The Burning Bush Still Burns: God of the Living

Proper 27: Luke 20:27–38

The Fire That Would Not Die

In the heart of the desert, Moses saw a bush engulfed in flame. It burned, yet it was not consumed. That scene — a paradox of light and life — has haunted the imagination of faith for centuries. The God who introduced Himself there has always been fire that refuses to die.

Centuries later, Jesus stands in the temple courts under the same name. The bush is still burning, only now it speaks with human breath.

It is Tuesday of His final week. The air in Jerusalem hums with tension. Pharisees, scribes, and priests take turns confronting Him like hunters circling prey. And now, from among the shadows, step the Sadducees — men of precision and pragmatism. They don’t believe in resurrection, angels, or anything that can’t be measured in temple coins or political alliances. Their religion is a monument to control, not wonder.

They bring Jesus a question, but it isn’t really a question. It’s a mockery dressed in logic. Seven brothers, they say, all marry the same woman in succession, each dying childless. When the resurrection comes, whose wife will she be?

You can almost hear the smirk behind the question. The crowd chuckles; it’s clever. The woman is made an object, her story a punchline. The Sadducees have reduced heaven to bureaucracy. But Jesus doesn’t answer their riddle — He undoes their reality.

“The people of this age marry and are given in marriage,” He begins. “But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage… for they are children of God and children of the resurrection.”

The laughter fades. The tone changes. The trap collapses. And then Jesus turns to their own Scriptures — the ones they claim to defend — and sets them aflame.

“Even Moses showed this,” He says, “when he called the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive.”

It’s as if the bush in Exodus 3 has begun to burn again in the temple courts.

Reading the Signs

The Sadducees’ world was built on what they could see. The temple glittered with gold, the sacrifices hummed with rhythm, and the Roman governors made sure the peace held. For them, resurrection was an inconvenient rumor. It couldn’t be verified, controlled, or taxed.

They saw religion as inheritance — something passed like property, like the woman in their hypothetical story. Meaning, for them, was biological. To live on meant having heirs who carried your name. Death was the end of your sentence, and children were punctuation marks keeping your name from trailing off into silence.

Jesus speaks a different semiotic language. In His world, meaning is not carried by possession but by relationship. “They are children of God,” He says. The sign of continuity is not lineage but belonging. The fire of the burning bush burns within every life that knows God.

In this clash of symbols — marriage vs. resurrection, inheritance vs. identity — Jesus reveals that God’s story is not about keeping names alive through law, but keeping persons alive through love. The grammar of heaven rewrites the grammar of fear. Divine present tense (“I am the God of Abraham…”) overtakes human past tense (“they were”). Resurrection is the punctuation of grace, a sentence that refuses to end.

This is more than a theological correction; it’s a re-enchantment of the world. Jesus reintroduces mystery to a system that had suffocated on certainty.

The Burning Bush Still Burns

Here lies the heart of the Gospel: God’s identity guarantees ours. “He is the God of the living,” Jesus declares, and in that phrase the cosmos shifts. Death is no longer a terminus, it is a threshold.

The bush that burned without being consumed becomes the perfect metaphor for resurrection. God’s being is life unending — energy that renews rather than depletes. The Sadducees’ logic imagined a world of scarcity: finite love, limited blessing, closed systems. Jesus reveals abundance at the center of all things.

Look around creation and you’ll see echoes of that fire. Sequoia trees release their seeds only through the heat of forest fire. The destruction that should end their story becomes the spark of renewal. The Phoenix, painted on catacomb walls by early Christians, spreads its wings from ashes. Even our human longing to keep flames burning — from the Eternal Flame at Arlington to the candles lit for the departed — testifies to an intuition that love cannot be extinguished.

The bush still burns - not in the desert now, but in every act of resurrection we witness: a reconciliation after years of silence, a faith rekindled after failure, a person who chooses hope when despair would be easier.

And at the heart of it all is Jesus - the Living One who walked into death’s desert and emerged still burning.

Living as Children of the Resurrection

So what does resurrection look like here and now? It looks like people who refuse to let cynicism have the last word. It looks like faith that grieves honestly yet still prays, “I believe; help my unbelief.” It looks like compassion that burns hotter than indifference.

We are, Jesus says, “children of God, children of the resurrection.” That identity changes everything. It frees us from treating others as objects in our own survival story - as the Sadducees did with that nameless woman. Instead, it invites us to see every person as one for whom the Living God burns with love.

It also transforms our view of endings. The career that closes, the dream that dies, the loved one we bury - none of these are final chapters. Resurrection means the story continues beyond the frame we can see. “For to Him all are alive.” In that sentence lies the courage to live again after loss.

When Christopher Wren rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London, he inscribed in Latin above his tomb, “If you seek his monument, look around you.” Every dome, every stone was a testament to creative resurrection. God’s inscription is even simpler: “If you seek My monument, look around you — the living, the breathing, the redeemed.”

To live as a child of the resurrection is to walk through the world with resurrection eyes — to see the spark of divine life in ashes, the holy grammar that changes every was into is.

BENEDICTION

The Sadducees’ question began with death and ended with embarrassment. Jesus’ answer began with God and ended with glory.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has not changed His tense. He is still the God of the living. The bush still burns. The light has not gone out.

And so, when you walk through your week — when you stand at a grave, when you face an ending, when the future feels like silence — remember the present tense of God. Remember that to Him, all are alive.

The flame that met Moses now burns in Christ.

The fire that flamed in Christ now burns in you.

And it will not be consumed.

Amen.