There came some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now, there were seven brothers . . .” Luke 20:27-29a
“Let us try,” say the Sadducees. “We have a question that’ll make steam come out of his ears.”
They are the political class, the priestly class, the church-and-state party, the ones who understand how the world really works. They’ve seen messiahs come and go; these days, the so-called anointed ones are mostly zealots or country boys who saw a vision once. Under clever questioning they fall apart, and then head for the caves if they know what’s good for them. For the gallows if they don’t.
“Teacher.” The teacher looks up; there stand two priests and a Levite, quietly but elegantly dressed in their ecclesiastical authority. “We have a question, if you can spare a moment. As you recall, Moses wrote for us that if a man dies childless, his nearest brother should take the widow and beget upon her heirs to the dead man’s estate.
“A very curious case came before us some years back: the oldest of seven brothers took a wife, but died without producing an heir. So the second took her, but also died childless. Then the third, then the fourth, and so on until all seven had married this woman in turn but left no children.
“So we were wondering: in the resurrection–” the Sadducee’s voice embraced that word with subtle but obvious sarcasm–“whose wife will she be, after legally marrying all of them?”
A little group of scribes nearby glare at the challenger: they recognize a trick question even though they can’t answer it, and it touches on a sore point. Scribes and Pharisees believe in the resurrection; Sadducees do not. The teachers answer will put him on one side or the other: which?
“The people of this age,” he begins, “may be duty-bound to marry. But there is another age, and those resurrected to it” (take that! think the scribes) “will find they have no reason for marriage, for they will never die again and will not produce offspring. They are like angels in the new age—children of God by the resurrection.”
The scribes suck in their collective breath at this. They picture the resurrected life as something like this life, only longer. Maybe forever. But he speaks as though it’s a different quality, a different kind of life altogether. As children of God?
“Moses himself knew that the dead are raised—what did he hear when he encountered the burning bush? I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The patriarchs were still alive to God, as they are now. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
After a stunned silence, one of the scribes speaks up. “That was very well put, Teacher.” And it went in a direction we didn’t expect.
As for the Sadducees, they have no follow-up questions. No more questions at all. They bow stiffly, gather up their robes and take their leave. And when out of earshot, they ask each other how he could know such things. “He speaks with authority,” one says, unconsciously echoing a long-ago observation from the Galilean hills. “Maybe . . . he speaks the truth?”
But no. That can’t be. Their world is not for shaking.
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