The Sadducees were the third group to attack Jesus in the Temple in an attempt to discredit Him. First there had been the Priests with their challenge to His authority, then the Pharisees with their challenge about tribute money paid to Rome. v. 23, "The same day" bundles this attack with the others.
The Sadducees were the wealthy, aristocratic, ruling class; the chief priests e.g., were all Sadducees. In politics they were collaborationist, in thought they were rationalist and 'open-minded,' quite hospitable to Greek thought. They observed the written Law of Moses, but did not acknowledge the oral traditions, nor any beliefs that could not be proved from the Scriptures - and the only Scriptures they acknowledged were the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. Not the prophets nor the psalmists spoke with the voice of God, only Moses! Josephus tells us: "Their doctrine is this: That souls die with the bodies; nor do they regard the observation of anything beside what the Law of Moses enjoins them ..."
On this basis they repudiated belief in either resurrection or angels. Neither, they maintained, could be proved from the Pentateuch. By their challenge they thought to show that belief in a resurrection of the body is too absurd to be taken seriously.
Jesus must have been known to believe and teach both, or they would not have chosen this ground on which to tackle Him.
Their quotation was from Deut. 25:5-6: "If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband's brother shall take her and marry her and fulfil the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel."
On that basis their question, they believed, reduced to absurdity any belief in the resurrection of the body. How could the Law have required such marriages if it had an after-life in view? Their question in v. 28 must be understood as meaning, "In the (alleged) resurrection ..." It was asked with scorn - "What resurrection?"
There was the commandment, in the Torah; and it rendered absurd any belief in the resurrection of the body. They stated it like a theorem in geometry. Q.E.D.
Note first that Jesus took their question seriously, at face value. He did not often do this. He usually challenged questioners in such a way as to oblige them to work out the answer themselves. He was less severe on Sadducees than on Pharisees because they were less prone to hypocrisy. Honest doubt is to be preferred to insincere belief. However cynical or flippant they were toward those who disagreed with them, it remained a serious question, an honest difficulty.
Their error, Jesus said to them, arose from two sources:
i. Their ignorance of the Scriptures.
ii. Their ignorance of the power of God.
i. The Power of God
Jesus takes them in reverse order, the power of God first. (Another example of chiasmus.)
Jesus says quite simply that the power of God will produce a physical transformation in our bodies. In the resurrection, the bodies we have are not the same as our earthly bodies. Was Jesus having a 'sly dig' at the Sadducees when He said that we shall be as the angels in heaven? For they repudiated the idea of angels too. At any rate, the point He here made to the Sadducees was simply that in the world to come there is no need for a birth process to preserve the species, since death there has been abolished. (The point carries fascinating implications, and I yield to the temptation to pursue them below - A comment on the Life of Heaven.)
ii. The Scriptures
The Scripture referred to was Exodus 3:5-6: God said, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob."
That was said in Moses' day, long after the patriarchs had died. Were they living or dead? If, as the Sadducees said they were dead, then God was God only of the dead! How could the living God so define Himself? Inanimate things may have a creator; only living, sentient beings can have a God.
"All life consists in friendship with God: nothing less is worthy of the name. Abraham was the friend of God, and it is incredible that such friendship should be severed by death. Death may put an end to physical life, but not to a relationship that is in essence eternal. Men may lose friends by death, but not God." (G. B. Caird, 'The Gospel of Luke' [A & C Black] p. 224)
v. 34 He silenced them! (He quoted, note, from the Pentateuch, the only Scriptures they recognised. He had the measure of His enemies!) He reduced to simplicity a question that had baffled their most able minds. It is easy enough to follow the argument; the hard bit is being the first to perceive it!
The meaning the story has for us is that a sloppy grasp of the Scriptures will not do, and has to be thrown out. Jesus will not have it in His Temple! "Don't quote your Bible at me," says Jesus, "till you have settled down without prejudice or laziness to see what it actually says. Don't be a bunch of parrots, saying only what others say it says, without bothering to look hard at what it actually says." Jesus condemned attitudes which are often embraced as a means to build a wall of protection around the Scriptures. Both 'fundamentalists' and 'literalists' come under fire from Him. Unless our heart is right no attitude to Scripture can render us proof against misunderstanding or error. (What infallibility can there usefully be for fallible men?) "You search the Scriptures," He said to the Pharisees (and how they did search them), "because you think to find in them eternal life. But you will not come to Me that you may have life." Unless we so read the Scriptures as to 'come to Him,' neither they nor anything we believe about them will profit us.
1. No Sex?
Our bodies will be like the bodies angels have, with the consequence that there will be no sex in heaven. Like the statement in Revelation that in heaven "there is no more sea" (though I believe that now to be a symbolic statement, not a literal one), it used to produce in me the reaction, "What a pity!" Should we regard it as a loss? Are we to conclude that in some areas at any rate the life of the world to come will fall short of life in this world? I suppose it depends on our estimate of sex!
But if there is to be no physical sex in heaven, it does not follow that there will be no gender. Male and female spirits there still may be. When Moses in his celestial body met with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, he was recognisable as "the man Moses." Had his wife Miriam accompanied him, would she have been seen as "the man Miriam"? What real value do we put upon our essential manhood and womanhood if we do not accept that they may be eternal qualities? In the creation, the two components were needed to make complete the image of God in which 'man' was made ("In the image of God He created him: male and female He created them." Gen. 1:27), for the nature of God combines the qualities of femininity and masculinity into one. If sex as an expression of love and union is ruled out, it does not follow that no expression of love and union in our heavenly bodies will be possible; that would be inconceivable. * God must have something up His sleeve even better than sex! The best will not be lost there; love relationships will be enriched, not impoverished; it is only the means to that enrichment which remains a mystery.
It could be argued the same way in relation to our thought processes that there is no thought in heaven because we shall not there have the same physical brains we have here. But what reason is there to suppose that because in this life a person's consciousness uses a brain that it dies with that brain? May we not be given some other tool of thought in the life to come? I see no reason why there should not be some alternative in the world to come, either to the human brain as a means to think with, or to physical sex as a means to express gender-love. If there is an alternative to physical sex, it will be better than sex. We shall not be deprived.
If I am right, a further heart-warming implication also follows: that those who have lived their earthly lives unmarried will not finally miss out on the personal fulfilment afforded by marriage in this life. **
2. No Recognition?
Do continuing relationships cease too? Will there be no continuance of love founded on memories? Shall we not even recognise each other? That question was surely answered at the Transfiguration of Jesus: Moses and Elijah, who visited earth from heaven that day, were clearly recognised for who they were.
There will be both continuity and discontinuity between our appearance there and our appearance here - as there was with the resurrection body of our Lord. There was something mysteriously different about it; the disciples and the women did not always recognise Him at once. And yet He was somehow the same, for they "knew it was the Lord." About this we have to be content to preserve 'a reverent agnosticism'; we shall just have to wait and see.
But that we shall recognise one another, and remember each other, I am sure.
3. No Substance?
Will the 'world' of heaven, because it is described as 'spiritual,' be less real and solid under our feet than this world?
Jesus here says the same sort of thing Paul says in I Cor. 15:50: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God," and I Cor. 15:51: "We shall all be changed." It is worth remembering at this point what Paul did say. I Cor. 15:35:
"But some may ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?' Now that is to ask questions without using your brains. You know that seeds you sow do not spring to life unless first they 'die.' When you sow seed, you do not plant the 'body' that will be, but just a seed, of wheat perhaps or some other seed. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. (Seed does not come up as seed, but as a plant.)
"So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
"The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man was from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
"Listen, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed."
Our bodies will be fashioned of different 'stuff.' The building brick we call the atom belongs only to this order of creation; the basic building brick of the world to come must be some other entity which, because we are atom-built, is inconceivable to us in this life. The nearest we can ever get to it is to say that our bodies there are 'spiritual' bodies, as Paul does say in Corinthians. But that is not the same thing at all as to say that they are 'unsubstantial bodies.' Because what corresponds to Nature in heaven will be made of the same stuff as our heavenly bodies, the ground under our feet there will seem as 'solid' to us as the ground under our feet here. Indeed, I suspect that from that perspective, it is our earthly mode of existence here that appears 'unsubstantial,' less 'real'!
This answer of the Lord's settles the question whether we are to believe in the supernatural. The dead are living, and are "as the angels," who are supernatural beings in the strict sense that they exist in a realm 'beyond nature.'
If the only premise we admit when we frame our view of life is the realm of observable phenomena, there is no other conclusion we may draw than the conclusion the Sadducees drew. *** But if we acknowledge God as being 'above' and 'beyond' nature (which is merely one creative work He did) then we have introduced a whole new set of premises from which to argue. We must not conceive of heaven in terms of earth, nor of eternity in terms of time. Jesus spoke of the 'regeneration.' (Matt. 19:28) That is how Paul argues in I Cor. 15. We can find only analogies; but they are analogies of something real, however mysterious.
* Could you love two women without the
complication of adultery?!
** Note the contrast between what the Lord teaches here and what the
Moslems and the Mormons teach. Both seem to conceive of heaven as
endless sex. To hear the Mormon doctrine of Celestial Marriage
expounded, you would think they had not woken up yet to this word of
Jesus was in Scripture!
*** It depends what premises you argue from .
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