The End of History
The End of History*
“Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question.” Wait, no resurrection? Isn’t that pretty basic in Judeo-Christian belief. Not always. The Sadducees were the religious faction of priests and their supporters for whom right worship in the Jerusalem Temple was the highest priority of Judaism. Offer the sacrifices commanded by Moses and let the priests mediate between you and God until God decided to act decisively on behalf of the Jewish people. Worship and wait.
Note that I said the sacrifices commanded by Moses, who was believed to have authored the first five books of theirs, and our, Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Sadducees considered only those five books of Moses to be authoritative for the people of Israel. And in those early books, there is no direct mention of an afterlife. The Pharisees come in for some criticism in the New Testament. But since they considered the later prophets to also be the revelation of God, and some of those prophets did speak of a resurrection, then they agreed with Jesus. But as far as the Sadducees were concerned, those writings didn’t count, only the Torah, therefore no afterlife, no resurrection.
So they present Jesus with an absurd hypothetical, the custom of levirate marriage, which was almost certainly not practiced in Jesus’s time. But if anyone would remember something that Moses wrote, it would be the Sadducees. How absurd it would be to have a resurrected world in which this poor woman would be an adulteress six times over, especially after having been “given in marriage” seven times, never with her consent (only women were “given in marriage).
But what if you believed that God had made us from the dust of the earth and then breathed life into us, and that once we stopped breathing that life went back to God, so that this one wild and precious life was God’s gift on loan? The children of one’s blood and name would be the one and only way that we could live on, not vicariously, as we wouldn’t be around to experience it, but at least as a hope as we went to sleep with our fathers and mothers, the way of all flesh.
But Jesus slaps the Sadducees with two arguments. First, a resurrected body like that of Jesus will not die again. So, we don’t have to reproduce as a matter of survival. We will no longer have that compulsion of fear to avoid death at all costs. And also, while we will certainly be reunited with our loved ones, there no longer be a need for exclusive relationships on which we learn to love others by loving the one person to whom we commit ourselves “until we are parted by death.” Before God we will all love God and be loved by God equally. And before God, we will all love each other equally. No one will be “given” to another.
Then, Jesus throws the Torah right back at the Sadducees, by quoting Moses in Exodus when God says, through the burning bush, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” all three of whom God promised innumerable descendants, and that through them all the peoples of this earth will be blessed. How can God keep that promise to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, unless God still remembers them, unless to God they are still alive, still waiting in the hope of the resurrection, as are we all?
Humans are a historical species. We tell stories of our past, spoken, written, chiseled, in the hope that they will be told by successive generations, and in that telling and reading and seeing, resist nothingness. Most of our histories are stories of love, of sacrifice and those are good stories. Others are the myths we create when the actual histories are not so positive, but we can’t go back and change them. Our histories are also legacies, inheritances that sometimes lift us up and other times weigh us down. Families, nations, it’s all the same.
But to those seek to live in the truth of the God who made us, and loves us no matter what, then all our histories have the same end: resurrection. For to God, we all live.
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* An allusion to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Let the reader understand.
The 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 27, Year C, November 9th, 2025
The Rev. David Kendrick