Matthew 22:23-33

Matthew 22:23-33 The Sadducees and whether there is a resurrection

This is the second in a series of 3 challenges Jesus faces when he arrives in Jerusalem – this time from the Sadducees.  The Sadducees believed only in the Torah – the first 5 books of the Old Testament, which Christians sometimes refer to as the Pentateuch, which is Greek for “five books.”  The Sadducees did not consider the books of the prophets authoritative, nor did they accept the wide body of oral tradition that the Pharisees adhered to.  Since the Torah does not suggest that there is a resurrection or an afterlife, the Sadducees did not believe in a resurrection.

The Sadducees tended to be wealthy.  They made up a major portion of the political leadership among the Jews and tended to be collaborators with the Roman occupation.  But those characteristics do not seem to be relevant here, where the question revolves around their religious beliefs.

The Pharisees believed in a resurrection and an afterlife.  They not only believed in an afterlife of the soul (as, for example, the Greeks believed); they also believed that our bodies are raised.  They pointed to passages later in the Old Testament that provided varying degrees of support for such a position.  Here are some of those passages:

• Isaiah 26:19 says, “Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.”

• Ezekiel 37:1-14 describes a vision of a valley of dry bones.  The bones come back together and regain flesh and skin, breath enters them, and they come to life.  Although in the passage itself the image is of a new Israel being restored after the exile to Babylon, Jews (and later, Christian commentators) saw it as a sign or foreshadowing of individual resurrection.

• Daniel 12:2 says that after a time of terrible persecution, “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

• Psalm 73:24-25 says, “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward [or, in the end] receive me with honor [or, into glory].”  This could merely mean that the psalmist will be restored, in this life, after when the difficulties he faces are over, but some saw it as a description of entering into God’s realm like Enoch (Gen. 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11-12), both of whom are described as being taken up to God without dying first.

The Sadducees, who don’t believe in an afterlife, approach Jesus with a puzzle that they think shows the foolishness of believing in a resurrection.

What is the problem the Sadducees pose?

There is a commandment in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, that directs a man to marry his brother’s wife if his brother dies childless, so that through the first child of that union the brother will have a legal heir.  Genesis 38:7-11 gives an example of a refusal to follow this command.  Both of these books are part of the Torah, the limited part of the Hebrew Scriptures that the Sadducees acknowledged.  The Sadducees imagine a series of brothers marrying the same woman, each dying before any offspring is produced, and they ask: Whose wife is she in heaven?

In verse 29, Jesus tells them they are wrong (misled, led astray) for two reasons they don’t know the Scriptures and they don’t know the power of God.  How is knowing both of those critical to the spiritual life?

In verse 30, what does Jesus say about how they are thinking incorrectly?

Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven, because in heaven people are like angels.

It is important not to misinterpret the statement that humans are “like angels.”  Humans in heaven are “like angels” in the sense that, like angels, they live forever and don’t need to engage in sexual reproduction in order to produce offspring and keep the family line alive (see New Oxford Annotated Bible, NRSV, Matthew 22:30 fn., p. 1780).  This does not mean we are like angels in other ways; for example, unlike angels, we will have a body in heaven.  Angels are a different kind of creature than humans.  They only have a spiritual nature and don’t have a body or a material nature.

Although Jesus frames his answer in terms of the Sadducees’ underlying assumption, common at the time, that the point of marriage is to carry forward the family line.  This should not be misinterpreted to mean that that is the only purpose of marriage.  St. Paul, and theologians and everyday believers throughout the centuries, have seen much more in marriage, in addition to its function of continuing an individual’s family line and ultimately propagating the species as a  whole.

In verses 31-32, Jesus turns specifically to the Scriptures.  We might expect Jesus to focus on how they are wrong in not accepting the parts of the Old Testament that the Pharisees accept.  Instead, in verse 32, Jesus quotes from Exodus 3:6, which is in the Torah, the part of the Old Testament that the Sadducees do accept.  What does God say in Exodus 3:6, and why does Jesus argue that this indicates people do live on after death?

In Exodus 3:6, God says, “I am” the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  They must be alive, because otherwise God would have said, “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before they died.  The fact that he is still their God indicates that they are still alive.  God is the God of the living, not the dead.

The Sadducees are wrong about the Scriptures partly because of their crimped reading of the Torah.  They think marriage works the same way in heaven as on earth, which shows that they think that heaven isn’t all that different from earth.  Why is thinking that heaven is like earth such a big error, not just with regard to the question they asked but in our understanding of heaven more generally?

Jesus also says the Sadducees are wrong about the Scriptures because they have not noticed a key statement by God in their Scriptures that presupposes that people do live on after death.  What does this tell you about Scripture study?

Now let’s come back to the fact that Jesus says in verse 29 that the Sadducees are also wrong because they do not know the power of God.  What is it that they are missing about God’s power?

They think that God is limited by what we understand from our human perspective.  They think he is only powerful enough to create physical lives, which come and go.  They don’t think that God has power over death and can extend life beyond death.  At a fundamental level, they don’t understand how powerful God is.  They underestimate God.

In what ways do we tend to act like God is bound by human limitations or underestimate God’s ability to transcend problems that stump us?

There are a lot of different threads in this exchange between Jesus and the Sadducees.  What insights does this passage give you about God, or heaven, or the resurrection, or the Scriptures, or yourself?

Take a step back and consider this:

It is possible that the Sadducees didn’t really want to think of God as having a power and perspective that transcended theirs and could cut through their conundrums.  They were very invested in their own power and comfortable with their own ways of seeing things.  Accepting a God who transcends their power might have forced them to rethink some of the ways they were using their own power.

How does our own desire for power affect our responsiveness to the power of God?

How does our belief that we have power, at least in some areas of our lives, sometimes make it harder to appreciate the Scriptures and the power of God?

Where, in your own life, do you need to let go of your preconceived notions about God and his ways? And replace them with what?