believed that John was a prophet. Then they asked him again in verse 22, “Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” And Jesus said to them, “Show me a coin. Whose head and whose title does it bear?” They said, “The emperor’s.” We all know what follows. Give to Caesar the things that are the Caesar's, and to God the things that are God’s.” a lot of us can recite these statements from memory. They are some of the more popular verses in the New Testament, but the thing that is so great about them is how much Jesus stumped the Pharisees when he said these things. They didn't have anything else to say. So the Sadducee's stepped up to have a shot at him and they asked him about the Resurrection. Jesus had preached the resurrection, so they thought they had him caught. There is no direct mention of the resurrection in the Torah, so the Sadducee's didn't believe in it. They thought this was an easy chance to discredit Jesus. So they gave him this long and drawn out question about a woman who marries 7 times, but bears no children. This was a practice called levirate marriage. It comes from the Hebrew word for Brother-In-Law. Basically the idea is that a woman has a right to children. In early Judaism, people thought that they would live on through their children, So if her husband dies without children, his brother is to marry her so that she can have children from that blood line. In this question, the woman marries each of seven brothers. And they all die. Which is really sad, but that isn't what the Sadducee's are concerned with. They are concerned with the pure law of it, and they are concerned with trying to catch Jesus in a loophole. None of these questions that were asked are honest inquiries for information, all of them are attempts to trap Jesus so they can put an end to his ministry one way or another. The Sadducee's really thought that if they could stump Jesus, the single most influential living teacher of their time that if it didn't stop his teachings, it would at least endorse the Sadducee's view to the people in Jerusalem, and then make the Sadducee's the undisputed and most powerful teachers in all of Israel. Not only would it raise their authority above the teachings of Jesus, it would reinforce their superiority over the Pharisees as well. Really just a win win for them. So they were drooling over the opportunity to take a shot at catching a flaw in Jesus' ministry. But when we are trying to pull one over on God, things don't always work out like we plan for them to.

What Jesus does is really profound. He answers all of their questions. But he answers them to a level far beyond the level that they were asking at. His answers are simply that God's will is beyond their perceptions. What matters in all of these scenarios that they are approaching him with is God, and God's Love and Grace, and Mercy towards us. Their legalistic interpretations are limiting their understanding of God and God's work in the world and in their lives.

The asked him about the Resurrection and he answered them.“Those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead cannot die anymore, 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.”

Jesus showed that even though the word resurrection isn't mentioned in the Torah, the idea is there. God held Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the same level with Moses, and therefore at the same level with Jesus and the Sadducee's then, and with us now. Those who have passed are somehow resurrected into a life everlasting with God.

Here is where we get into dangerous waters. What is the resurrection. It's in the apostle's creed, and it's in the Nicene Creed, so we must believe in it. But what is it. We have to be careful because we don't want to fall into the trap of the Sadducee's and the Pharisees themselves, and become so caught up in the legalistic idea of God and the resurrection that we can't see God at work in the world. It would be too easy to take verses like this and build up really elaborate theologies of the afterlife where we take the simple phrase “that we become like angels and live as Children of God” and combine that with all of our ideas about what Angels are. Pretty soon each of us has a halo and wings. But is that the Resurrection of the body, or is the resurrection of the body our own physical bodies that we are in right now, reborn into a life with God? We can debate these things, and there are still modern sadducee's and scholars do debate these things. In fact, one of the classic theological debates is to ask how many Angels can fit on the head of a pin. This kind of question of course sounds very weighty. How big, or small are angels and how big or small can they become? Can an angel ever actually rest upon the body of that pin to begin with? Is the answer merely, one angel can dance on the head of a single pin, or is the dancing of angels so different from ours that it requires no pressure or space, so an infinite number of angels, no matter what their size might be able to dance on the head of the smallest pin. It doesn't matter, really we can debate these things in order to gain a fuller understanding of God, but by focusing our efforts, and our thoughts, and our prayers on this kind of question are we really just avoiding asking the God that is in our own presence to reveal his truth into our own lives? When Jesus tells us that in the Kingdom of Heaven we will all be like the Children of God, that means we will all know and experience the love of God in the way that a small child knows and experiences love from their parents. It is an all consuming love that is the foundation for everything else in that child's life. And so to know God and to love God, the God who is everpresent and constantly revealing himself, is to encounter this all consuming love, This is what it means to be a child of God.

Karl Barth, one of the most influential Theologians of the 20^th century once said, “The Bible gives every person and every era answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and nothing more.” The question is what are we seeking in it? What questions are we asking the scriptures to answer for us, and what questions are we asking about the scriptures? Are we seeking the love of God, or are we seeking a strict legal answer to our questions, as the Sadducee's were? Either way, we will find those answers in the scriptures. Are we looking for the scriptures to tell us that we can't eat dairy and meat on the same plate? If that is the kind of answers we are looking for, we'll find them there. The pharisees and the Sadducee's knew these verses all too well. They're in Leviticus. These verses were the law. They were the old convenant between God and the people.

If, on the other hand, you are looking to the scriptures for the living breathing word of God, it is there too. What Jesus was doing when he answered the Pharisees and The Saducee's is not revealing a literal understanding of what the resurrected look like. In all three of the questions that were asked to trip him Jesus reveals God, as a living breathing God, through himself. He tells us that there is more than just this world, that like Abraham and Isaac before us, we will be counted among the living in the eyes of God. We struggle and fight and debate and theorize over who it is that will earn God's favor. Who are we in the kingdom of Heaven, and how are the problems of this world solved? It isn't that these aren't important questions, it is just that we can become so focused on these issues that we can neglect the simple yet profound truths presented to us by a living breathing God. We too easily fall into the trap of tying Jesus up in our own legalistic interpretations of what God is, and loose sight of God in our own lives. The Sadducee's wanted to know whose wife this woman would be. In the eyes of God, living and dead, man or woman, these things don't matter. The ancient concept of a wife as the property of irrelevant because in the eyes of God, we are all God's children, and God is ready to reveal himself to us as soon as we are willing to ask God, and not just about God.

Amen