Hello everybody and welcome to Tuesday’s podcast. My name is James Brown – I’m taking us through chapters 22 and 23 of Matthews Gospel. Today our reading is Matthew 22:23-33. It is another story of a religious group trying to trick Jesus with their seemingly clever questions. This time they are arguing about the afterlife. All the dialogue build up to the phrase Jesus uses at the end that I’d love us to consider our focus verse for the day. It is verse 32, its Jesus reminding the listeners of what God has said in the past. “He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

REFLECTION:

When I was 22, and a recent graduate, I put all of that student-debt and experience to good use and I got a job working at a couple of different coffee shops at the university [if you are a parent of a young adult who just left for University please let them know if they work hard like me they too can have a 0 hours contract with a minimum wage job]. I joke. I did that for 3 years alongside working for the church part-time. I made some good friends working at the coffee shops. About half of the staff where students or recent graduates like me. Whilst the other half were exclusively ladies of a certain age. I won’t disclose precise ages, as that would not add to the wonderful mental picture you are probably creating. These larger than life ladies basically ran the outlets. As the students came and went with each passing year. They held the ground. Taught us newbies their systems and they took all the best shifts. Well earned of course. They worked hard, took no nonsense, gave as good as they got and had the best Sheffield accents I’ve ever come across.

Now, I’m not a big journeller but during my first year out of Uni, I was encouraged to keep some thoughts about what God was teaching me as part of doing the training year at church. One stand out memory was with my new friend Marie who said to me, “How can God exist?” … “There are so many horrible things that happen in this world. Kids all over the world are starving – why doesn’t he do something?… & my husband is dead – you can’t explain that. I’m alone, I could never believe in God.” And with that the conversation died. I didn’t get many other chances to talk with her again about faith but I hope the way I worked and the way I acted in the coming years perhaps planted a seed for someone else to have a chance.

I don’t know if we have ever felt the way Marie felt? Perhaps we’ve asked those exact questions before. I’ve just reread in my journal that that particular moment was really hard. It might come to no surprise to you that I had very little to offer and no clear way to answer her deeply personal question. I wrote down that I simply replied, “I’m sorry… things weren’t supposed to be this way.”

This started a journey for me; do I really understand this topic? I became increasingly aware that I have not suffered like she had. As a result, I felt so far removed from where she was standing, I simply could not relate.

Lets go to the passage and then I want to end by offering some words of hope (don’t worry – if you are wondering where this is going – this ends well! )

At the start of our story we have the Sadducees, I’ll not go into detail about who they are here but one important piece of information we are told instantly after their introduction. They do not believe in the resurrection. They do not believe in life after death. They ask a question. The question is a little difficult when you first read it, because the question is about an institution we don’t know much about. “ ‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him.’” It’s a merciful provision given in Deuteronomy 25. In traditional patriarchal cultures, if a woman got married and her husband died before they could have children,...