November 9, 2025

On Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of people who are participating in “100 Days of Dante” a national program that engages readers with Dante’s Divine Comedy. For me, it was an opportunity to return to a text I knew well. When I was teaching, I participated every year in Interdisciplinary Humanities Programs that included at least the Inferno on the reading list for the Medieval semester. It’s an expansive and detailed vision of the afterlife, encompassing Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and peopled with figures from Italian history and Greek and Roman mythology. It’s also the story of Dante’s pilgrimage from a dark wood of uncertainty to eternal certitude.

While it is a great work of literature, it is also quite funny at times and very human. Wouldn’t you like to imagine where in hell you would put your enemies and how they would most appropriately be punished? That’s exactly what Dante did.

One topic we touched on briefly on Thursday was the way in which Dante’s vision of the afterlife influences our own. For example, how many of us imagine a hell in which unrepentant sinners are punished according to their desserts and the worse the sinner, the worse the punishment, and the closer to Satan. Similarly, do we imagine a heaven in which there is a hierarchy and the greater saints are closer to God, while we are further away?

I pose these questions because today’s gospel reading is all about our perceptions of the afterlife. But first, let me offer some context. There’s the context of Luke’s gospel. For many weeks now, we have been following Jesus on his long journey to Jerusalem. What the lectionary skips over now is his actual entry into the city, which we reenacted way back on Palm Sunday. Immediately after his entry, Jesus goes to the temple. Luke says that he spent every day teaching in the temple.

In fact, Luke recounts a series of encounters between Jesus and religious leaders in which Jesus is asked questions that seem intended to trap him. First, it’s the chief priests, scribes, and elders. Then Luke says they sent spies to trap him—that’s the question about whether it’s lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. And now Sadducees come and ask about the resurrection.

The Sadducees were a movement within first century Judaism. We might regard them as conservative or traditionalist. Unlike the Pharisees, who had an expansive view of scripture that included the prophets and writings, much of what would later become the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, the Sadducees regarded only the Torah, the Five Books of Moses as authoritative. 

The Sadducees were also closely aligned with the priestly caste and the temple. When the temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the Sadducees faded into history. That they were unfamiliar to Luke’s readers is suggested by his side comment that they didn’t believe in the resurrection (a belief that isn’t attested in the Torah).

One more word of explanation. The question the Sadducees pose has to do with what is called Levirate marriage—the custom, attested in the Torah, that if a man died without a male heir, his brother was obligated to marry the widow in order to ensure his bloodline would continue. Now there’s no evidence that this was practiced in first century Palestinian Judaism, so what we have here is not an honest attempt to seek Jesus’ opinion, but an obvious attempt to point out the absurdity of the resurrection as a doctrine, and to ridicule Jesus, who like the Pharisees believed in it.

But Jesus will have none of it. In fact, the Sadducees made a fundamental error, and it’s one I think we’re prone to as well. In their opposition to the idea of resurrection, they imagined it to be something very like the life we have now. But Jesus tries to explain it to them. There will be no marriage in the resurrection, because resurrection life will be categorically different from the life we have now. That’s what I think he means when he says they will be like angels, children of God, children of the resurrection.

I think what Jesus is saying about the qualitative difference between our lives now and resurrection life is something that St. Paul was grasping at in I Corinthians 15 as well: 

What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

One commentator points out that the doctrine of the resurrection emerged from a fundamental realization that earthly life is unfair and unjust. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that God will make things right in the end. One reason the Sadducees rejected the resurrection was because they had it pretty good in this life. They were wealthy and powerful and had no need to imagine a better life. 

There’s something else. The question posed by the Sadducees reveals a profoundly unjust reality. Think of a poor woman placed in that situation. Her only value is her ability to produce male offspring for her husband. She is locked into that system, lacking agency of her own. Her desires, her hopes, her feelings are ignored. Can you imagine what resurrection might mean for her? To be freed from that unjust, patriarchal system, free to live a life seeking meaning and fulfillment!

But, and this may be the most important thing, it is not a life lived for oneself. The passage with an intriguing statement: “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” Alternatively, the Authorized Version (KJV) reads “all live to him.” Resurrection life is not about self-realization but is life for God. Just as life comes from God, in the end, we will live in and for God.

As we consider all the ways our society exploits and demeans people; as we watch while our neighbors struggle with the ending of SNAP benefits, or fear that they will be seized from their homes and families and unjustly deported, as we struggle with the rise in neo-Nazi rhetoric, antisemitism, and the attacks on vulnerable communities, we realize how fragile was the pluralistic society we were attempting to build. The same people who claimed Christianity was oppressed now seek to prevent prayer, witness, and pastoral care at ICE facilities.

To proclaim the resurrection is to proclaim that the reality we see and experience is not the reality desired by God, that God’s reign is a reign of truth and justice, promising wholeness and healing to all people. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that the chains that bind us to this unjust and and oppressive world will one day be broken and that we will all live freely—live in and for God. May that belief fill us with hope and courage for the coming days. May we all live in God!