Adventures In Missing The Point
Mark 12:18-27
Dr. Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affective Research Group at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), was once convinced that she didn’t need God or religion. So, she declared herself an atheist and dismissed believers as uneducated. But as an educated person she figured at least she should read the Bible. Picard said, “When I first opened the Bible, I expected to find phony miracles … and assorted gobbledygook. To my surprise, the Book of Proverbs was full of wisdom. I had to pause while reading and think.”
She read through the entire Bible twice. She said, “I felt this strange sense of being spoken to. Part of me was increasingly eager to spend time with the God of the Bible, but an irritated voice inside me insisted I would be happy again once I moved on.”
In college, another student invited her to his church. The pastor got her attention when he asked, “Who is Lord of your life?” She said:
I was intrigued: I was the captain of my ship, but was it possible that God would actually be willing to lead me? After praying, “Jesus Christ, I ask you to be Lord of my life,” my world changed dramatically, as if a flat, black-and-white existence suddenly turned full-color and three-dimensional. But I lost nothing of my urge to seek new knowledge. In fact, I felt emboldened to ask even tougher questions about how the world works.
Today, I work closely with people whose lives are filled with medical struggles. I do not have adequate answers to explain all their suffering. But I know there is a God of unfathomable greatness and love who freely enters into relationship with all who confess their sins and call upon his name.
I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arrogant fool who snubbed the greatest Mind in the cosmos – the Author of all science, mathematics, art, and everything else there is to know. Today I walk … with joy, alongside the most amazing Companion anyone could ask for, filled with desire to keep learning and exploring.[i]
She showed a lot of intellectual honesty as a young adult just starting her career. If you’re going to reject something, at least be aware of what it is you’re rejecting. So she read the Bible. Twice. And in the process, she met Jesus. She certainly had things she expected to find there. But her mind was at least open enough to take Scripture at face value and allow it to speak to her.
How often do we come to Scripture with an agenda? How often do we read and study and meditate on only the parts we like, the parts that don’t challenge us to grow, to change, to do the hard work of submitting to the Lordship of Christ. How often do we ignore the parts of Scripture that we don’t like? The parts that challenge us?
Mark 12 and 13 are dedicated to Jesus’ time in Jerusalem between his triumphal entry, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday, and his betrayal, trial, and crucifixion later in the week. Throughout the early part of the week, Jesus often found himself answering the questions of religious leaders who were trying to trap him in his words, trying to get him to incriminate himself so that they could be rid of him. Today, it’s a group of Sadducees who approach him with a question. Turn with me to Mark 12:18-27.
We don’t know much about the Sadducees, and much of what we do know was written either by the Jewish historian Josephus or by their Pharisee adversaries. As far as numbers go, they were a relatively small group, and they appear to have arisen from the aristocratic, priestly families in Jerusalem. They were a small group, but they held a lot of religious and political power. They dominated the Jewish ruling council, known as the Sanhedrin, although there were plenty of Pharisees on the Sanhedrin too. But while the Pharisees were admired by the masses, the Sadducees were not.
They were very urban, educated, wealthy, and sophisticated, and they kind of looked down on everyone else. They had an air of superiority about them. They acted like others were beneath them. But it’s clear that Jesus had made enemies among them too, because they approach him with a question. In the style typical of discussion and debate among the educated, they presented a scripture, and then created a story to illustrate their point.
In the Law of Moses, if a man was married but died without children, his brother was supposed to marry her and raise any children he had with her as children of his brother, so that his land, his inheritance, would stay in his family. It was a way of protecting each family’s part of the promised land. So these Sadducees concoct a story in which a man dies without having any children with his wife. And then each of his six remaining brothers, in turn, marries her and then dies without having any children with her. They then ask Jesus, “In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.”
Which is an interesting question and actually tips the hand of the Sadducees, because Sadducees didn’t believe in any kind of an afterlife. They didn’t believe in a resurrection from the dead into eternal life. They also didn’t believe in angels. For them, this world was all there was, and all that was ever going to be. And the only part of the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, that they viewed as scripture was the first five books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the Law of Moses.
They’re trying to make Jesus look stupid. But he isn’t playing their game. He actually comes right out and tells them that their perspective on life and on the kingdom of God is just plain wrong. “Is this not the reason you are wrong …” And why are they wrong? “… because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” They approach Scripture wrong, and they don’t have a living, breathing relationship with God that leads to a knowledge of and trust in God’s power. For them, faith is an idea, not a relationship.
Instead of coming to Scripture with an open heart and an open mind, ready to allow God to transform their way of thinking and seeing the world and relating to others, they come with preconceived notions about what God is like and the way God’s kingdom works, and then reject out of hand any part of Scripture that counters that. And Jesus is having none of it.
Most of us, regardless of our background or theology, are practical atheists. We think God exists and is involved in his creation and loves us, but we live as if we are the only thing that matters. And so we think the church is sustained by the services it provides or the amount of fellowship and good feeling we have in the congregation. Church effectiveness is measured by sentiment – how people FEEL about things.
Without God, without the one whose death on the cross challenges all our good feelings, who stands beyond and over against our human anxieties, all we have left is sentiment. Feelings. The residue of theism in demise. Sentimentality is the way our unbelief is lived out.[ii]
But God doesn’t want our sentiment. He wants our lives oriented around him and around life in his kingdom. And that means we allow him to challenge our core beliefs and assumptions through the truth of Scripture. But we must also be careful about how we speak that truth.
When Jeremiah DuPrau signed up for a sword fighting class, he probably didn’t expect to lose vision in one eye and part of the other. But that’s exactly what happened.
In his third sword fighting class at the Milwaukie Elks Lodge, instructor Jason Brown called him over to demonstrate a particular move, and according to local news reports, “jutted the sword into [his] eye,” without warning Jeremiah to put on his protective face mask first.
After losing the vision in his right eye and part of his left, he filed suit against Brown and the his parent organization, Swordguild Portland. His attorney John Coletti says the resultant injuries, which also included a stroke and partial paralysis, impacted DuPrau’s life in a dramatic way.
“He’s unable to drive, unable to ride his bike, unable to hike,” Coletti said of DuPrau. “He actually had to give his dog away because he was unable to take care of it.”
DuPrau’s lawsuit, which also names the venue Milwaukie Elks Lodge as a defendant, sought $9 million in damages.
If the Word of God is a sword, we must be careful how we handle it, lest we injure others from our carelessness. As followers of Christ, we are accountable for the ways in which we handle God’s Word. If we use the Word only to attack others, we undercut our legitimacy as followers of Jesus.[iii]
So Jesus countered them, and he countered them with a passage of scripture from the Law of Moses – the only part of the Jewish scriptures they accepted as authoritative. He quotes Exodus 3:6, a part of the story of Moses and the bush that burned but didn’t burn up. God, speaking from the bush to Moses, said “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Jesus then goes on to say, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.”
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had long since died when God appeared to Moses in the bush, but they are alive in God’s presence and God was keeping his covenant with them through Moses, and then made his own covenant with Moses. In calling Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt, God is honoring his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God is a God of power and faithfulness who keeps his promises. Jesus argues fully for a resurrection into eternal life for those who die, and he does it from the only part of scripture the Sadducees, who rejected the idea of an afterlife, believed was authoritative.
But Jesus also corrects any false assumptions about the eternal nature of the kingdom of God. In popular culture, heaven is often pictured as a kind of ethereal place with all of us sitting on clouds playing harps. When a child does, something people often say to the grieving family is, “God needed another angel.”
So what DOES Jesus say about the nature of life in the eternal kingdom of God? Look at V. 25. It almost sounds like Jesus is saying we will in fact become angels. But look closely at what Jesus says. He doesn’t say that we will be transformed into angels somehow. He simply says, “Like the angels.” What he’s saying is, “Life in the eternal kingdom of God will be fundamentally different from life as we know it now.” As different as the life of an angel is from your life right now. Angels and human souls are never said in scripture to be the same, or that one is transformed into the other. He’s saying that our lives in God’s kingdom in eternity will be fundamentally different than they are right now. But very real.
He also says that in the kingdom of God in eternity people will not marry or be given in marriage. He does NOT say that relationships as they happened here on earth will not exist then, or that people will not enjoy intimacy and friendship with one another. Of course, reproduction will no longer be necessary. But the marriage relationship, as we know it, will have served it’s purpose.
This I can promise you though. Whatever God has in line to replace it will be an even better, fuller expression of intimacy than even the best of marriages is today. And yes, you will know your spouse and they will know you. But we will no longer belong to one another in that way because we will all belong fully to God.
Not that the Sadducees cared. They didn’t believe in eternal life anyway, even though the narrow part of Scripture they did accept did in fact teach the resurrection to eternal life. But they weren’t really all that interested in what Jesus had to say. They weren’t there to allow Jesus to touch them or transform them. They just wanted to show their superiority. They wanted to prove the superiority of their preconceived notions and assumptions. They wanted to transform scripture to suit them, rather than allow scripture to transform them. But Jesus was having none of it. And his final words to them are haunting. “You are quite wrong.” Period. He doesn’t argue with them, as he often does the Pharisees. Why? Because their minds were so closed, no argument would matter. Are we teachable when we come to God in our study of and meditation on the Bible?
Eugene Peterson wrote a book about scripture called Eat This Book. In that book, he tells this story:
At age 35 I bought running shoes and began enjoying the smooth rhythms of long-distance running. Soon I was competing in 10K races every month or so, and then a marathon once a year. By then I was subscribing to and reading three running magazines! Then I pulled a muscle and couldn’t run for a couple of months. Those magazines were still all over the house, but I never opened one. The moment I resumed running, though, I started reading again.
That’s when I realized that my reading was an extension of something I was a part of. I was reading for companionship and affirmation of the experience of running. I learned a few things along the way, but mostly it was to deepen my world of running. If I wasn’t running, there was nothing to deepen.
The parallel with reading Scripture is striking. If I’m not living in active response to the living God, reading about his creation/salvation/holiness won’t hold my interest for long. The most important question isn’t “What does this mean,” but “What can I obey?” Simple obedience will open up our lives to a text more quickly than any number of Bible studies, dictionaries, and concordances.[iv]
If we approach the Bible with an openness to being transformed by it, asking “What can I obey?” our passion for obedience to Christ will grow. And as we obey Christ, our desire to hear him speak to us through his Word will grow. And it becomes a life-giving, life-transforming cycle. Let us pray.
[i] Rosalind Picard, “An MIT Professor Meets the Author of All Knowledge,” ChristianityToday.Com (3-15-19)
[ii] The Christian Century.Leadership, Vol. 10, no. 3.
[iii] Aimee Green, “Lawsuit: Sword-fighting student sues instructor for stabbing him in eye and brain,” The Oregonian (9-06-18)
[iv] Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (William B. Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 70-71; paraphrased in the September 18 entry of Men of Integrity (September/October 2009)
