Readings:
Sermon:
Some of us are marking these weeks before Advent as the ‘Kingdom Season’. A time when we can reflect on what it means to be part of building God’s kingdom here on earth and listening to the Holy Spirit so that we can discern more and more what God’s kingdom is all about and how that should inform how we live our lives.
I think it’s fair to say that the Sadducees in today’s Gospel reading were more interested in earthly matters than those of the kingdom of God. The questions they throw at Jesus are either a pretty poor attempt to hoodwink Jesus into saying something they think will get him into trouble or demonstrate them unwilling to enter into a discussion about what comes after this life and how it will be different to the one we experience on earth.
Taking the first of those options it’s fair to say that there are many examples in the life of Jesus where people tried to engage him in a particular type of debate in order to try and get him to slip up and land himself in a whole heap of trouble. And sometimes as Christians we can do the same. Those moments in our lives when we try and engage God in word gymnastics to try and justify something we want to do but where we really know in our hearts of hearts it is contrary to the values of God’s kingdom. And this is a simple teaching, but often simple teachings are those most needed to be repeated, and in this case, we need to remember that we shouldn’t try and hood wink Jesus into saying what we want him to say so that we can do what we want to do rather than what we should do.
A good visual for this is the old-fashioned jack in the box because when we try and engage God in verbal gymnastics to justify our less that Godly actions we are trying to cram God’s word into a box but no matter how much we try and do this God will spring back out of the box with his truth and if we aren’t careful hit us in the face in the process. We are not called to try and get Jesus to justify what we want from our lives but instead to hear what Jesus says and echo that in our lives and in doing so become Kingdom people focussed on helping build God’s kingdom here on earth.
The Sadducees were also unwilling to engage with recent developments in theology. They were traditionalists who were more interested in keeping things as they were rather than seeing where God was leading them. And I’m sure that there are times in all our lives when we just want things to stand still. I’m now at an age where I feel myself ready to say ‘it was better when I was young’, and so I get it, but if we truly believe that the Spirit of God is at work in our lives, in our world and throughout creation then we need to recognise that change will come whether we want it or not and right now our world needs to change because if it doesn’t then we aren’t really committing ourselves to building the dynamic and transforming Kingdom of God.
And this leads us onto the debate between Jesus and the Sadducees which is essentially the age-old question – what happens when you die? And in my experience it’s still a question we only ever skim over week by week in our church communities. A few years ago, I started running a course based on the book ‘Heaven’ by Paula Gooder. And the feedback from the course, time and time again, was that it gave a safe space for people to talk about, question and explore the Bible on the subject of heaven, what comes next, the resurrection, angels and a whole heap of other things linked to what happens to us when we die. It’s a subject that all too often is sidestepped, and no safe space is offered to explore our thoughts, hopes and fears.
And all those years ago when Jesus was being questioned by the Sadducees we hear the same questions, the same differing views, the same need to have a space to discuss this and be open to different theological perspectives in these questions rather than being like the Sadducees who only see things from a very closed perspective. A key question is how we learn and build spaces in our communities where these questions can be explored.
There is much going on in this reading but in this Kingdom Season offers us some insight into how the Kingdom of God can be built on earth as it is in heaven: by listening to God’s word and not trying to be clever with God so we get what we want rather than what God desires; by being open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in building the Kingdom and by considering the often avoided questions of what awaits us in the eternity of God’s kingdom. Amen.
Questions:
- Have you ever tried to justify doing something through verbal gymnastics with God? How did it make you feel and what was the outcome?
- What are the things which you wish hadn’t changed in the church and why the changes might have been needed.
- Have you ever talked about what happens after we die? What questions do you have?