God of the Living / Luke 20:27-40 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday November 9th 2025/ Season of Pentecost / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday November 9th 2025: Season of Pentecost / Luke 20:27-40 “God of the Living”

“There came to [Jesus] some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked Him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”

And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him.” Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, You have spoken well.” For they no longer dared to ask [Jesus] any question.               

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace, peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends with Remembrance Day right around the corner our thoughts are drawn to questions revolving around the living and the dead, and we think on words like these,

“They shall grow not old,

as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them,

nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun

and in the morning

We will remember them.”[1]  

The general idea behind such poetic words comes from the thought that the dead stay as we knew them at the time of their death while for us who are left living the years march on and age and time creep up on us. Questions about life and death are not new, people have contemplated this from the moment death entered our world. One of the oldest recorded books in the Bible is the Book of Job both the Pharisees and the Sadducees which we hear about in the Gospels had the Biblical Book of Job and they knew what it taught. And in the Book of Job, which details a life visited by tragic deaths, by much suffering and hardship on account of demonic attacks and spiritual anguish along with well-meaning but often bad advice from friends and harsh words from Job’s wife alongside the physical torments of escalating health problems we find Job saying these familiar words, 

        “For I know that my Redeemer lives,

               and at the last He will stand upon the earth.

        And after my skin has been thus destroyed,

               yet in my flesh I shall see God,

        whom I shall see for myself,

               and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

               My heart faints within me!”[2]

Today we know these words best from the graveside committal services of the faithfully departed and from the hymn from our hymnal that we started the Divine Service with today “I Know that my Redeemer Lives.”[3] These words from the long suffering Job are said with hope, Job says them looking forward to his personal redemption of body, mind, soul and spirit. So from ancient times God’s Word has taught the promised resurrection of the dead where the effects of death are reversed, set aside and put to naught. And like I said all the Jewish people, including the Pharisees and the Sadducees, know these words from Job and had had them handed down to them through time.

The Pharisees believed in the Resurrection of the Dead, believed in what the Bible of the Old Testament taught about life after death; but the Sadducees well that’s another story. The Sadducees who sat in the seat of Moses and conducted all the affairs and sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem, who held extraordinary political power denied that the Resurrection of the Dead could be true. By the time they came to Jesus with their question the Sadducees no longer believed in the Resurrection of the Dead; they simply did not believed or trust in what the Bible of the Old Testament taught about life after death. It wasn’t only the resurrection of the dead that the Sadducees disbelieved they had somehow also gotten to the point of denying the existence of angels, or even the soul, among other things that we know to be true. In some ways they are like modern materialists who refuse to entertain the possibility or reality of things they cannot measure with a microscope or some other scientific method or instrument or observation.   

So, having planed their “hypothetical” question well, before coming to Jesus, it’s safe to say their question wasn’t a genuine question, rather with their question about the Resurrection of the Dead they were hoping to trip Jesus up. The Sadducees weren’t looking to Jesus for a definitive answer – they had their answers already. By asking the question and having some idea of how Jesus would answer they were likely hoping for a couple of outcomes. First) That Jesus would be shown to be more in line with the Pharisees, the political and religious rivals of the Sadducees, and Second) That Jesus one way or another was an obvious enemy of the Sadducees and therefore not to be trusted. Remember this question comes at Jesus during Holy Week after Jesus’ Triumphal Entry and His clearing out of the money changers from the Temple and by this point these enemies of Jesus were beginning to plot for His death. Also remember Jesus had only the week before raised Lazarus from the dead and the city of Jerusalem was buzzing with the news of this miracle. Perhaps their riddle like question was also meant to throw some cold water on the question of resurrection in general. Basically they thought the scenario they presented about this woman and her brother-in-laws was silly and they wanted to make Jesus look silly if He publicly affirmed it. Jesus however was unflappable, the Sadducees with their question weren’t going to get Jesus’ goat and by the end of their Q&A Saint Luke records that, “some of the scribes [the lawyers] answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ For they no longer dared to ask Him any question.” 

As we pin on our poppies and prepare for Remembrance Day, the day when we remember the brave men and women who’ve served our nation in war time, those who laid their lives down for friend and family, for Queen and country and now for King and country, with All Saints Day just over one week in the rearview mirror this passage from the Gospel of Saint Luke with the Sadducees’ question presents itself for our consideration. And so the answer that Jesus gave the Sadducees all those years ago is just as important to us today as it was then, but most men, most of the people in the world today likewise disregard Jesus’ answer and think it unbelievable. For His part Jesus takes the “hypothetical” question of the Sadducees, Jesus takes their riddle and makes it real: Jesus says, ‘no this isn’t just some question this is for real.”

Now we often speak of Jesus’ Resurrection from the Dead — particularly we speak of it on Easter Sunday — but we also confess the truth of it at funerals where we proclaim the fact that because of Jesus’ death and resurrection He has defeated the enemies of sin, death and the devil and in this victory Jesus wins for us eternal life. But what is eternal life going to be like? When we Baptise with the Water and the Word with the Lord’s command to do so a sacrament occurs, sin is forgiven, the Holy Spirit enters in and gives faith in Christ Jesus, and the one who is baptised is buried into Jesus’ death and promised His resurrection from the dead and now lives eternal, now has eternal life as Saint Paul teaches in his letter to the Romans.[4] And so eternal life is and will be life in Christ Jesus. And if you have that then you might be left asking, “What is death then if I have Jesus, if I have life in Him?”      

Yet people will say ‘everyone dies.’ People don’t recover from death the way they recover from a broken leg or pneumonia or an ear infection. Due to advancements in medical care there are occasionally people who experience what is referred to an NDE (a near death experience), but a person who dies and is in the grave for a couple days, three days, four days they don’t recover from that. ‘Dead is dead’ says the modern materialist who lives and dies by the scientific method. Jesus however proclaims that our Father in Heaven is not the God of the dead but of the living: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were all long dead to the World but not to Jesus, not to our Heavenly Father, not to the Holy Spirit. They live and so do all our soldiers who died with their faith in the LORD, who while dead to the World are alive, even still, in Christ. They may have received a fatal blow on the battlefield, they may have even been blown to bits, or they may have died in the field hospital yet their faith in Christ Jesus – their faith provided by the grace of God in their baptism – that faith, ensured that they would live in Christ and not be dead. Your baptism ensures you the same life in Christ Jesus: the life won on the Cross by Christ the Lord.

This life, this eternal life then involves not just their resurrection from the dead but our personal Resurrection from the Dead. What is this resurrection going to be like? From time to time our congregation goes through spurts of members having surgery, or preparing for surgery, or suffering with illness, suffering with chronic pain. When sin entered the World in the garden, when Adam and Eve disobeyed the will of God and ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we were not corrupted in or mind only, in our soul only, but all of creation was corrupted. As a result our bodies suffer from that fall into sin: our kidneys fail, our eyes degenerate, our prostates become cancerous; we suffer abnormalities, and diseases, and sicknesses of all sorts, broken conditions of the mind and frailties of the body. We like Job are plagued will a variety of sufferings and challenges. And yet when we become alive in Christ—when our sin is washed away in the blood of Jesus in our Baptism, when this happens God also had, and has, a plan for our bodies—for in The End we will be made whole: body and soul made perfect on The Last Day, and sin will never touch us again for the rest of eternity. Arthritis will be gone, cancer will vanish, germs and viruses will never kill or injure again, our eyes will see perfectly, our hearts will pump perfectly; our nerves will feel and operate perfectly. If a loved one died in an artillery blast he will be made perfect That Day, they will be made new on That Day by the power of Christ Jesus. This is the Resurrection: look at your hands; these hands you will see on that day, missing fingers restored, busted tendons made perfect, wrinkles and liver spots washed away. Not ‘new of the rack’ hands but rather your hands, the hands you know so well, made new.

Jesus promises this, He says, “For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise Him up on The Last Day.”[5]

Jesus also promises, “Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on The Last Day.”[6]

Saint Paul tells us about our resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 saying,

“Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.” 

“O death, where is your victory?

“O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”[7]

Dear ones when we think on those at their rest in Christ, soldiers and family, brothers, sisters, parents, children, when we pin on the poppy, when we visit the rows of white tombstones, when we are left barely able to remember their face without a photograph, remember this: if they died with their faith in Christ Jesus they are alive and well, think on them as not dead but living, for our God “is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him.”

The Sadducees, with their ulterior motives, may not have been looking for a real answer to their question but once they received Jesus’ answer, regardless of whether they believed it or not, they couldn’t deny it, what Jesus answered them is what Scripture literally says and everyone who heard Jesus’ words to them would know that to be true. Resurrection is real for you and for me and it is part of our great Christian hope, the hope we share with Job. When we meet our physical death, our life is not over, we are hidden away in Christ until The Last Day[8] and on That Day we will be reunited body, mind, soul and spirit never to suffer injury or illness or separation from our body ever again. So with confidence, by the grace of God, we can confess together what is taught in the Creed: “I believe … in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Amen.  

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.”

[1] For the Fallen By Laurence Binyon, The London Times (1914)
[2] Job 19:25–27
[3] “I Know that my Redeemer Lives” Lutheran Service Book, Concordia Publishing House 2006, #461
[4] Romans 6:3-11
[5] John 6:40
[6] John 6:54
[7] 1 Corinthians 15:51-57
[8] Colossians 3:3-4

Photo Credit: Main photo composite Luther's Rose from from bawue.museum-digital.de with text and photo of a poppy from picryl.