Trick Questions

Scripture:

Job 19:23-37

Luke 20:27-28 

 

Preached 11/10/2013                                                             

Remember a few weeks ago when there was a pop quiz?  Well, you might want to get used to that happening occasionally.  This time, brace yourselves.  It’s math related.  I’ll give you a math problem, and you figure out the answer as quickly as you can. It’s a two question test.  First one. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.  The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.  How much does the ball cost?

What was your instinctive answer? I’m guessing it may have been that the ball costs 10 cents.  That can’t be right though, can it?  The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.  So, if the ball costs 10 cents, and the bat is $1.00 more, the bat would cost $1.10, and our total would be $1.20 rather than the $1.10 it’s supposed to be.  So, the right answer is that the ball costs 5 cents.

Let’s try it again, with a different problem.  It takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets.  How long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?  The right answer is 5, but the setup of the question tempts you to say 100.  Be honest- were you tempted to say 100?  Did it at least come up in your mind, even if you later dismissed it?

Trick questions are the worst, aren’t they?  They set you up so carefully, just so you fall into their little trap.  I’m pretty sure this is what the Sadducees thought they were doing to Jesus.  They had been trying to trap Jesus into saying something wrong for a while, and now, with their question on marriage and the resurrection, they thought they’d finally done it.  It was a carefully crafted question.  The Sadducees were Jewish scholars, and were also literalists.  If it wasn’t written in the Torah—basically what we call the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament—the Sadducees didn’t believe it.  And, not seeing any reference to a resurrection in the Torah, the Sadducees didn’t believe in it.  They thought it was absurd.  And, with their carefully crafted question, they sought to make Jesus look absurd too.

I keep imagining them coming up with the question in the first place.  In my head, they’re all sitting around a table, looking a little sinister.  They’re throwing out the most absurd things they can think of, and laughing as the absurdity grows.  And this question they finally land on—with the woman marrying seven brothers while remaining childless—clearly took some effort.  The woman could have married two or three brothers, but no, they had to go with seven.  The traditional number of perfection and completion.  And, in their heads, they had the perfect, complete best trick question that would finally show Jesus to be as absurd as they thought he, and his beliefs and teachings were.

 And I keep imagining them, after landing on this perfect question, snickering as they go to find Jesus in their little group.  And I have a hard time believing that the Sadducee who actually asked the question did it with a straight face.  Maybe he was smirking the whole time, or he had to get the last part of it out between giggles.  And I imagine the very pregnant pause before Jesus began his response, with the expectation and the giggles of the Sadducees growing inside them.

And then, Jesus answers.  And, much to their dismay, he doesn’t fall into the trap.  In fact, he pretty much dismisses the question they so carefully crafted and delivered.  Rather than being stuck i as they so hoped, Jesus gives a brilliant answer, even poking some fun at the Sadducees his reference to resurrection from the Torah.  It ends up being the Sadducees who get caught in the trick, not Jesus.  How did this happen?

Well, first, the Sadducees wanted a very simple answer to their question.  If life after death exists, they asked, tell us what it looks like, in relation to this specific marriage thing.  It’s still a question we ask today—not the marriage part specifically but what life after death looks like.  I did a quick Google search for images of heaven, and thousands and thousands of images popped up.  What does heaven look like?  Well, maybe it’s a golden city, like the cities we know today.  Maybe it’s choirs of angels, who look a whole lot like people with wings on them.  Maybe heaven is a floating city, or a garden.  Maybe it’s all kinds of strange things, or maybe it’s something very familiar.  Or, as an Iowan I can’t resist saying—maybe it looks like a baseball diamond in the middle of a corn field.

But do you catch something similar in all those images, and in all our concepts?  When we’re trying to figure out heaven, we do the same thing that the Sadducees did.  We fall into the same trap.  We try to take the things we understand—so the Levirate marriage in the case of the Sadducees, or perhaps cities, gardens, or baseball in our case—and we then attempt to make God’s reality fit around our own concepts.  We try to insist on a simple, relatable answer.

And then, Jesus and his wisdom come along, and remind us that the simple answer isn’t the right one.  Think back on Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees’ question.  It definitely isn’t simple.   Jesus doesn’t really tell the Sadducees what the resurrection will actually be like.  He tells them that there won’t be marriage, or death, as we understand them.  And there will be people who were dead, now raised, and now alive to God.  He doesn’t say how it works or what it looks like.  His answer is not simple.  It doesn’t make for a cute answer to a riddle like the Sadducees wanted.  It doesn’t exactly make for an easy to picture pretty image either.  I Googled these specific verses too and mostly got random pictures of cats, soccer, and Japanese cartoons.

 To those of us who like things to be explained clearly and wrapped up simply and neatly, Jesus’ answer isn’t very satisfying, at least at first.  But here’s what I’ve come to realize, in my week of wrestling with this text.  Even if Jesus’ answer doesn’t give us an easy to see visual, or a simple to understand explanation, it does give us something a lot more real.  Because, honestly, when is anything in real life easy and neat?  When is the easiest option the best?  Reality is messy and complicated, and only when we fall into the same trap that the Sadducees did can we be fooled into thinking that easy and neat will be the perfect answer. 

We’re living this messy and complicated reality right now, as a congregation.  That’s part of why we’re going through the New Beginnings meetings now.  And if you missed that, that’s my subtle push for you to sign up and go to those meetings.  We’re doing these meetings because your session leadership has realized that the simple questions and the simple answers aren’t right for us any more.  Doing what we’ve always done isn’t going to get us where we want to go.  And the methods we’ve tried in the past—those house meetings and the mission study—didn’t let us explore our current, messy reality in the way we need to do now if we’re going to figure out that future life thing.  New Beginnings is a way that we, as a congregation are following Jesus’ example and refusing to get caught in the trap that insists on simple answers to life’s questions.

We clearly don’t want to die as a church, or we wouldn’t be here this morning.  And New Beginnings is giving us a chance at new life together, perhaps resurrected life, the kind of life where we as a church are reinvigorated, changed, and moved to a fuller and more vibrant connection to one another, our neighbors, and to God. 

Jesus doesn’t give us a very clear picture of what resurrected life looks like.  And honestly, I like that.  I like that he leaves open the possibility that it looks different for everyone, and that it’s dynamic and changing. So, with New Beginnings, we have a chance to figure out what we want resurrected life to look like, here and now.  We get to take an honest look at where we are, who we are, and where we want to go.  And, just like Jesus leaves our imaginations open to wild and wonderful possibilities, New Beginnings is designed to open up bigger and bolder things for this congregation.

I know I’m not going to get all of you to go to the meetings, and that’s okay.  Thank you to those of you who are.  And to those who aren’t, please pray for your sisters and brothers in faith who are.  Because they’re going to be doing some hard, messy, and very faithful discernment work on behalf of us all.  We won’t find easy answers to the questions we’re asking.  It’s not going to be easy to figure out what we want our resurrected life as a congregation to look like.  We’re working hard to avoid falling into the trap the Sadducees did, and insisting that there’s an easy answer with the work already done.

And we’re actually working hard to be more like Job.  I know, it sounds kind of strange.  Job has had a whole lot of awful things happen to him, and he’s in a hard place in his life.  That’s not what we’re going after though.  The Sadducees saw resurrected life as something very simple, and also far away.  However, Job sees resurrected life as very complicated, but also very near.  Job sees the current situation very clearly, and yet has faith in redemption, and in seeing the face of God, even in his destroyed flesh.  That’s what we are called to emulate.  Trusting in redemption, resurrection, and hope even when the answers don’t come easily and the work is hard.  So may we all stay out of the trick of the easy answer, and find the beauty in the hard work.  Because there too, like Job so certainly believes, we can certainly believe we will see the face of God together.