Whose Wife Will She Be?

¹⁸ Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. ¹⁹ “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. ²⁰ Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children.²¹ The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. ²² In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. ²³ At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

²⁴ Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? ²⁵ When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ²⁶ Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? ²⁷ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”

The interrogation of Jesus by the religious authorities continues unabated.  For us many of these questions that are posed to Jesus seem as pointless as the scholastic dispute over how many angels can dance on the head of a pen.  The questions were, however, for the day relevant.  We may ask, why in the world is this important, but 2,000 years from now someone will look back at the controversy between praise choruses and hymns and wonder much the same.

This time, the Pharisees and Herodians are replaced by the Sadducees as Jesus interlocutors.  The Sadducees were the equivalent of today’s fundamentalists.  While we tend to portray the Pharisees as legalists, they were actually the progressives of the day.  The Sadducees refused to accept any religious authority other than the Torah (the first five books of our bible).  If a religious idea was not contained within these scrolls it was not to be entertained.  So while the Pharisees believed in an afterlife, the Sadducees rejected the notion as a modern intrusion.

This all makes their question even more absurd.  When they ask Jesus a question about resurrection, the correct answer as far as they are concerned is that the premise of the question is flawed.  Any answer Jesus gives other than to deny resurrection will show him to be a fraud in their eyes.  But for the crowd around Jesus who would have been more in the line with the blue collar Pharisees than the privileged Sadducees, to deny the resurrection would be proof that Jesus was not an authentic teacher from God.

The convoluted hypothetical which they pose to Jesus must have been a favorite from their rabbis who used it to show the absurdity of resurrection.  A woman outlives seven brothers who because of filial obligation each marry her in turn.  Moses provided for this to ensure that a widow had a social safety net.  But when she dies, whose wife will she be?

Jesus refuses to play their game and rather than answer their question attacks their premise.  He accuses them, the ones who pride themselves on keeping the integrity of scripture of not knowing the scripture or God’s power.  I cannot imagine anything that Jesus might have said that would have been more inflammatory.

Resurrection is more than human life recreated in a new place.  It is instead existence in the presence of God where human traditions become unimportant.  The Sadducees have made it their life to enforce human traditions as the path to God, but now Jesus says that human tradition is worthless in the presence of God.

Finally, Jesus goes to the Torah and rabbinic argument to disprove the position of the Sadducees on resurrection.  If the scripture says God in the present tense is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then they must still exist.  Otherwise, the text would say God was their God.  While this would have been an acceptable form of rabbinic argument in that day, it seems a bit labored to us.  The key is that Jesus uses their own accepted way of proving things to prove them wrong.

Most importantly, in his conclusion, Jesus reminds them that God is the God of the living and not the dead.  God is about the present and if we are to be with God, we can do so only by living in the present with God.