Introduction
We’ve jumped forward in time quite a bit here in Luke’s Gospel. We smack-dab in the middle of conflict. If you moved away from the narrative for Reformation and All Saints, it will feel like even more of a jump. We’ve moved from Green Season’s teaching-and-healing Jesus to just-on-the-precipice-of-death Jesus.
So, it will be important to set the scene for your folks to capture the intensity of this exchange.
Narrative Context: Setting the Scene
By Luke 20, Jesus has entered Jerusalem, the place which he has been journeying toward since Luke 9:51. The triumphal entry has already happened (19:28–40), and Jesus has cleansed the temple (19:45–48). He has since begun to camp out in the temple during the day and hold court among those gathered and the religious leaders. Since entering Jerusalem and disrupting everyday religious life, Jesus has provoked a steady stream of confrontations from the temple’s religious leaders. They challenge his authority, try to entrap him with questions about paying taxes, and now the Sadducees (the priestly class tied to temple authority) come with a trick question about the resurrection.
This setting is crucial. Jesus is standing in the temple, a symbol of religious order and control, and teaching in its courts about a coming kingdom that redefines power, purity, and even life itself. The tension is mounting. The questions lobbed at Jesus are not curious inquiries. They’re attempts to expose him, to test him, and to reassert control in the face of his disruptive disregard of conventional practices. We even hear in 19:47 that these attempts are for the purpose of finding a way to “kill him.” But for now, Jesus is protected by the crowds who are listening in on all these debates.
And so, Luke sets up the Sadducees to be the ‘rationalists’ of their day. Traditionally Sadducees rejected the resurrection because it’s not explicitly found in the Torah. But Luke is laying it on thick. Here, they frame a rhetorical absurdity: a woman who marries seven brothers, one after another, each dying childless, to expose what they see as the logical folly of resurrection belief.
Their question, “Whose wife will she be?” assumes that marriage, as a social and legal construct, continues into eternity. In the framework of this particular argument (that Luke is really building a straw man with), relationships are bound by the hierarchies, obligations, and gendered expectations of this world. This argument isn’t about love. It’s about property and posterity, the way lineage ensures continuity. How are property, lineage, and legacy transferred in the resurrection?
Jesus’ “Non-Answer”
Jesus’ response is less a direct answer and more a reorientation. He doesn’t play into their logic. Instead, he upends the categories the Sadducees use to imagine the resurrection. Marriage, he says, belongs to “this age,” but resurrection life belongs to “that age.” Those who share in that future are “like angels” and “children of God, being children of the resurrection.”
Now, Jesus doesn’t say that human relationships disappear or become meaningless. But what he does say is that they are transformed. And this follows much of Luke’s overall trajectory of liberation. They are freed from the systems of possession, obligation, and mortality that shape them now. Resurrection isn’t simply the continuation of this life, it’s the transfiguration of life itself.
Then Jesus meets them in their own game, using a pharisaic/rabbinic move. He finds evidence for resurrection in the Torah itself. Quoting Exodus 3:6, he recalls that God calls Godself “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Even though each are dead in Exodus, God still claims to be the God of each of them now. And so, for Jesus, the implication is clear. God’s faithfulness doesn’t end in death. The covenant still holds. “He is not God of the dead but of the living.” Therefore, there must be resurrection and life to come.
But for Jesus, the point isn’t about who marries whom, it’s about who God is. A living God cannot preside over a dead creation. Resurrection isn’t a theological loophole. It’s the very logic of God’s covenant love.
Luke’s Theological Emphasis
Writing decades after Jesus (and after Paul), Luke is shaping a community that lives between resurrection promise and present reality. By this point, early Christians are learning that the world has not ended. People are still marrying, having children, and dealing with empire and economics. Yet Luke wants to keep resurrection life from being incorporated into the world’s categories.
In that sense, Jesus’ “non-answer” is actually a pastoral word for a waiting church. Resurrection is not about the mechanics of the afterlife but about the character of the God who holds life itself.
Luke’s Jesus doesn’t dismiss marriage. He puts it in perspective of God’s greater promise. In a world still bound by patriarchy and property, this is another call to God’s liberation. Resurrection life, Luke insists, is not an extension of the old order but the birth of a new one where people are no longer defined by possession, reproduction, or power.
Preaching Possibilities
Resurrection as Relational Renewal
We can’t make the Sadducees our punching bag. But we can take this Lukan straw man argument to imagine something that leads us to hope. The argument imagines the afterlife as an endless bureaucracy of who-belongs-to-whom. But Jesus imagines it as life held entirely in God. Resurrection doesn’t erase our relationships. It redeems them from the distortions of worldly ownership and inequality.
Today, we may not be worried about carrying property or lineage with us into the resurrection. But neither were the Sadducees. They were making up an argument they didn’t believe in. But even still, it illuminated our understanding of this life altogether.
Even though we believe in it, ultimately, we rarely imagine resurrection as liberation. The argument’s problem isn’t simply that they denied the resurrection but that they couldn’t imagine a world not structured by hierarchy, gender, or status.
And that continues for us today. We can’t see past political party, ideology, or religious denomination amongst or neighbors or enemies. I think in many of our minds, we’ll be our political party in the afterlife. We’ll have our group of friends in the life to come. While reluctantly we might say everyone might be redeemed and come to heaven, we still hold onto that belief that we’ll be able to hang out in our cliques at the feast to come.
But resurrection, as Jesus describes it, is not the extension of our world’s categories. It is their undoing. To belong to “that age” is to belong to a realm where all that confines and constrains life (death, patriarchy, possession, wealth, politics, ideology, identity, status) is finally broken open. Resurrection life is not about who owns or belongs to what/whom but about belonging entirely to God.
And Luke, ever the pastor and storyteller, doesn’t just place this hope off in the future. Resurrection life begins now, in the community that bears witness to the living God. Those who follow Jesus are already “children of the resurrection.” That means this freedom, this transformation, is not only a future promise but a present reality breaking into this age.
The problem, as Jesus names it elsewhere, is that we struggle to sense beyond what we experience. Our scope is limited by what makes sense to the world as it is. A world of power, politics, hierarchy, and control. But the resurrection life that Jesus reveals is a world where bodies, relationships, and identities are freed for love and for life here and now.
In this way, resurrection is not only a doctrine about what happens when we die, but a vision of what God is doing while we live. When Jesus says that God is “not the God of the dead but of the living,” he’s not only talking about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He’s talking about you and me, and the liberating God whose life-giving power is already stirring among us.
If we had our hearts open to it, we might notice resurrection everywhere. In the forgiveness that frees someone from shame. In the courage to live differently than the systems of this world demand. In communities that refuse to let death, in any of its forms, have the last word.
Resurrection isn’t the end of the story; it’s the renewal of it. God’s living promise already breaking in.
Micah Krey 
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