Whose Wife Would She Be?

Luke 20:27-38

November 9, 2025

 So Jesus is doing something 

that he doesn’t usually do.

He’s arguing with the Sadducees.

I mean in Luke, Jesus argues all the time,

He’s been doing it since he was 10 or so

and went off by himself to 

the synagogue in Jerusalem.

But he usually he does it with the Pharisees.

But this is the first time he’s arguing with Sadducees,

they are just defined here by what they don’t believe in,

and that is the resurrection or life after death.

 

The Sadducees were the elite class of Judaism.

They only believed in the Torah.

The first five books of the bible

while others accepted the psalms and the prophets.

The Sadducees just believe that God kept covenants

in the here and now, just in this earthly realm,

only in the boundaries of this world.

 

Jesus has been talking about resurrection and

new life God quite a lot lately.

He’s telling them about the forgiveness of God

and the wonder and grace of God’s kingdom.

This is going against the Sadducees understanding

and they’d like to prove Jesus wrong,

so they’re trying to trick Jesus and show him  

how silly and unworkable the idea is.

 

The hypothetical situation they use is actually a law in Leviticus.

If a woman’s husband dies and they didn’t have any children,

then she is supposed to marry the man’s brother,

in another effort to have offspring in the original husband’s lineage.

 

So they present this hypothetical woman who couldn’t have

children and she gets passed on to the next brother

and he dies and then the next and the next seven times.

Really a terrible situation for the woman if you think of it.

The grief the sadness the failure to produce an heir.

It seems like all the men in that family are the infertile ones,

but she’s bearing the blame and the consequences.

 

And the Sadducees question to Jesus was,

“If this resurrection was real, then whose wife would she be?

All the husbands would be there.”

To put it crassly, they’re asking “Who would she belong to?

Who will she keep house for? Whose floor would she sweep?

She can’t keep the house of seven men.”

Because in the resurrection, to them, obviously,

all the rules here still apply. They’re trying to say to Jesus,

“See how silly resurrection and eternal life is?

Eternal life would be an eternal mess.”

 

But Jesus doesn’t get trapped in their petty arguments.

When Jesus talks about the resurrection, Jesus is not talking

about spending eternity in a place

where all our laws and constraints

and prejudices and shortcomings and status are still in place.

Where one person still keeps house for another.

Jesus is talking about something completely new.

Jesus is talking about new life.

Jesus is talking about heaven.

 

In my Reformation sermon, I said I think that we do

need to spend more time focusing on God’s Kingdom on Earth 

rather than heaven only focusing on or God’s eternal Kingdom.

And I do think it would do us a lot of good in many ways,

But this week gives us a warning that we could 

end up like the Sadducees. We still believe in eternal life, and

Jesus believed in eternal life,

and he told other people about it.

But even though we believe in it,

and Jesus talked about it,

there’s not a robust vision of what it actually looks like,

or when it starts, or what’s involved.

There’s mostly metaphors and vague images

and feelings about it.

 

We hear about a kingdom where fears and doubts and pain

and sadness will be a no more.

A place where God’s will is always done.

Where we experience the constant love and presence of God.

There’s other images of trees by rivers,

and streets paved in gold.

But other than that, it’s not really clear.

And the theology is not fully cleared up with this debate.

 

But here’s the thing that Jesus words today do clear up:

Heaven is not just a duplicate of this world.

The rules and the traditions and the constraints

that people live by in this world don’t automatically

transfer over to eternal life.

No one is sweeping the floor for anyone else!

 

Could you imagine that with this woman,

like the Sadducees were thinking?

She had a miserable life being shuffled from brother

to brother due to some rules based on her duty to

provide offspring. A widow seven times without security,

without harmony and happiness, with repeated

disappointment, and then she would

have to relive that life in the hereafter?

That wouldn’t be a gift, but an eternal curse.

 

And we’ve come a long way since then,

but still, women are still often valued by some people

only for their spouses, and only for our ability to bear children.

In the US, we’re only about 50 years away from women being

allowed to have their own credit cards

without husbands or parents signing on for them.

Jesus is saying here that these rules and standards

and judgements aren’t duplicated in God’s kingdom.

 

Our rules and standards and judgements exist for our reasons.

They reflect our problems, solutions and our fears.

 

But God is doing something completely

new and different up there, out there

over there, in there, wherever God’s kingdom is.

For everyone, all genders, all people.

 

The problem with the Sadducees

is that they were thinking too small.

God was too small for them.

They underestimated God.

Jesus is talking about heaven, eternal life, paradise,

and they are worried about which man’s floor

this poor woman would be sweeping every day.

Jesus tells them, don’t be small -don’t think so small.

 

In God’s kingdom, this woman is not

given in marriage again and again,

Jesus actually says there is no marriage.

Which may make some of us happily

married people uncomfortable.

 

But whatever God has in store for us is

even better than we can even fathom right now.

Where people are free from the constraints

we make for ourselves and we hold other people to.

Constraints that we might not even know are constraints.

 

In Jesus understanding of God’s kingdom

This woman is no longer stigmatized by her barrenness,

she is no longer defined by her ability

or lack of ability to have children,

she is no longer identified by her series of

fruitless weddings, she is no longer second class to others.

 

In God’s kingdom, this hypothetical woman does

what no one, except maybe Jesus, expects her to do:

She steps out into eternal life, on her own,

a full and complete child of God.

 

And this is vision of God’s kingdom is what should

drive us to act in our life here and now.

 

Our desire is to make the kingdom on earth

to be the like the one in heaven.

 

Where people are not constrained by the notions of this world,

but where everyone can exist and know that

they are a full and complete child of God.