Luke 20:27-40
November 9, 2025
If you have ever been to a concert where the music was great, the performance was outstanding, and the people in the audience were really into it – singing along with some songs and just having a fun time; then you know that feeling you get as you see the musicians walk off the stage, wishing the concert did not have to end. Oh, but wait, the musicians are coming back on to the stage to do a few more songs. There’s more to come as the band is going to do an encore performance. This will be awesome. Or remember when you were growing up on Christmas you opened your presents and as you looked at the tree with wrapping paper all around, the moment came when it appeared as though there were no more gifts. You’re a little disappointed, because you don’t want it to be over. Oh, but wait, your parents are bringing in a few more presents that they had hidden. There’s more to come, how exciting.
In the verses leading up to our Gospel lesson for today, at the end of Luke 19, Jesus arrived in Jerusalem and went to the temple to worship, but instead He discovered that the temple had been turned into a business market, filled with people who were being dishonest in their businesses. Jesus walked in, flipped their tables over, and ran them out; and this started a series of confrontations between Jesus and the religious leaders of His day, known as Pharisees and Sadducees. Time and gain these religious leaders would ask Jesus a series of questions, hoping to trap Him into saying the wrong thing so that they could get the people to turn against Jesus and run Him out of the area. And that is precisely the scenario we see in our Gospel lesson as Jesus is confronted by a group of Sadducees.
Now the Sadducees were intelligent, old-school, hard-core religious leaders, who adhered strictly to ancient traditions and did not believe in any kind of life after death. They thought that this life was all there was. When you died that was it. There was no more to come. They did not believe that your soul would live in heaven after you died and they did not believe that our bodies would one day rise from the dead and be reunited with our souls. That’s sad, isn’t it. In fact, we even have a song that we teach our children here at our Open Arms child development center that is a wordplay on their name. We sing, “I don’t want to be a Sadducee, because they’re so sad, you see.” They have nothing to look forward to after death.
So these Sadducees approach Jesus with a question that is designed to destroy Jesus’ credibility. The purpose of their question, like some of the others in Luke 20, is to prevent them from having to change their views on the idea of life after death. The Sadducees knew there was a law that stated if a man was married and then died, the man’s brother was then obligated to marry the widow, so that she was cared for and to insure that the family line continued through having children. Now if the oldest brother could not fulfill this obligation, it was the next brother in line who took up this responsibility. So the Sadducees come up with a scenario to try to show how ridiculous the idea was of life after death by asking, “If a woman marries and her husband dies, and then she marries his brother and he dies, and then she marries the next brother and he dies, and this happens again and again with all 7 brothers in a family; well if there is life after death what will this poor woman do when she dies and meets all of the men she was married to in heaven?” This was not a serious question as the Sadducees were not looking for some new knowledge or understanding about the resurrection, they just wanted Jesus to look foolish by showing how ridiculous the idea of the resurrection of the dead really was to them.
But Jesus answers by explaining that they don’t understand what the resurrection is all about. Marriage is for this life, for a helpmate, companionship, and for having children to repopulate the earth. In the resurrection, no one dies, so there is no need to repopulate the earth. There are no children being born in heaven. In heaven, everyone will be a brother or a sister in Christ, so the companionship of a spouse won’t be needed. Life in heaven will be so different from this life that marriage won’t be needed anymore. Now the Bible tells us that we will know our loved ones in heaven and we will talk with them and rejoice together when we see them, but human relationships will be different. We don’t know exactly how it will be, but Jesus says that it will be more wonderful than we can imagine. The Sadducees tell this story to show how ridiculous the resurrection of the dead is, but I see it as just the opposite. I see it as showing us just how important it is to know that there is still more to come after this life.
Let’s imagine for a moment that this story is true. Put yourself in the woman’s position. She’s married, she had no children, and her husband dies. Imagine her grief and sadness. Anyone who’s lost a dearly beloved spouse knows that kind of grief. So she remarries, but it happens again. Her husband dies and she has no children. And then it happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Seven times. You know what she needs? She needs hope. She needs to know that this life is not the end, there is more to come. She needs to know that there is life in heaven after we die, where our souls immediately go to heaven and we leave our bodies behind here on earth. But then there will be additional life – you could say life after life after death when Jesus returns to this earth someday and our bodies will rise out of the graves, whatever that grave may be – a casket, an urn, a container at the bottom of the ocean, or bones turned to dust in the desert, and our bodies will be transformed and reunited with our souls, and we will continue to live with Jesus forever. This woman needs to know that life after this life will be more wonderful than we can imagine, because for her this life was not that great.
She needs to see that Jesus will turn her losses into victories, and so do we, because we can get so wrapped up in our daily challenges, worrying about the bills, family members, work, school, schedules, and our own health that we find ourselves wondering at times, “It this it? Is this what life is all about?” That’s actually the Sadducee spirit swirling around in our hearts and minds. In our worries and busyness, we need to see Jesus showing up in our losses to turn them into victories. And He does. The resurrection is all about Jesus turning our losses into victories, our death into life, our sorrow into joy, our weakness into strength, and our futility into glory.
Many years ago I was working with a family as they mourned the death of a loved one who had spent a career in the Air Force. As we planned his memorial service, the family wanted to honor his military career while also making a witness to His faith in Jesus, namely that through Jesus this man lived and we would all seem him again someday in heaven. One family member wanted to have the Air Force song played at the service, but his wife said, “I don’t want to play a song in the service that begins with the words, ‘Off we go into the wild blue yonder.’” Another family member mentioned the playing of Taps at the end of the service. His wife liked that idea, but she said, “That song is beautiful, but it brings tears to peoples’ eyes. I want people to leave feeling hopeful, knowing that there is life in heaven after this life here on earth.” So I suggested doing something that Winston Churchill apparently had done at his funeral service. He had the British version of Taps played at the end of his service, followed by the playing of Reveille, a French word that means, “wake up.” The playing of Taps in the military signaled the end of the day and it was time to go to sleep. That would be very appropriate in a funeral service since Paul often described death in Scripture as sleep. But the playing of Reveille in the military was always done at the start of the day to indicate that it was time to get up. So playing Taps & Reveille would serve as a witness that as soon as a believer in Jesus closes their eyes in death, they immediately open them and wake up to a new life with Jesus. The family agreed and that’s what was done at the service.
Whenever we experience death, Jesus is there to tell us that there is more to come. There is life, there is life after death, and then there is life after life after death. And that is reason to hope, to rejoice, and to live life to its fullest right now, because there’s more to come.
