“Answer the question, and nothing but the question.” That’s the advice I received a few years ago when preparing for the General Ordination Exams. These exams, known as the GOEs and dreaded by many a seminarian, are 21 hours worth of required proficiency exams that must be taken by all candidates for ordination in the Episcopal Church. They cover six subject areas, and you are either deemed “proficient” or “not proficient” in each area, based on the assessment of the General Board of Examining Chaplains.
Because these exams are open resource exams, the particular challenge is not to go down rabbit holes. The objective is to answer the question thoughtfully and directly. “Answer the question, and nothing but the question.”
Well, that’s not bad advice if it means delivering a succinct, theologically sound response to the question prompt and not writing down everything you know just to prove how smart you are. The problem is that the exam questions are inevitably little more than fictional thought experiments.
For instance, trying to devise a funeral liturgy for a deceased stock character from an anonymous American town can be rather hard to do. There’s no experience with that person that can inform a pastoral liturgical response. In your head, you know the person doesn’t really exist, and pretending like he or she does feels phony. The test-taker can be left wondering just how such ethereal theologizing in a Word document relates to a real-life situation in a parish. You get the drift, I suppose.
As it turns out, I happen to think the General Ordination Exams are crucial to demanding some theological rigor from future priests. But theological speculation on paper in the form of an exam is most definitely not reality. And at the end of the day, the point of theology is to speak convincingly about God’s activity in particular human lives, not in the lives of invented characters. I’m reminded of a bit of advice I received from a seminary professor in a preaching class. You can wax eloquently about theological concepts until the cows come home, but at some point, the wheels have to touch the ground.*
Answering the question and nothing but the question doesn’t seem to be Jesus’ forte, though. His encounter with the Sadducees in St. Luke’s Gospel is the third in a series of encounters with opponents who are posing GOE-style questions. In the first question, earlier in chapter 20, Jesus has been teaching in the Jerusalem temple, and the chief priests and scribes confront him: “By what authority are you doing these things?” Translation: Who does this guy think he is? And Jesus fails to answer the question. Instead, he responds with his own perplexing query about the nature of John’s baptism. So far, he’s not doing so hot. And in the second question, Jesus must answer whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not. He responds with a rather oblique answer: “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Okay, Jesus, could you elaborate just a bit more?
So far, Jesus is not answering the question, and nothing but the question. And by the third question, Jesus is in “not-proficient” territory. Here, the Sadducees offer a ludicrous hypothetical scenario in which the six brothers of a deceased man, in succession, take his widow as their wife according to the ancient custom of levirate marriage based in the Torah. Each brother died without an heir, and finally the widow dies. The issue is this: whose wife will the woman be in the resurrection?
Now, this is both a trick question (like all the others), as well as a cheap dig at belief in the resurrection. And Jesus, in his usual fashion, doesn’t really answer the question as much as he offers a theological corrective to the question itself. (This, by the way, is precisely what you don’t want to do when taking the GOEs.) Jesus shows himself not-proficient in the hypothetical world of exam questions because for Jesus, talking about God is all about the wheels touching the ground.
And the preposterous question levied by the Sadducees is not intended to touch the ground. It’s intended to make the resurrection of the dead seem foolish. But if we probe more deeply into a world that contains no hope of resurrection life, we see precisely why we need the wheels to touch the ground. And it’s because real human lives are at stake.
Tragically and shamefully, the widow in the Sadducees’ question has been dehumanized. The background of levirate marriage ostensibly provided protection in the form of a husband for a widow, who was a vulnerable member of ancient society. But in the Sadducees’ imagined scenario, the widow in question is objectified and viewed as nothing more than the property of her husbands.
To those who did not believe in the hope of the resurrection, you could only live on after death through your progeny. The widow was thus passed around from brother to brother, as you might hand down a piece of land, in the hopes that she would produce an heir. And she became the coveted means by which a man’s legacy could endure through successive generations.
If you rejected the resurrection of the dead, material goods, wealth, and the mammon of this world, bequeathed from generation to generation, would be the only posthumous testament of an earthly life. Perhaps in the future faces of the progeny of a patriarch, one might hope to see a visible, living example of his memory. And for some, I imagine that was better news than for others.
But Jesus throws a wrench in the cogs of this lifeless mechanism of human greed and materialism. By refusing to directly answer the Sadducees’ question, he refuses to legitimize the sinful structures of a culture that views women as property and life as nothing more than earthly existence. Jesus may not answer the question as it is posed, but he renders a testament to the power of resurrection life, where the wheels really do touch the ground, because human lives themselves are in question. In Jesus we find the ultimate source of freedom that breaks the vicious cycle of sin and death. In Jesus, God’s wheels touch the ground.
Resurrection life is the gift of a God who is God of the living and not of the dead. In that life, no person is the possession of another human being, but each is a beloved child of God. In that world, people don’t live on in surname and in wealth but continue to live in bodies that are changed according to the glory of God. Those who are worthy of a place in that age to come, where true life exists, are utterly free because they are not constrained by blood lineage to perpetuate their existence or by oppressive human constructions. They are like angels, and they are children of God, not slaves to the corrupt powers of this world.
But while the Sadducees’ question to Jesus was a theological thought experiment unworthy even of an answer, is their resurrection-denying worldview still only a thought experiment in our current world? If theological integrity demands that the wheels of God’s grace must touch the ground fully, shouldn’t we at least acknowledge that we live in an age full of people who really do not believe in a resurrection of the dead? And I’m not talking only about people of religions that hold no concept of the resurrection. I’m talking also about purported Christians who give verbal assent to resurrection life and yet who live as if earthly death were the end of the story.
Ironically, while we live in an age that is terrified of death, it is an age often deeply allied with death because it refuses to acknowledge what the hope of resurrection life really is. Look around and witness the objectifying of human beings on a daily basis: staggering numbers in the reports of abuse and victimization, human trafficking, and people locked in cages and treated as disposable property. It’s a reality. Whose children will all these people be in the resurrection? We can only pray for resurrection life where they will live freely as children of God, especially when they have been separated from their biological families or abused by their own kin.
And as youth in our Connect formation class have recently learned, in prisons across this nation, millions of people are viewed as incapable of second, third, or even first chances. Lock them up, and pretend they don’t exist is the order of the day. What kind of real resurrection belief holds that new life isn’t possible or that Jesus didn’t come to free people from their sins and offer them forgiveness?
But, thanks be to God, resurrection is also tied to God’s justice. If resurrection is nothing more than the sustained memory of a human life distorted by sin, then resurrection is nothing more than a perpetuation of evil. But we believe that the wheels of God’s justice have touched the ground in Christ. The resurrection age, far from being just an ethereal concept of a future time impinges on this age, too, so that human sin and death do not have the last word.
The widow of seven husbands was a stock character in a thought experiment by some Sadducees out to trick Jesus. She was tossed about from husband to husband because she was considered little more than an ancestral commodity. And tragically, she represents so many children of God who have been and continue to be demeaned by a world that is oriented more towards death than resurrection life.
There will be plenty of people who try to weaken your hope in resurrection life. They will scoff at your belief or denigrate it with ungracious questions like those the Sadducees lobbed at Jesus. Don’t let them succeed. Don’t let anyone take away your resurrection hope. The reason that belief in the resurrection is so much more than a hypothetical exam question is that the answer to the question is a matter of life and death. If the wheels of God’s mercy and compassion are on the ground, then fallen humanity is capable of redemption, and death is not the end of the story.
So, here’s the question, and it calls for an answer to the question and nothing but the question: in the resurrection, whose children will the marginalized, the poor, the lonely, the abandoned, the faceless, the persecuted be? Whose children will we be? And the answer, and nothing but the answer based on Christian hope, is that we will be the resurrected children of God.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
10 November 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
*with gratitude to the Rev. Dr. Frank Wade for this image