The Sadducees Ask About the Resurrection
Notes
In order to discredit the idea of resurrection from the dead—as well as Jesus who had spoken of his own resurrection (8:31; 9:31; 10:34)—the Sadducees devise an ingenious stratagem based on the concept of levirate marriage (Gen 38:8; Deut 25:5–6).
Levirate marriage was a practice whereby a man was obligated to marry a childless widow of his brother in order to preserve the name and memory of his deceased brother and to ensure the establishment of his deceased brother’s property inheritance within the family line. The practice is first mentioned with reference to Onan (Gen 38:8–10), who, in order to annihilate the line of his brother, refused to have a child by Tamar, wife of his deceased brother Er. The OT boasts of two women, Tamar (Genesis 38) and Ruth (Ruth 3–4), who actually violated prescribed sexual morality to ensure the preservation of their genealogy through levirate marriage. In the Apocrypha, the book of Tobit tells the story of a woman who married seven men and remained childless (3:7–15)—a story that may have inspired the fantastic plot proposed by the Sadducees to Jesus.
In the current pericope the Sadducees focus their test of Jesus on the subject of the resurrection. They believed that at death the soul perished along with the body, and hence that there were no future rewards or punishments.
The Sadducees cite the OT law of what is later called “levirate marriage” (from Latin levir, “brother-in-law”), in which the surviving brother of a childless, deceased man was obligated to marry his sister-in-law in order to provide for her needs and to preserve the deceased brother’s family line (Deut. 25:5–10; cf. Gen. 38:8).
Jesus declares the Sadducees “ ‘in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.’ ” The Greek word for “error,” planan (from which “planet” is derived), means “to wander off track” or “to be led astray.”
The audacity of Jesus’ accusation of the Sadducees would be like claiming that Wall Street knows nothing of finance!
The audacity of Jesus’ accusation of the Sadducees would be like claiming that Wall Street knows nothing of finance! Scripture (the Torah) and power (the Sanhedrin) were precisely the Sadducees’ stock-in-trade, the two matters in which they majored. In magisterial authority, Jesus asserts that what the Sadducees claim to know best they in fact know least. They are vulnerable not at their weak points but at their strong points. They have gone astray not at the periphery or in the incidentals of their belief system but at the heart and center of their beliefs.
The Sadducees are making two errors: (1) they do not know … the Scriptures well enough to know that Scripture teaches the reality of the resurrection, and (2) they do not know the power of God to create a much more wonderful world than anyone can now imagine.
But are like angels in heaven means living without an exclusive lifelong marriage commitment to one person. This teaching might at first seem discouraging to married couples who are deeply in love with each other in this life, but surely people will know their loved ones in heaven (cf. 8:11; Luke 9:30, 33), and the joy and love of close relationships in heaven will be more rather than less than it is here on earth. Jesus’ reference to “the power of God” suggests that God is able to establish relationships of even deeper friendship, joy, and love in the life to come. God has not revealed anything more about this, though Scripture indicates that the eternal glories awaiting the redeemed will be more splendid than anyone can begin to ask or think (cf. 1 Cor. 2:9; Eph. 3:20).
The Sadducees falsely assume marriage in heaven. Interpersonal relationships in heaven are similar to the relationships of angels (whose existence the Sadducees likewise deny; see Acts 23:8).
The resurrected life is not a prolonged earthly life but life in an entirely new dimension (1 Cor 15:40–44). Earthly conditions and conventions must yield to heavenly, where “ ‘they will neither marry nor be given in marriage.’ ” In this pronouncement Jesus cuts against the grain of the majority opinion among Jews of his day, who affirmed that married life characterized the resurrected state.
Present earthly experience is entirely insufficient to forecast divine heavenly realities: we can no more imagine heavenly existence than an infant in utero can imagine a Beethoven piano concerto or the Grand Canyon at sunset.
The present tense in the quotation from Ex. 3:6 logically implies that when God spoke these words to Moses, God was still in covenant relationship with the patriarchs, even though they had been dead for centuries. If the Pentateuch thus implies that the patriarchs are still alive, and if the rest of the OT points to the resurrection (as it does), then the Sadducees should recognize God’s power to raise the patriarchs and all of God’s people to enjoy his eternal covenant in a life beyond this one.
God would not pledge himself to the dead unless the dead were raised to life.
Jesus concludes in 12:27 not only with an affirmation of resurrection but also with a condemnation of the Sadducees’ position, “ ‘You are badly mistaken.’ ” The Greek word for “mistaken” is again planan, that is, “ ‘You are way off base.’ ” If truth is to be asserted, its opposite must be denied.
The ultimate answer to the Sadducees, however, is not the exegesis or even the authority of Jesus (neither of which they accept), but the life of Jesus, for the empty tomb will verify his teaching to the Sadducees (16:6). Jesus does not simply announce the resurrection—he is the resurrection (John 11:25).