This Age, That Age:
Sex and the Sadducees

           Last summer I read two books about sex. One was about all the bad sex in secular culture; the other was about all the good sex in the Bible.

           In The End of Sex (2013), Donna Freitas questions the casual sex of our "hookup culture," where kids have sex with a person they may or may not know, with the explicit understanding that it doesn't include intimacy, emotions, or commitment. Behind the adolescent bravado about hookup sex, Freitas documents a trail of emotional wreckage. In her lectures around the country, she observes "so much sadness" among kids who long for something better.

           In Unprotected Texts (2011), Jennifer Knust objects to Christians who find a clear and simple sexual ethic in the Bible. She argues that it's "a mistake to pretend the Bible can define our ethics for us in any kind of straightforward way." Sometimes polygamy for men — but not women, is taken for granted. David had seven wives. Paul and Jesus privilege celibacy as the preferred state. Why is marrying a "foreigner" wrong? And why all those regulations about circumcision, semen, and menstruation?

The Entry Into Jerusalem, by Giotto, 1305.

           The gospel this week is one of the texts that Knust explores. Jesus has entered Jerusalem after Luke's long "travel narrative" (9:51–19:47). "Every day," Luke writes, Jesus "was teaching at the temple." It was here that the religious authorities tried to trap him with trick questions about money and sex.

           Luke tells two stories that occur back to back in all three synoptic gospels. The first one's about taxes; the second one's about marriage. But Jesus never takes the bait. Instead, he flips the questions and turns the tables on us. Believe it or not, he says, there's something more important than sex and money.

           The first question comes in Luke 20:22. Should Jews pay taxes to their Roman oppressors?

           Jews disagreed on how to answer this question. The pragmatic "realists" cooperated with Rome and paid the tax, maybe out of conscience or maybe as a survival strategy. Who wanted undue attention from Rome? The "idealists" of a more nationalistic bent resisted, resented and protested Roman economic exploitation out of principle.

           The Pharisees who despised Rome and the Herodians who cooperated with Rome were opposing sects, but in this story they join forces. Luke calls them "spies." They didn't want an honest answer to a complicated question; they wanted "to trap Jesus in his words."

           That seemed easy enough. To answer the question "yes" smacked of capitulation to Rome and renunciation of Jewish nationalism. Jesus would have lost his audience. To answer "no" and encourage tax-dodgers was political sedition that would have jeopardized his ministry and endangered his followers. In fact, charges of tax evasion led to Jesus's criminal execution: "This man opposes paying taxes to caesar and claims to be Christ, a king" (Luke 23:2).

           Their trick question elicited a trick answer. Jesus asked for the coin that was used to pay the state tax, then asked whose image it bore. Most likely it bore the image of the emperor Tiberius. One side of the coin would have deified Tiberius as a "son of the divine Augustus." The other side would have honored him as the "Pontifex Maximus" or "chief priest" of Roman polytheism — which is to say that the two sides of the coin celebrated Tiberius's absolute religious and civil authority.

           To a nationalistic Jew who confessed a radical monotheism, such a graven image was religiously offensive and politically humiliating. Certainly much of the crowd would have been repulsed at the political, religious, and economic implications of paying a tax to a pagan "god." How would Jesus respond to this lose-lose proposition?

Young Jesus Teaches in the Temple, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1282-1339.

           He replied with an enigmatic answer: "Give to caesar what is caesar's, and to God what is God's." He evaded their trap with a dismissive shrug — "If the coin belongs to caesar, let him have it. So what? It's only money." But then he turned the tables and asked them, "What do you owe to God?"

           There's something more important than my economic relationship to the government — my existential relationship with God. On that ancient coin was an image of caesar, and merely money is owed to him. On the other hand, and far more importantly, every human being bears the image of God, implying that I "render to God" wholly and without condition my entire self. So pay your taxes to caesar, says Jesus, and give your self to God.

           The second question comes in the very next story in Luke 20:33. Is there sex in heaven?

           This question is from the Sadducees, the rivals of the Pharisees — who after their own humiliation were no doubt eager to see what happened to their opponents. This too is a duplicitous question because the Sadducees didn't believe in the resurrection. For them, only the Pentateuch was authoritative, and in their view Moses didn't affirm the afterlife. For the Sadducees, you only live on in your lineage. No descendants means no future existence.

           To trap Jesus, to see if he would contradict their interpretation of Moses, they posed a bizarre hypothetical.

           If seven brothers all had the same wife out of obedience to the Mosaic law about widows in Deuteronomy 25, and none of them produced a child despite all that sex, "at the resurrection, whose wife will she be?" Will there be sex in heaven so they can fulfill the Mosaic law and continue their lineage? And if so, which one of the seven brothers will do the deed? Won't this be terribly awkward?

           "Just as there's something more important than taxes," says Jesus, "there's something more important than sex. You're mistaken about Moses."

           "The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection."

Moses and the burning bush, Dura Europos Synagogue.

           The Sadducees are wrong to deny the resurrection. If they really knew their Moses, they'd understand the implications of the story about the burning bush: "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."

           This was no academic debate for Jesus. He was living out his last days in Jerusalem, trusting his own life and death to the God of Moses.

           After the tax question, Luke says that "they were unable to trap Jesus in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent." Likewise after the sex question: "No one dared to ask him any more questions."

           Whether it's death and taxes or sex and marriage, the apostle Paul put it this way in Romans 14:7–9: "For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living."