Fr. Stephen De Young: So we’ll go ahead and get started. As I mentioned, when we get started here in just a minute, we’re going to be picking up in chapter 20, beginning with verse 27 of the Gospel According to St. Luke. I’ll do my de rigeur introduction in that, way back when, when we first started the Gospel of Luke, we had the introduction to the whole book that is still available online for you to refresh yourself with if you don’t remember any of it. I don’t know how much of it I remember. I’d probably give a completely different one if I gave it again today.

Now, just to get us caught up real quickly to where we are, last time we talked about how the Gospel According to St. Luke follows basically the same kind of framework as the Gospel According to St. Mark and the Gospel According to St. Matthew, in that Christ’s life and ministry and death and resurrection are structured around this sort of single journey that begins in Galilee and then carries through sort of in a straight line down to Jerusalem where Christ’s death and resurrection occur.

So, as we saw last time, we read about Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and his cleansing of the Temple and the sort of immediate and drastic conflict that has brought him into with the religious authorities leading up to this, especially once Jesus gave it a Judea. We saw a lot of Pharisees and scribes sort of popping up and having these controversies with Jesus about theological issues and matters of the Torah and how the law was to be captured, this sort of thing.

But now we’ve seen as he’s coming to Jerusalem, it’s now been shifted to being the chief priests, those who have authority over the Temple in Jerusalem, who have now come into more direct conflict with him. These individuals hold a greater amount of power over the Jewish people through their religious authority. They don’t have any power vis a vis the Romans. The Romans, as far as they’re concerned, these priests are nobody important. But because remember the way the Romans viewed their empire. The Romans were interested in the land, the roads, the rivers, the natural resources and exploiting those things to benefit the Empire. They viewed the non-Roman citizens, the peasantry, the people like the Jews, they viewed them sort of the way they viewed cattle or any other animals that happened to be wandering around on their land. They were okay as long as they didn’t cause any trouble. They became troublesome, well, we’ll get rid of them. And so, they have no authority vis a vis the Romans.

But the Romans… because they didn’t really care about the people. They were sort of content to let the people, as long as they didn’t cause any trouble, sort of govern their own affairs. And so we talked about how Herod had the title of ethnarch. He was the king of the people, he was the ruler of the people. And again, Rome didn’t really care about the people. They just cared about the land the people lived on. The same way the chief priests we talked about primarily last time we talked about through temple taxation have become the landholders of almost all of the privately owned land in Judea. And so they have power. They have economic power and, of course, spiritual power and authority over the Jewish people. Because, remember, when we think about Judaism, we tend to think about contemporary modern day Judaism. We think about what goes on at B’nai Jacob synagogue. And Judaism was a very different religion at this time because Judaism at this time was centered and focused around the temple, around animal sacrifice taking place at the temple, around the cycle of feasts, Passover, Pentecost, these other feasts taking place at the temple, where Jews from all over the world, they were spread out all over the world, and they would have synagogues, meeting places for prayer wherever they were. But as we’ll see, and as we’re seeing now at the time of the Passover, as Jesus enters, Jews would come from all over the world to be in Jerusalem, to be at the temple for these feasts. So Jerusalem is still this religious hub at this time.

Now, that’s going to change, of course, in AD 70, when the temple gets destroyed. At this point in history, we see all these different forms of Judaism. We see the Pharisees. We see the Sadducees. We see the scribes. We see all these different groups. There’s also the Essenes. There’s groups in Egypt. There’s groups in other places. So there’s various messianic movements. The destruction of the temple is essentially going to wipe out all of those movements except two. The two movements in Judaism that are going to survive the destruction of the temple are the Pharisees, Pharisaism, which becomes Rabbinic Judaism. So the Judaism we know today is linearly descended from the Pharisees, from those rabbis. And we talked about before, the Pharisees had already sort of rejected the temple of that day as being corrupt because Herod built it. It had been desecrated by the Romans a couple of times. And so when the temple gets destroyed, they’ve already sort of distanced themselves from it, and so they’re prepared to continue on without it.

Then the second group that survives is Christianity, which, remember, was a Jewish movement originally. And Christianity survived because with Christ’s sacrifice and death and resurrection, Christianity didn’t need the temple anymore. Christianity was teaching that the purpose of the temple had been fulfilled. And so God allowed it to be destroyed because we didn’t need it anymore. And so that prepared Christianity to continue without it. But so, this time, the temple is this major hub. And so if someone is barred from going and offering sacrifice there, they’re essentially cut off from God. And the only forgiveness of sins that’s available to the Jews at this time, according to the Torah, is through making sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem. So that’s an incredible amount of spiritual power that these chief priests wield at this point in history. And they were using that spiritual authority, that spiritual power, basically to enrich themselves and to exploit the people. And so that’s why Jesus is now coming into conflict with it. But that’s why this conflict is so serious.

Interlocutor: After the temple was destroyed, did they just give up on blood sacrifices?

Fr. Stephen: The short answer is yes. I know it was way back in the long-ago time we were going through the Pentateuch, but in the law, it’s very clear, God is very clear that there’s only one place where you’re allowed to offer sacrifices to him. That was at the tabernacle and in the Temple. And that’s it. That’s it.

Before that, like Genesis, we see people offer Abraham builds an altar and offers a sacrifice just wherever he is. But at that point he says, “No, just at this one place.” Why did he do that? Well, at the time they came into the land of Canaan, the Canaanites, remember who they failed to completely drive out of the land, so they’re living alongside them. They had shrines everywhere. They had shrines everywhere. They were referred to as high places because they were usually on hills or promontories or they would have these shrines to Baal, to Ashura. They had them everywhere. And the danger was not so much it wasn’t so much that God wanted to give a monopoly to this one set of priests or that kind of thing, or some kind of spiritual power and control.

The idea was that the temptation was not we’re going to reject worshipping Yahweh and worship Baal instead. That’s the way we tend to think, because we think of religions as sort of discreet things, right? If someone came to you and said, “I’m both a Buddhist and a Muslim”, you’d look at the right and be like, “Wait, what? How does that make any sense?” Those are two different religious systems. That’s not the way religion worked in the ancient world. Religion of the ancient world was both/and. Religion of the ancient world, people would worship dozens of gods. There would be gods related to your family. You would sort of be born into worshipping them, gods related to the place where you lived. If you moved from one place to another, you start worshiping the gods of wherever it was you went.

By the time you get to the Roman period, they were even at the point where when you read their religious discourses in the first century and stuff, they basically were arguing that really all these gods worshiped in different places are sort of the same set, right? So they’d say, well, Isis, who they worship in Egypt is basically the same as Aphrodite in Greece, is basically the same as Venus in Rome, is basically the same as Ishtar in Babylonia. But it was just Chinese menu, one from column A, one from column B, two from column C. Put together your gods however you like.

And so, because that was the way of viewing things, the temptation for the Israelites was not that, “Oh, we’re going to stop worshiping Yahweh and go worship Baal instead,” like you had to pick. The danger was they were going to try and worship Yahweh and Baal and Ashura and whoever, an Egyptian god or two. And so, by God prohibiting them from worshiping him at those high places, he prevented them from mixing the two together. Only Yahweh is worshipped the tabernacle and in the temple, and you’re only allowed to worship Yahweh in the tabernacle and in the temple. That keeps the worship of God separate from the worship of these other gods.

But that was so thoroughly, remember, the creed for Jews at this time is the Shema from Deuteronomy, “Hear O, Israel, the Lord your God. The Lord is one.” It’s this idea of one. There’s one God, one temple, one worship, and none of this other stuff can mix with it is so ingrained in them that when the temple is destroyed, they can’t just go build another temple somewhere else. Because that doesn’t fit. It’s been so educated into them that the thought never occurred to them.

Interlocutor: Didn’t they have the same problem as the Samaritans, of worshipping at a false temple?

Fr. Stephen: That was one of the big obstacles between, remember, the Jews and the Samaritans is that the Samaritans had a temple on Mount Gerizim that they said was the true temple. They didn’t say there were neither. Groups thought there were two. The Samaritans thought the one on Mount Gerizim was the real one. The Jews believed the one in Jerusalem was the real one. They both believed the other ones were heretics for worshiping at the wrong one. But even there that idea of, there’s one sanctuary. And so the synagogues don’t get referred to as temples. The synagogues are just places to gather and pray. That’s what the word synagogue means, it’s a gathering place. It’s a place where the Jews of this community gather together to pray to their God. They pray and they read the scriptures, they preach and teach, but they never offered sacrifices.

And so, while it was easy for that to continue after the temple was destroyed, for them to just continue to use the synagogues, it was the Pharisees who came up with a theological way to explain why that was okay, why what the synagogue was doing was sufficient for the time being, as opposed to there being this huge missing piece of the temple

Interlocutor: They only way to get rid of the sin was to do the sacrifice in the temple. So how did the Jews do that after? How do they do that now?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is a piece of that theology that developed among the rabbis afterwards. Because the question, if people didn’t hear it, was about if at this time the view was, the teaching of the Old Testament was, that the forgiveness of sins is directly connected to sacrifice in the temple. Now that there’s no temple, how is there forgiveness of sins? Eventually, in Hebrews, it says, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. Well, they’re not sacrificing anything anymore, how did they…? The theology that develops is this theology of prayer and of fasting, fasting in particular, being sacrificial. So remember back in Leviticus, there was the whole ritual for the Day of Atonement, where they got the goat and they got the lamb, and they put the sins on the goat. The goat gets driven out of town, and they sacrificed the lamb, and the blood of the lamb goes here and there to cleanse the sanctuary.

The day of Atonement, Yom Kippur today, Jews pray and fast for their sins. And so they sort of developed this idea of finding other forms of sacrifice since we can’t do animal sacrifices outside of the temple, other forms of sacrifice like charitable giving, like fasting, sacrificing time in prayer and worship, those kind of ideas. But obviously I’m biased because I’m Christian and not Jewish, when I say that seems a little hollow. But that seemed a little hollow to the early Christians, too. And what you find if you read St. Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew, this is one of the rhetorical points that the early Christians made against the Jews related to the temple. It’s, your whole belief in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, your whole belief centers around there being a temple, but you don’t have one anymore. We can explain why you don’t have one, because Christ’s blood forgives and cleanses from all sin. What have you got? And their answer was still being formulated at the time, but that was a major rhetorical point in the dialogue between Jews and Christians in the early centuries.

Interlocutor: The temple is not even in the Torah, it’s after?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s in the Torah. It’s talking about the tabernacle at that point. But then that gets… the Ark of the Covenant, and everything that was in the tabernacle gets transferred to the temple when it’s built by Solomon.

Interlocutor: If you got to go to Israel… [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s a mosque there right now where the temple used to be. The temple was left in ruins by the Romans. There was nothing there. And in fact, we know over the next few centuries, it became a garbage dump, because nobody was allowed to build anything there, so just junk and stuff would get dumped there. And as I probably mentioned before in a Bible study, after the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 128 AD, the Jews were expelled from the city completely, and were only allowed to come into the city. It wasn’t called Jerusalem anymore. The new city was Aelia Capitalina. They were only allowed to come into the city one day a year. That was the day the temple was destroyed. And they were allowed to go to the ruins where the temple were, the junk heap to go there and mourn on that one day, the fact that their temple had been destroyed by the Romans. Not only did the Romans like to make a point, they liked to keep making it sort of in perpetuity.

That’s the way it remained until the first time there was any activity. There was actually under Julian the Apostate, who was Constantine’s nephew, who became emperor after him. And he was called Julian the Apostate because he didn’t like Christianity. And he set out to reverse all of the pro-Christian policies that Constantine had set in place. And so one of the things he did that he thought would help discredit Christianity was he was going to pay to rebuild the Jewish temple, because, as I mentioned, that had been a rhetorical point between Jews and Christians. The Christians saying to the Jews, “Look, you don’t have a temple, you can’t function.” So he was going to rebuild it to sort of take that away from the Christians and get, you know, he thought Judaism, that could be a rival, a better rival to Christianity.

And there were a series of incidents that we have reported people killed on the building site in accidents, all these kind of things. They kept delaying work on it. And then Julian the Apostate died in battle against the Persians. And so, when he died in battle, the next emperor reversed everything he did and went back to pro-Christian policies and so the whole project got left. So then it got left off again, and then nothing really happened there until the Islamic conquests. And when the Muslim armies took Jerusalem, they set about eventually building a mosque there, the Dome of the Rock. And that’s when the story of Mohammed having ascended up into heaven from that spot starts appearing again. I’m biased because I’m not a Muslim, but that story sort of pops up about 100 years after Mohammed lived, 150 years after they took Jerusalem. But so, there’s a mosque there now.

Interlocutor: When was that?

Fr. Stephen: The Muslim conquest? We’re in the 7th century, about the 660s that they took Jerusalem. And we know a lot about what went on at that time, actually, because the patriarch of Jerusalem at the time, Sophronius we have his journals and he talks all about, I believe it’s called the section is called I think it’s “On the Customs of the Arabs” or something like that, when they came, and talking it because he remained the patriarch after they took over the city. But he writes about sort of his customs and food and everything and what life was like once they came in. So we have a lot of information about it.

So, that mosque being there is why they haven’t yet. But there are various sort of Jewish fundamentalist groups that do want to rebuild the temple there at some point. Right now, they’re pretty certain that if they tried to demolish that mosque, they’d get attacked by about 18 different countries at once, and you’d have World War III, so they haven’t tried. But there are fundamentalist groups who want to do that.

But those are small fundamentalist groups, I should say. I don’t know how… that would be a good question for me to ask Rabbi Urecki sometime, I don’t know how the broad range of Orthodox Judaism would react if a new temple was built, if they’d embrace it or not at this point, I’m not sure how they would feel about that beyond those fundamentalist groups. Because, as I mentioned, rabbinical Judaism kind of moved on and went in a different trajectory religiously.

So here in chapter 20, verse 27, we have some more of these folks pop up. Remember, the Sadducees are the party that the priests belong to. Sadducees comes from, it’s actually Saddoukaioi, comes from Zadoc. Remember in Ezekiel there’s the prophecy that the priests of the new temple, right? When the Messiah comes, the priest of the new temple will be from the line of Zadok, who was one of the descendants of Aaron. Now, none of these people are descendants of Aaron, let alone Zadok. But they call themselves the Zadokites anyway, sort of as propaganda. And this group in particular, it is about to be pertinent. They only accepted the Torah itself as having spiritual authority. They didn’t accept the rest of what we call the Old Testament. Those were interesting writings, but they weren’t sort of what we would call canon. That’s kind of anachronistic, they didn’t use that term at this point in history, but they didn’t consider it to be authoritative, only the Torah.

And so because of that, anything that wasn’t explicitly in the Torah, they didn’t believe it. One of those things was the resurrection of the dead. Remember, we’re going through the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy. You’re going to be hard pressed in there to find anything about any kind of life after death. And so since they’re very strict, if it’s not there, they’re sort of fundamentalist in their own way. If it’s not there in the Torah, we don’t buy it. And so, Jesus has already come into conflict with these priests, and that leads into now these people from the priestly group, from the Sadducees, coming to approach him. Verse 27:

Then some of the Sadducees, who deny that there is a resurrection, came to Him and asked Him, saying: “Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a manís brother dies, having a wife, and he dies without children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.  Now there were seven brothers. And the first took a wife, and died without children. And the second took her as wife, and he died childless.  Then the third took her, and in like manner the seven also; and they left no children, and died. Last of all the woman died also.  Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife does she become? For all seven had her as wife.”

So this is a little bit different than the musical. This is one wife for seven brothers. [Laughter] But remember, what they’re quoting here is what’s referred is a practice called Levirate marriage. It is in the Torah, which they accept is authoritative. And the idea was, remember the way property was handled in the Torah, which was when they came into the land of Canaan, the land was divided up by person. Each tribe got its own allotment, and the allotment was big or small, based on the size of the tribe. And then each person of that tribe got their allotment. Everybody got the same piece of land, right? They all started on an equal playing field, and then that land was handed down from generation to generation. And remember, every 50 years, in the Jubilee year, it would all revert to the original family ownership. The idea there was that, again, everyone would still have this level starting point.

Now, if I’m lazy and don’t work my land, then I’m not going to have any food, right? Or if I go and run up a bunch of debt and have to sell my land to somebody, I’m not going to own my land anymore. But 50 years pass, my son isn’t going to suffer from me having been lazy or foolish. He’s going to get the land back. He’s going to have that starting point again where he can make a new start. That was the original idea.

That being the case, what’s key to that whole system? Inheritance rights. Being able to track who is supposed to own this piece of land from generation to generation. And so, this gets passed from father to eldest son, father to eldest son. Well, if you have someone who is the eldest son or the only son, he has a wife, gets married. They don’t have a son. Now, things can get complicated, because what if he’s got, like this guy, six brothers. Now you’ve got six brothers fighting over the land. Or you’ve got a first cousin or an uncle or somebody else, or if her husband dies and she goes and marries a man from another family and has a son with him, does he get the land? Does he get that land and the other family’s land, too, right? It creates all these problems.

So to keep the line of descent clear and to keep the land within the family that originally received it, when that happened, when a man died without a male heir, then his next youngest brother was supposed to marry the woman in order to give her a male heir. And that son was then considered the son of the original husband, meaning he’s the heir. He’s the family heir. So that was the practice, and that’s why it existed.

Now, the Sadducees, again, they think all this resurrection from the dead nonsense is silly. And this is one of their test cases for why it’s so silly, right? Because when they think of the resurrection, they say, “Oh, you think everybody’s going to be alive again and just go back to living?” In their minds, the age to come after the resurrection is pretty much just this, just more of it, right? So me, my wife, my kids, “Oh, we’re all alive again, and we go back to farming.” So they think they’ve got a real good one on Jesus here. They’re like, how about this, right? So this woman has been married to all seven brothers before she dies. When all eight of these people are arrested for the dead, who’s going to be married to who? Is this woman going to have seven husbands?

Remember, they’re okay with a man having seven wives, but a woman having seven husbands was right out. So they said, “Look, we got you see, that’s ridiculous.”

Jesus answered and said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage.  But those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.”

So Jesus basically says to them, you’re being silly. You don’t understand what you’re talking about. And he talks about two ages, right? He says, in this age, we get married, we have children. That’s what we do. In the age to come, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to do that. Why? Because nobody’s going to die. You’re not going to need to figure out inheritance, in the age to come. What Moses taught them in the law was for this age, for their particular context.

Trust me, I’m not proposing we bring back Levirate marriage in the church in the modern day, right? It was to deal with a particular social and societal situation in the Bronze Age. It was for that age. It was for that period. And so Jesus is trying to explain, “What are you talking about? It isn’t going to be like this age, right?” And so humans of the resurrection and the age to come aren’t going to get married because they aren’t going to be having children. There’s not going to need to be inheritance because no one’s going to die. It’s going to be like the angels. Angels don’t get married and have kids, right? Because there’s no reason to, right? There’s no reason to.

There’s a little deeper level of theology here in that you see that here the gift of marriage. The gift of marriage and the gift of family and the gift of children, here Jesus is seeing that as part of God’s response to the fall, God’s response to death coming into the world. He’s not saying, and the reason this point is important is that he is not saying that there’s something wrong with marriage or procreation or any of that. He’s not saying there’s something wrong with that, by saying, “Oh, that’s for this age, the next age is going to be better because we’re not going to have that,” because there’s something bad about it or lesser about it.

He’s saying it is a good thing. It is a good thing that God has given us to help us counter the effects of sin that we brought on ourselves. Which is death. Which is death. So it is a good thing, but it is a good thing that will become unnecessary in the age to come.

Then he continues:

But even Moses showed in the burning bush passage

I like how they did this in the Orthodox study Bible, “in the burning bush passage”, you’ll notice the words “burning” and “passage” are in italics. When you see a word in italics, that means it isn’t in the original. That means they added it in their translation. Something to keep in mind. What literally he says is “he showed in the bush”. Now, that is what Jesus was trying to communicate, right? Remember, they didn’t have chapters of verses, so he could say, read Exodus 13 verse… Right? He couldn’t say that because those breakdowns didn’t exist.

So when he says “Moses showed in the bush”, he’s referring that back to the story of the burning bush. So the “burning bush passage” or the “story of the burning bush” is what he’s getting at here.

But even Moses showed in the burning bush passage that the dead are raised, when he called the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’  For He is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him.”

Why does he say but even Moses? Because it’s the Torah, because that’s all their Sadducees accept. So he one betters them. He not only explains why they’re wrong, but he says the resurrection isn’t just something that showed up later. It’s there in the Torah. It’s there. Moses himself. Because what does he call God? God is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He doesn’t say, “I was the God of Abraham, I was the God of Isaac, I was the God of Jacob in the past when they were alive.” He says, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”

Interlocutor: So meaning that they still live.

Fr. Stephen: They still live as far as God is concerned. And he points out God is the God, not of the dead, but of the living. What does that mean? Well, what did we just say? What did we just say about marriage? Marriage and procreation are part of God’s response to death coming into the world. God is not the one who brought death into the world. We, through our sin, have brought death into the world. God is the God who gives life, who gave life to the world originally and who gives us life now.

Therefore, God is a God of what? Resurrection. By definition, he’s a God who gives life, right? Who brings life out of death, who brings good out of evil. That’s who God is. And you notice their response then.

Then some of the scribes

Now notice, it’s the scribes. It doesn’t say some of the Sadducees who ask the question. “Then some of the scribes”, or these are the Pharisees, they do believe in the resurrection.

Then some of the scribes answered and said, “Teacher, You have spoken well.”

See, he’s on our side.

But after that they dared not question Him anymore.

So they said, “That was a good one, Jesus, but I don’t think we should ask him any more questions.”  The last few attempts have not gone so well for them, have not worked out the way they planned.

Interlocutor: I’d like to ask a question, going back a little bit. It says in verse 35, “But those who are counted worthy.” Meaning he’s talking about the resurrection?

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s talking about the people who enter into the age to come.

Interlocutor: But that doesn’t mean we’re all going to enter into the age to come.

Fr. Stephen: We’re not going to enter into the life of the world to come. To quote the creed.

Interlocutor: OK, if you are not counted worthy, then we assume your soul is dead.

Fr. Stephen: That counted worthy is a reference to the judgment, because the judgment comes first, right? Remember the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, there are those who go to life and those who go to condemnation. So he’s saying those who are counted worthy to go to receive the life of the world to come are not going to marry and be given in marriage.

Interlocutor: So when we say it is in hope of the resurrection that we may be resurrected?

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s describing what that is going to be like for those who enter into it. Not everyone will.

Interlocutor: That’s what I’m saying not everyone will be counted worthy, so they will remain in in sin and their souls will be destroyed.

Fr. Stephen: Well, they will be under condemnation. As we’ll see later, Jesus talks about the resurrection of life and the resurrection of condemnation. Actually, the language is going to be used later of eternal life and eternal death. Well, what does eternal death mean? We tend to think about death… well you die and you’re dead. So then what would eternal death mean? Well, we can’t really wrap our head around it. We probably don’t want to know what that means. I don’t want that, whatever that ends up being in terms of the details.

Now, this is a very important passage also for a couple of reasons theologically. One, apologetically, some of our Christian friends who don’t necessarily believe in the communion of saints the way we do, they will say about saints if we ask a saint to pray for us. We ask St. George to pray for us. We ask the Theotokos to pray for us. They’ll say, “Well, they’re dead. How can they pray for you? They’re dead.”

You usually get that argument where if you try to make the comparison, like they may say, well, why do you ask the saints to pray for you? Well, first they’ll say, Why do you pray to saints? You think they have magic powers. But you say, we’re asking the saints to pray for us. We’re asking for their intercessions. And you say, well, it’s like if you go and ask your pastor to pray for you, or you go and ask your friends to pray for you, right? You don’t think they have magic powers, right? You don’t think if you get enough people, you’re going to change God’s mind, right?

But we support one another in prayer. And so it’s the same thing with the saints. Then they usually say, “Yeah, but your pastor and your friends are alive and the saints are dead”. Well, if you read this passage carefully, Jesus pretty clearly says here that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which would be three of the saints, are not dead. Are not dead. They’re alive. They’re alive to God. So this is a good place to take people, to show them where in the scriptures they can find that.

The other thing that’s important, though, is the point that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. God is not a God who brings death and destruction. Most people wouldn’t say that he is directly. But when a disaster happens, when something horrible happens, you will frequently see, “Well, why did God let this happen? Why did God let this happen?” If not, “Why did God do this?” Natural disaster, this and that? Why let these things happen? This is when you hear from atheists, when you hear from people, not just sort of your militant atheist arguing on the Internet types, but people who have legitimately sort of lost their faith, who at one point consider themselves Christian and now do not legitimately, this is what you’ll usually hear from them. “Well, there’s so much evil and so much suffering and so many horrible things in the world, I just can’t believe there’s a God anymore. Or if there is a God and he let all these things happen, I don’t know that I could worship him.” Because they’re viewing, what? They’ve kind of got john Calvin whispering in their ear from the 16th century says, God predestined everything that happens, right? So if something happens, God did it, God did it.

This isn’t, of course, the teaching of the church, and I don’t think it’s the teaching of Scripture here. I think the clear teaching of Scripture is that not only does God do things, but human beings who are created in the image of God also do things. They’re moral agents. They cause things to happen in the world. God is not the sole cause of everything that happens in the world. If he was, the world would be a much better place. In the Garden of Eden, when God created the world, God was the sole cause of everything that happened. Everything that existed at that point was created by God and was created good. Adam and Eve made in the image of God, then were also able to act and were also able to bring things into the world. And by their actions, they brought sin, evil, death, corruption into the world. And what we see throughout the scriptures from that point, is God acting as here with marriage and procreation. God acting to counter the evil and the wickedness that human beings are committing.

When you look at the Flood Story, if you start in Genesis 5 instead of Genesis 6, everybody starts with Genesis 6:1. But if you start in Genesis 5, in the genealogy, people get bored when you start saying “begat” more than three times. But if you start in the genealogy, when Noah is born, his father prophesized about him, that God is going to save the Earth, the land, he’s going to save the world through Noah. If you start with that, that makes the story of the Flood a very different story. If you start with Genesis 6, it’s very easy to present the story as people were doing bad stuff and God got mad and wiped them all out, right?

And by the way, if you read the pagan versions of the Flood myths, that’s what they all are. Some of them are kind of silly about it. In one of them with Atrahasis, the gods are mad because human beings are making too much noise and so they wipe them all out. But it’s all basically some God got mad at human beings and decided to wipe them all out. And they take that reading of Genesis 6. But if what’s going on is what was prophesied in Genesis 5, that God is saving the world through Noah, what is he saving the world from? Evil. Evil, but in particular human beings. He’s saving his creation. That’s why Noah takes animals on the ark. God is saving his good creation from the wickedness that human beings were committing upon the earth. And we see that again and again all the way through.

All the way… I mean through the end of Genesis in the story of Joseph, right, his brothers are wicked and jealous. They throw him down a well. They debate killing him and then sell him into slavery. He goes into slavery in Egypt. He has this woman tried to commit adultery with him when he won’t sleep with her. She claims he raped her. Has him thrown in prison, he’s thrown in a dungeon facing execution. And what does God do? God acts miraculously by giving Joseph dreams and the interpretation of dreams to bring him to the forefront of the Egyptian government so that he can save his family from the famine that’s coming in Canaan.

And Joseph says at the end to his brothers, “You meant it to me for evil, but God meant it for good.” Not saying, “You didn’t do this, God did this.” He’s not saying, “God sold me into slavery. God threw me down a well. God did all these things,” right? No, he’s saying, “You were trying to do evil to me. You were trying to kill me. You folks were all trying to do these evil things to me. But God took that and turned it around and blessed all of you through it and brought life out of it because he saved you from that family.” That is how God is presented in the Scriptures. He’s the God of the living. He’s the God who gives life in the face of death and his human beings who bring death and destruction and evil into the world.

That’s going to be very important, later on in the Gospel of John, when Jesus is speaking to Pontius Pilate, Pontius Pilate asks him if he’s a king. He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” People usually stop there, but the rest of the sentence is, “If my kingdom were of this world, my disciples would take up arms to defend me.” Why? Kings of this world, how do they rule? Through violence, right? Through inflicting pain, suffering, death, right? That’s how they wield their power. That’s not how Jesus wields his power in his kingdom because Jesus is the God of the Bible. So this is a very important, very important point. God is the one who was there in the midst of our sinfulness, in the midst of our evil, to give us forgiveness, life, healing, he continuously offers himself to us and offers his life to us, for us to share. He is not the one who’s bringing about the death and destruction and chaos and evil.

So now they don’t have any questions left for Jesus or they think better of asking them if they do. So now Jesus decides to ask them a question.

And He said to them, “How can they say that the Christ is the Son of David?”

We’ve seen already in St. Luke’s Gospel, son of David is one of the terms for the Messiah, right? Because the Messiah is the anointed king. He’s the Son of David, he says how could they call him the Son of David?

Now David himself said in the Book of Psalms:

‘The LORD said to my Lord,

“Sit at My right hand,

Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”’

Therefore David calls Him ‘Lord’; how is He then his Son?”

The Messiah is his descendant, right? A father is greater than his son, right? More worthy of honor in their thinking. Well, if this is his descendant, David is this great king. He’s the founder of the royal lineage, right? So if this is his descendant down here, if David is the paradigm. Why is he calling this descendant of his Lord? So Jesus, by asking this question, is again pointing to who he is, because there’s only one possible answer. There’s only one possible answer, and that’s that the Messiah is divine.

You’ll notice no one responds. He throws this question out. He’s got scribes there, he’s got Sadducees there, he’s got crowds of people there. He throws this question out. And as far as we can tell in St. Luke’s Gospel, there’s crickets off in the background.

Then, in the hearing of all the people, He said to His disciples,

Now notice there’s a “then”. So this is Jesus’s response to no one answering the question.

He said to His disciples, “Beware of the scribes, who desire to go around in long robes, love greetings in the marketplaces, the best seats in the synagogues, and the best places at feasts, who devour widowsí houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation.”

Now, not only is he saying that all the scribes are still there, remember, the scribes are the ones who gave him an “attaboy”. Remember, just a minute ago, Sadducees came with this question, right? Jesus corrected them. The scribes were like, “All right, slow clap. That’s right. You’re on our side.” And then Jesus asked him this question. They all kind of go and he turns to his disciples and says, “Beware of these guys. Because they go around arrogantly making this pretense of religion, but they’re as wicked as they come.” So Jesus just really wasn’t trying to make friends. He really didn’t have a good pastoral attitude about the scribes.