(Josiah Hall)
Matthew 22:23–33 The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, 24saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.’ 25Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. 26So too the second and third, down to the seventh. 27After them all, the woman died. 28In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her.”
29But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. 30For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 31And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: 32‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” 33And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.
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Following the failed challenge to ensnare Jesus in his words by some Pharisees and Herodians, a group of Sadducees now take a turn. The Sadducees were a religious party that had arisen about one hundred years before the birth of Christ. No writings survive from any Sadducee, so we know little about them except that many of them were priests, that they held strictly to the written Torah* and did not view any oral traditions or Jewish writings outside of the Torah as authoritative, and that they did not believe in a final resurrection of the body.
Members of this group come to Jesus and seek to expose a belief in a bodily resurrection as illogical and in contradiction with the laws which God gave his people through Moses. They pose a question relating to a common cultural practice called “levirate marriage.” While this practice of a family member marrying a widow and then considering the child to be the heir of the deceased husband can seem exceedingly strange to us, it was common in the ancient Near East and occurs in several key episodes in the Old Testament (see the episode of Judah and Tamar in Genesis and the book of Ruth). This practice, which Moses provided specific instructions for in Deuteronomy 25:5–10, protected widows from exploitation and poverty by ensuring that the family into which they had married would provide for them. It also sought to ensure an heir for that family so that they could maintain ownership of the property in Israel which God had given them as an inheritance.
The Sadducees pose a situation (whether real or hypothetical) where a woman ends up married to seven brothers in succession, which to their minds would result in the absurd situation where all seven men could legitimately claim the same woman as their wife in the resurrection. Jesus’ response focuses on two related claims, the authority and consistency of Scripture and the power of God.
Jesus takes the debate on the Sadducees’ terms and turns to a prominent passage from the book of Exodus to demonstrate the reality of the resurrection.** Jesus points to the use of the present tense when God names himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to conclude that since God remains in relationship to these three deceased patriarchs, then they must experience the resurrection.
Beyond again showing Jesus’ wisdom, this passage teaches us three things. First, it reminds us that our marriage relationships, as wonderful as they are, are not permanent or ultimate. Jesus’ teaching here aligns with Paul’s remarks in Ephesians 5, which remind us that earthly marriage is a sign of our true marriage to Christ. The one marriage that persists beyond the grave is our marriage to Christ as his church. Second, the passage reminds us that our hope in the resurrection depends on the power of God. Jesus rebukes the Sadducees not only for their knowledge of Scripture but their lack of confidence in God’s power. To deny the resurrection is to assert that death has greater power than God does. Third, it remains interesting that Jesus’ reply here astonishes the crowds. Matthew doesn’t tell us why they were astonished. It may have been astonishment at Jesus’ wisdom, his boldness in rebuking established teachers, or perhaps at his confident assertion of God’s power.
As we approach Easter, we should consider our own posture towards the questions the Sadducees pose to Jesus. It can be easy to become so fixated on this life that the idea of the life to come seems silly or hard to grasp. Or our experiences of the brokenness of this world, such as the situations of death and heartbreak which the Sadducees’ story recalls, can make us doubt God’s power to intervene and fix that brokenness. Jesus’ affirmation of God’s power to resurrect Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is connected to God’s power to resurrect Jesus from the grave. This episode in Matthew thus points us to the event that most fully demonstrates God’s power and must likewise reorient our approach to life in this world: the resurrection of Jesus.
* The Torah here refers to the instructions that God gave his people contained in the first five books of the Old Testament.
** Scholars debate from where Jesus draws the conclusion that those resurrected will be like the angels in heaven. Because he critiques the Sadducees for their lack of knowledge of Scripture, it seems reasonable to expect that Jesus finds evidence for this claim in Scripture. Some scholars have proposed that Jesus draws on two passages from Daniel. (1) Daniel 12:2–3, which is the only explicit reference to individual resurrection in the Old Testament and which states that those who are resurrected will shine like the stars. (2) Daniel 8:10, which seems to equate the stars with angels. If Jesus is drawing on Daniel here, then he is challenging the Sadducees’ inappropriate limitation of Scripture to only the first five books of the Old Testament.
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