Lectionary blog for Nov. 9, 2025
22nd Sunday after Pentecost
Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9;
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38
Did you grow up with cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote or Donald Duck died (temporarily), and then went to heaven? I did. The characters grew wings and a halo sprouted over their head, and somehow they gained a white robe and a harp. Much more so than any instruction that I received in church, these cartoons formed my vision of what happens after we die. But something is missing here: resurrection. We might become like angels, but we never stop being the humans that God created us to be. Far too often, we settle for disembodied spirituality or even a deemphasis on Jesus’ triumph over death. This must not be so. Bodily resurrection is some of the best news we have! This week, the lectionary texts insist on the resurrection.
The Sadducees were the sola scriptura, small-canon, tradition-rejecting folks of their day. There is no place in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) that says explicitly that humans will be resurrected from the dead, so they didn’t believe in resurrection. People die and are gathered to their ancestors. (In a concrete, physical sense, their bones are placed together.) “Scripture says it, I believe it, that settles it,” thought the Sadducees.
They loved teasing the Pharisees about their insistence on the resurrection. The Sadducees would laugh at Pharisees trying to quote prophets or writings to defend their positions. Protestations such as, “But Daniel 12 says …” or “But Job 19 says …” were brushed aside by the Sadducees.
“Look, if it’s such an important teaching, why didn’t Moses teach it?” the Sadducees might’ve asked. And then they would double down, and ask their favorite anti-resurrection question: “We just happen to have studied what Moses actually taught. In Deuteronomy 25, if a man dies without children, his brother is to marry his widow, to raise up children for the deceased. If there is a resurrection, whose wife will she be?” This practice of Levirate marriage was ancient already, and even central to stories in Genesis (38) and Ruth. Since polyandry was unthinkable, didn’t this test case disprove the resurrection?
Bodily resurrection is some of the best news we have!
One day, the Sadducees were doing what Sadducees did—trying to mock and disprove Pharisees—when along came Jesus. And, recognizing Jesus as someone who dines with Pharisees, they decided to have a go at him. To intensify their mockery, the Sadducees drew on the apocryphal book of Tobit (6:14-17), a work they rejected, to present Jesus with a case in which seven (!) brothers married the same woman without any having children. They then asked who she would be married to in the resurrection. Certainly the Sadducees were expecting frustrated sputtering that had characterized Pharisaical responses to the question so often in the past. But that is not what Jesus did.
Instead, Jesus told the Sadducees that they didn’t know Scripture, or even the power of God, well. Instead of appealing to the prophets, Jesus went right to the Sadducees’ favorite works. They loved talking about Moses, so Jesus talked about when God appeared to Moses on Sinai in the burning bush. God introduced Godself, saying, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” There was no past-tense verb in that sentence. (Present-tense “to be” verbs like “am,” “is” and “are” are omitted in Biblical Hebrew—zero copula). God does not say that God was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God’s verb choice means that death cannot be the end for these men and, therefore, God is the God of the living, not of the dead.
Here Jesus, in his only substantive interaction with Sadducees by themselves, agrees to play their game and beats them by their own rules. Without recourse to the book of Isaiah and the Psalms that Jesus loves to quote so much, Jesus makes his argument only from texts that the Sadducees recognized as authoritative. Jesus undermined the Sadducees’ favorite “gotcha” question by making a theological argument about who God is, based off of a grammatical point.
So, what does this mean? Jesus was willing to engage in debate framed by folks who were not his core audience—he is much more focused on Pharisees—to defend a major issue: the resurrection. Throughout the rest of his ministry, Jesus doesn’t speak with a group of Sadducees by themselves after this. But in defending the bodily triumph of life over death, Jesus was willing to turn aside to make sure that everyone understood that a physical, bodily resurrection is central to the good news of God’s kingdom.
