(The Message)
27-33 Some Sadducees came up. This is the Jewish party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, “Teacher, Moses wrote us that if a man dies and leaves a wife but no child, his brother is obligated to take the widow to wife and get her with child. Well, there once were seven brothers. The first took a wife. He died childless. The second married her and died, then the third, and eventually all seven had their turn, but no child. After all that, the wife died. That wife, now—in the resurrection whose wife is she? All seven married her.”
34-38 Jesus said, “Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. Even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at the burning bush, saying, ‘God: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob!’ God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living. To him all are alive.”
Jesus is running up against - again - the religious who were of a different kingdom. They didn’t want him to be the final answer; they wanted to be the final answer. They wanted to keep God in the box of their own making, so God would not ask of them more than they were willing to give. Jesus didn’t fit in their Kingdom! He also didn’t answer their question because it was a worthless question. He reminded them that God has to do with life. not death. And we are to be to.
As was Mother Teresa, who didn’t fit for the ‘religious’ man who spoke these words when confronted with the possibility that Mother Teresa was close to what Jesus taught.
“Someone should tell Mother Teresa about triage. In battle the medics don’t work on what they judge to be hopeless cases. They work on the ones who have a chance to make it. Mother Teresa is impractical. Think how much better it would be if she helped people who were going to live and taught them a skill that would enable them to earn a living and maybe even help others. She needs some business training.”
The Kingdom of God as seen in Jesus
(and those who follow him) is impractical.
Yet it is what Jesus was all about and what
we are to be all about -
being merciful as our God is merciful!
Prayer thought for the week: “Lord, help me to live in the right kingdom - your Kingdom on earth!”
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