From the Lectionary for 9 November 2025 (Proper 27C)

Luke 20:27-38 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”

~

"The Sadducees had couched their question ironically, within a familiar [1st century] backdrop. Jesus, in reply, gives as his example of the Scriptures and the power of God the story of Moses and the Bush from the book of Exodus, where God says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Jesus' point is that for God who knows not death, those people, long dead in terms of the supposed historical chronology of Moses' life, were alive. If they were alive to God, contaminated as it were with God's utter aliveness, held in presence by one whose presence is beyond time, then they are alive. It's God's aliveness that counts in understanding all these things."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pg. 165

~

"So when, earlier, Jesus had said to the Sadducees that they didn't understand the power of God [...], now we begin to understand what this power might consist in. Jesus isn't talking about some special power to do something miraculous, like raising someone from the dead. Rather he's giving an indication of the sort of power which characterizes God, something of the quality of who God is. This ‘power’, this quality which God always is, is that of being completely and entirely alive, living without any reference to death.

"There is no death in God. God has nothing to do with death, and for that reason facts which are obvious to us, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob having been long dead at the time of Moses, simply do not exist for God. Let's put this another way: for us ‘being alive’ means ‘not being dead’; it's a reality which is circumscribed by its opposite. For God this is simply not the case. For God being alive has nothing to do with death, and cannot even be contrasted with death."

- James Alison, Raising Abel, pg. 38

~

"“Because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” [v.36] Now that simply sounds as though he's saying something, it doesn't actually sound like an argument. I think that it's worth trying to bring out some of the heft of what is behind that, because it's a difficult thing. He's suggesting that in this age marrying and giving marriage is for the production of offspring and that's perfectly fine, but the age to come, the resurrection, works on an entirely different principle. The resurrection is not something that happens to dead people. It's a form of being alive that God has already begun in some people before they are dead, and once they're dead they become alive in the resurrection. In other words, the driving force, if you like, between their being alive comes from God and that can start now.

"The same was hinted at when Jesus told the disciples to rejoice not that the evil spirits obeyed them but that their name was written in heaven. The notion of the name being written in heaven means that the driving force of who you are is something that is coming from elsewhere and turning you into a witness to it, rather than you being started from here and becoming a simple reproduction of a system going on indefinitely.

"So it's the driving points that are different. So having suggested that what's important here is not whether your driving point is the reproductive one but whether your driving point is the one from heaven who has as it were brought you into being and turned you into a witness to it's presence in the world during your life. In which case your marital status is neither here nor there, it's part of your relationship to other people that has reproduced God's original Adam and or Eve as one person. You're going back to a zero point, an Omega point before creation, that's what's being brought into being.

[...]

"In other words, the resurrection is God's life, it's the utter livingness the effervescence of Life of God which here on Earth turns people into Sons and Daughters, inviting them to share in God's life. It's a logical thing, it's not to do with “Am I Immortal?” It's “Is my name written in heaven?” In which case I am being brought into Life by the utterly living effervescent God.

"I want to bring this up because it's important for us. So many of us have an understanding of immortality, the resurrection, eternal life, as things which start from here: “Is there something Immortal in me and am I going to last forever?” Whereas it's quite clear from Jesus's understanding that none of this starts from here. The whole point of God is that the utter effervescence and aliveness of God - everything starts from there. And we are, if you like, dialogically called into it. We are being created, started from above, given a name from above, so that our flesh becomes the life of a son and daughter of God in the midst of this age but not run by this age.

"That's his picture: we are started from elsewhere. And this elsewhere is utterly alive, which is why we don't need to be frightened of death and its consequences. The starting, being started, from elsewhere, so difficult for modern individualists to understand, and something which of course was disconcerting to people who want a very stable social order, one above all where unhelpful things like hope are not encouraged lest it leads to uprisings and changes to the social order, which of course carried on happening in the immediate aftermath of Jesus's life, as we all know, with relation to Jerusalem and the Romans. But the utterly alive Life Of God, starting us from elsewhere, is what we are being summoned into."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLXqZiV7o4w)

[Source of quotes from Jesus the Forgiving Victim and Raising Abel, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper27c/]