A Jewish traditional wedding ceremony.
Today's passage can be read here: Luke 20:27-40
Marriage relationships seem so transient nowadays. The divorce rate is very high, with no appreciable difference in that rate between religious groups and secular people. And many young people don't ever bother with marriage, since it might not last long, and it complicates their financial affairs to have to worry about who gets what in the division of common property at divorce. For those of us in the older generation, about to celebrate 50 years of happy marriage, this all seems so ominous. We fear for our society's future, when family ties may rarely exist.
In ancient Israel marriages as a rule were not as short-lived as today's marriages. But because of the higher rate of pregnancies and births, together with a higher rate of infant and maternal mortality in childbirth, second and third marriages by widowers were not uncommon. Add to that the need in ancient Israel for a male heir to carry on the inherited property, which led many husbands to take a second wife while the first one was still living, and you sometimes had a complicated picture of what wives belonged to what husbands. Another complication spawned by the need for a male heir was what scholars call the "levirate" marriage laws of the Bible. If a husband died before he had produced a male heir, his brother or other near blood relative was required to take the widow in marriage, and the first son he produced with her would be reckoned as not his own heir, but that of his deceased brother. The practice of this law is illustrated several times in the Old Testament (see Genesis 38:7-11; Numbers 36:6-9; Deuteronomy 25:5-10; Ruth 3:1-8; Ruth 4:7-22).
In today's passage we see yet another group hostile to Jesus coming to trick him with a question they thought he could not answer. This time it was the group known as the Sadducees. This group was largely made up of members of the priestly families. They were generally well-to-do financially, well educated, and heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. They accepted as divinely inspired and therefore authoritative only the first five books of the Old Testament, not the historical books, the Psalms or the prophetic books. Their "Scripture" was therefore truncated compared to the rest of the Jews who acknowledged all the books we now call the Old Testament. So far as their "theology" was concerned, they were fairly rationalistic. They believed nothing they could not see, and therefore denied the existence of angels, spirits and the life after death. The rest of the Jews believed in all these things and indeed also a physical, bodily resurrection at the end of the history of the nations, when God inaugurated his eternal kingdom.
Knowing that Jesus accepted as authoritative the entire Old Testament and believed in spirits, angels, the life after death, and the physical resurrection of the dead, they decided to discredit him with what they believed was an unanswerable question. Using the levirate marriage as an example, they posited a case in which a woman was successively married to seven men, not able to have a child by any of them. Their question was: When they all died and then were resurrected at the end of history, who would be the woman's husband in the next life? Their trick question was built on several premises: (1) that belief in the resurrection entailed that resurrected humans have the same activities, powers and limitations as in the present life, and (2) that the seemingly absurd dilemma of the woman in their story revealed the absurdity of the doctrine of resurrection. As Jesus remarked in one gospel's version of the incident, the problem of the Sadducees was twofold: (1) they did not know their own Scriptures, and (2) they were setting unnecessary limits on the power of God.
Before launching into Jesus' answer, let me say that, although both Jesus and the non-Sadducean Jews believed in a physical, bodily resurrection of God's people at the end of history, nothing either in the situation envisaged by the Sadducees trick question or in Jesus' reply requires anything but some form of an Afterlife, whether physical or non-physical. Their objection would hold even for a non-physical afterlife, although it loses some of its bite.
Jesus' answer is twofold. First, he enlightens the questioners on the actual state of God's people in the afterlife and after the resurrection (v. 34-36). Marriage was instituted in the Garden of Eden to provide for a growing population of humans on the Earth (see Genesis 1:27-29). A rapid population growth was desirable in the first epochs of human life on the Earth. And after certain population levels were reached, it was at least necessary in order to replace the generation dying. Of course, there have always been additional values to marriage in God's plan. Companionship and love between human married partners provide a training ground for learning how to live harmoniously with other members of human society. But the initial and always primary purpose for marriage according to the Bible is the producing of a new generation of children. Jesus does not state this overtly, but it lies behind his answer.
What he does say is that there is no further need of marriage after death, since there is no need for offspring generated in the afterlife: "They do not marry nor are they given in marriage. They are like the angels in that they do not die." Since they do not die, there are no ranks needing to be filled by offspring born in the afterlife. Such is Jesus' explanation of the state of those who have died in faith. The conditions of life after death are quite different from those before. Since he was not asked to describe in detail what the new activities will be, Jesus does not elaborate further. It is enough to answer his interrogators: their trick question only reveals how little they know about God's plans for the afterlife of his people.
The second part of Jesus' answer (v 37-39) addresses the Sadducees' lack of knowledge of their own limited "Scripture", the first five books of the Bible. For Jesus cites a statement of God given to Moses at the burning bush, found in Exodus 3:6. God identifies himself to Moses as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob". Now, it is possible to understand that as "the God whom Abraham worshiped, the God whom Isaac worshiped, and the God whom Jacob worshiped", or something like that. This is probably how the Sadducees had understood it. But Jesus pointed out to them that by not saying "I was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob", God was saying that those three individuals were still alive at the moment he was talking to Moses! Now, this one verse would hardly suffice as a full justification for the immortality of the soul, i.e, an afterlife. Fortunately, there is much more Scriptural evidence available in both the Old and the New Testaments. But Jesus wanted to pick out a verse within the corpus of the Sadducees' own limited "Bible", in order to show them their error. That he succeeded is shown by the answer given to him by several of the Sadducees present (v. 39): "Well said, Teacher!" And because his answer had so devastated their attack, the group no longer tried to ask him questions.
Not every passage of Scripture is equally useful for moral exhortation. One way of looking at this passage is simply to show that our Savior showed his vastly superior knowledge both of Scripture and of the plan of God for the Ages, and in so doing put his critics to flight. We all cheer, and rightly so.
But I believe there is also somewhat of an application we can draw from this incident that will guide our daily living as disciples. We live now under quite different conditions and circumstances from what we will live under in God's eternal kingdom. But there are opportunities even now in this age for disciples of Jesus to practice some of those future activities and live in those future conditions. In this life their are what we just regard as "necessities": food, drink, human companionship, love, family, physical health. But having these necessities in itself does not constitute life, not even now. They make life possible, but they are not life.
Disciples of Jesus know that real life—life that after death will require none of the necessities—is communion with God who made us. Jesus once said: "This is eternal life, that they [disciples] may know you, the One True God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (see John 17:3). In Hebraic parlance, the verb "know" means more than rational perception. It is a verb that describes a husband's sexually intimate love for his wife. "Adam knew his wife, and she brought forth a son". To know God means to enter a very intimate relationship with him bound together by love and eternal commitment. We enjoy that already in this life, if we become Jesus' disciples. That is why Jesus said "I give unto them [my disciples] eternal life, and they will never die"—he gives this to us now, not only after we have died. And that eternal life survives physical death: it goes on forever.
What I am trying to say is this: Jesus' words to the Sadducees should remind you and me that life is more than the pursuit of these necessities. We should be enjoying now the daily communion with God that prayer and daily obedience to His Word afford us. We should be drawing upon the strength and wisdom that the Holy Spirit of God is in us to provide, in order to minister to the needs of our friends, neighbors and associates. We should be living now the "resurrected life" written about by St. Paul in Romans 6 and 8. We will talk about this more later. But keep this thought in mind and begin today to exploit the resurrection life that is yours now. Enjoy your food, exercise, work and sleep, while you do them for Christ's sake, but remember that they are a means to an end, not the end itself.
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