08.02 | Curiosity & Wonder
Matthew 22:23-46
“The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be?”
Matthew 22:23-28
There’s something disgustingly duplicitous about this question.
There were a few key religious groups at the time of Jesus. Each had their own unique vision of utopia.
There were the Pharisees—familiar to us by now. They believed the Kingdom of God could be brought into being through painstaking commitment to the Law of Moses. Every law was to be taken literally and obeyed down to the tiniest technicality. The Kingdom would arrive through 100% obedience to the rules.
The Essenes were a kind of monastic desert community. They believed that the nation was corrupted, and that the Kingdom could only be manifest in a community utterly withdrawn from the pollution of the surrounding world, hiding away for fear of contamination and a lifestyle of radical obedience. The Kingdom would arrive through secluded purity.
The Zealots believed that the Kingdom would come through military force, identifying the Romans as the oppressive occupiers who were the obstacle to the will of God. They believed the Kingdom of God could only move in when the kingdom of Rome moved out. Their methodology was guerrilla warfare and violence, stabbing people in crowds to catalyse a violent revolution.
The Sadducees were the group of compromise. A wealthy societal elite, whose privilege led them to friendship with the global power base that was Rome. They viewed only the Ten Commandments as essential to the Old Testament, and rejected the miraculous and spiritual—the idea of a God who intervenes. Most famously this manifested in having no belief in bodily resurrection.
It is the Sadducees that get us started today.
Their question is about resurrection. A resurrection that they do not believe in.
It’s a disgustingly duplicitous question.
It’s a hypothetical scenario, exclusively concocted for the purpose of trying to demonstrate to Jesus what an intellectually foolish idea resurrection is. They’re trying to make the point that resurrection is incompatible with marriage. There’s no openness or teachability in the question. It’s crafted to laugh and point at the ludicrous, supernatural God that Jesus seems to believe in.
They not actually come with a question; they’ve come with a point. A position. And their minds firmly made up.
What’s Jesus going to do?
He blows their minds.
He blows their minds by expanding the idea of resurrection, beyond the limitations of temporary human institutions (like marriage), and into the eternal beauty of a relationship of unending intimacy and joy with the Father.
He blows their minds by pointing beyond the Law of Moses, which was only a shadow of the realities to come.
And He blows their minds by describing God as the present-tense God of all. That when He said ‘I am the God of Abraham’, He specifically wasn’t saying that ‘I once was the God of Abraham,’ but rather that, in some extraordinary way, the God who exists beyond time and beyond all our limited frameworks of thought and understanding, remains the God of the Abraham who, to Him, is still very much alive.
The Sadducees are a warning to us. They are a warning that, when we think we’re too clever, we lose curiosity. And that the loss of curiosity leads to a loss of wonder. They are a warning to us that, when we start to believe that the rational world of progress and such impressive intellect around us surpasses the magnitude of the wisdom of God, then our questions become veiled efforts at parading our cleverness, rather than openness to seeing differently and experiencing actual growth. They are a warning to us that when the ideologies of the secular become the fabric of our soul, we will always attempt to reduce the God of wonders to something that fits the limits of our intellect.
Jesus blows their minds. And in doing so, He invites them to a spirituality beyond. A spirituality of curiosity and questions, of wonder and amazement. Of a God who is not restricted by the limits of my understanding, but the real God who of course exists vastly beyond my oh so limited ability to comprehend.
The God of Wonders.
The God of Abraham.
The God of Resurrection.
Our God.
May our little minds be blown afresh today.
Reflect:
Does my posture towards God look in some ways like the Sadducees (fixed, decided, and looking for a Jesus who will affirm what I already think)? What might I need to lay down to increase my curiosity and allow Him to reveal to me again His wonders?
Pray:
Father
It feels a little safer to put you in a box.
A box where you can be explained and described
By simple metaphors and quick cliches
It feels more comfortable to imagine that you agree with me in all my views
And that, being the mature and wise person that I am
I now understand you.
Father,
I can be something of a fool.
Today, I let go
I let go of the tidy paradigms, the easy cliches, and the idea that I already understand it all
And I ask you to stretch my understanding
Teaching me new things
Helping me to see heavenly realities
And to live with curiosity that leads to endless wonder.
Grant me this gift of humility
That the God I worship may not be an invention of my own mind
But the God who is
Utterly, immeasurably, and eternally
Wonderful.
In Jesus’ Name
Amen.
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Exodus 31-33 | Psalm 21