Back in my Navy days, there was (and probably still is) a type of sailor known as a sea lawyer. Sea lawyers have an unshakable belief that they know all the ins and outs of the Navy’s rules and regulations, that they can use that knowledge to explain away any misbehavior.
Kindergarten teachers are intimately familiar with 5-year-old sea lawyers. If given a rule like, “Only the teacher is allowed to get things from the supplies cupboard,” a 5-year-old will immediately want all the ancillary case law surrounding the rule. What if the wind blows open the cupboard door and the crayons fall out and I just happen to be standing right there and they fall into my hand? That is classic sea lawyering.
Jesus had to cope with a lot of sea lawyering (I bet you were wondering where I was going with this). In today’s gospel passage, Mark 12:13-27, Jesus encounters two different groups trying to use the law (as they saw it) to verbally trap him into sedition or self-contradiction.
In the first encounter, Jesus is asked by some Pharisees and Herodians if paying taxes to the Romans was lawful (presumably, they mean lawful according to Mosaic law). Jesus answers with the well-known “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s…” admonition. In the second, a delegation of Sadducees try to prove that resurrection is illogical by presenting Jesus with a hypothetical case of a widow marrying her dead husband’s brother (in accordance with Mosaic law), and then being widowed again and marrying the next brother, and so on through all six of her first husband’s brothers. They ask whose wife will she be after the resurrection, since she had lawfully married seven men. Jesus answers that their whole premise is mistaken: no one will be married after the resurrection, but will be like the angels of heaven (who are, it seems, uninterested in sex).
What strikes me about these two encounters is not the sea lawyering going on. Rather, I’m struck by how difficult it is for so many of Jesus’ listeners to understand that God is not bound by our current reality—He operates by a different set of rules, outside of our perception of space and time. In the case of the taxes, Jesus reminds us that God really doesn’t care about the physical things we have. Money is something created by and for the present world, the world we live in right now, not for the world to come under God’s kingdom. In the case of the widow and the seven brothers, Jesus reminds us that the resurrected will rise into a world outside space and time, and not into the world as we know it now. The rules are not the same, and no amount of sea lawyering will do us any good if we can’t see that.