2025-11-09 Pentecost 22

Scripture Readings

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!

At this time of year, with Remembrance Day right around the corner, I often think about our soldiers and everything they went through as young men, many still teenagers. The Great War. World War II. The trenches. Combat. Good vs. Evil. You can watch war movies to get a glimpse of what they faced, but I think Hollywood’s best efforts and all the computer graphics in the world fall short of conveying the dark and horrific reality that war creates on earth. It is a machine that devours humanity on every level. Fear and outright terror abound at every turn. You can be attacked at any minute. Shot by enemy fire. Blown up and dismembered by enemy bombs and grenades. Diseases like scurvy, dysentery and typhus kill more people than bullets. Food shortages and starvation set in as people are forced to eat anything they can find from grass to pets. That’s just the physical stuff.

The psychological abyss is perhaps even a far worse plague. In the old days, the doctors called it being “Shell Shocked,” but we now know it as PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, a condition affecting at least 30% of all combat veterans, if not more. Then there’s the moral collapse as civilians on the enemy side are considered “collateral damage.” A drone operator in Nevada vaporizes a wedding party 7,000 miles away in the Middle East and then goes home to have dinner. Trillions of tax dollars are spent to facilitate this extreme darkness of conflict. The price of freedom? The cost of thwarting evil? In the end, war’s darkest reality is predictability. Every generation who lives to see such days always says “never again!” But the cycle always resets, for earth is truly full of poor, miserable sinners.

In the midst of all this heavy darkness, the light of the Gospel shines forth. The Lord has given us a true and glorious hope. The bright light of Christ our Saviour produces in His people a heavenly hope. And this hope stirs up in us joy in the midst of sorrow and perseverance amid suffering. Heavenly hope produces patience and endurance as we all encounter battles of various kinds. When we are smack dab in the middle of these kinds of suffering and difficulties, our prayer is almost always directed towards God’s Divinity and asking for miracles and deliverance from the suffering. Make it all go away, Lord! Take away the war. Take away the disease. Deliver us from the afflictions! And there is certainly nothing wrong with that. But perhaps our prayers would be even greater if we orientated them towards God’s humanity instead. Be with us as we suffer, Lord. Help us endure these difficulties. Be our Good Shepherd and lead us and guide as we walk through the valley of the shadow death.

This is how Jesus Himself handled the ultimate suffering of the cross. We remember our Lord’s words in the Garden of Gethsemane. “And going a little farther He fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (MT 26:39). Our Lord’s human nature will be subject to the divine nature of God. He will endure the dark suffering and shame of the cross because of the hope and light His sacrifice will bring. This is none other than the resurrection. The ultimate victory over sin, death and the devil was on display for all the world to see as the stone was rolled away.

This reality and this greatest moment in all human history is what grants all humanity a future and a bright hope. Christian hope is not some kind of buddhist-like immaterial eternity in a nebulous spiritual realm. Far from it. The Christian hope that we cling to is a reunion of body and spirit in a new, physical realm that is free from the shackles of sin and evil. Our Lord didn’t walk the way of sorrows to pave the way for some kind of consolation prize, leaving an irreparably broken, physical world behind. He came rather to make all things new and restore them to what He always intended them to be. When Jesus Ascended 40 days after Easter, He did so with body and soul together. This shows us what the future holds for us when we make our way out of this life - the exodus for all who trust and believe in Him.

Our scripture readings really hammer this point home for us today. The joy of the resurrection is what transforms suffering and gives us a heavenly focus to look forward to. In the Gospel reading, Jesus goes to battle with the Sadducees. We often hear about the Pharisees but who were the Sadducees? Well … they were so sad, you see?! Sorry. Who were they. They were the chief antagonists of Jesus along with the Pharisees. They claimed to be descendants of Solomon’s high priest Zadok (Ezek 40:46). You can hear the etimology from Zadok to Zadukee to Saducee. They rose up to be a prominent land-owning elite at the time of the Hasmonean revolt, featuring the one and only Juddas, the Hammer, Maccabaeus! A couple hundred years later at the time of our Lord’s ministry they dominated the priesthood and the Sanhedrin, a 71-member Jewish high court in Jerusalem (modeled on Moses’ 70 elders + leader). They became powerful and wealthy through Temple taxes and trade. For them, the Pentateuch alone was authoritative, the Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. And to this end, they rejected oral traditions and denied the resurrection, angels, spirits and any kind of afterlife. However, these Temple Aristocrats who hitched their wagon to Rome went the way of the dodo bird in 70AD. When the Temple fell, so did they.

It’s this group who comes to Jesus to harass Him about the resurrection. “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother” (LK 20:28). For you keeners, you can look this up in Deuteronomy 25:5-10 and learn all about the man who had his sandal pulled off! Suffice it to say, the brother of the widow was to take care of her and raise up a family with her to preserve the family lineage. So the Sadducees attack Jesus on this angle. There’s seven of these bros, and they each marry the widow but they all die before producing offspring. Then, they all die, including the poor widow, who has had to put up with seven husbands over her lifetime! “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?” (LK 20:33).

Of course, they are barking up the wrong tree. They’ve got the completely wrong take on things, including the teaching of Moses himself. Life in the resurrection will be the same but also very different. In the age to come, the reign of suffering and death and darkness and evil will be eradicated. Death will be no more. Earthly institutions like marriage won’t really be a thing as people become sons and daughters of God, unhindered by sin and equal to angels in the nearer presence to God Himself. “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. 38 Now He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him” (LK 20:37-38).

Resurrection. Eternal life. This is what it’s all about. This is our hope and light in our dark world. This is what we cling to when we have to face our battles and hardships. No matter what happens, Christ is Risen and life reigns. The Living God promises life for all who believe and are baptized. What comfort this brings us. We look forward with great joy to the day when “night will be no more. [And] they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Rev22:5). Glory be to the Living God Who fills us with the eternal hope of the resurrection, now and forever more. Amen!