Today’s reading is on the Sadducees, specifically Jesus’s interaction with them in Matthew 22:23-46.
So, that Sadducees: generally, not a well-liked bunch. It’s easy to see why in the Gospels, as they repeatedly pop up to attempt to trick Jesus into speaking blasphemy against their laws and silencing his radical preaching. But who is this group and why is this smackdown Jesus delivers particularly noteworthy?
The Sadducees were one of the main religious leading groups in Israel during Jesus’s life. They were an offshoot sect of sorts of the Pharisees, seated as a sort of oppositional ruling party to the Pharisees. But whereas the Pharisees believed in the oral passing of traditional teachings of God and fervently interpreted the books of Moses in their own terms, the Sadducees were more direct and literal in their interpretation of God’s word. They believed nothing but the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible as we know it, were the word of God, and while the rest may have been divinely inspired, they saw anything outside of that as unfit for following as the law. Since their writings didn’t have any mention of an after life either, the Sadducees, unlike their Pharisee counterparts, didn’t believe in any sort of an afterlife – that God ruled over this life absolutely, but after this life, nada. This is displayed in Matthew 22:23, as well as later in Mark 12:18 and Luke 20:27, where it is expressed the Sadducees “say there is no resurrection.” They had no belief in angels or demons either, essentially distilling the essence of God’s word to its most literal and applicable usage as they saw fit. Their faith was more of a political ruling practice – this was done out of love for power and ruling over Israel, not for love of God.
So when Jesus begins speaking in the Sermon on the Mount about the kingdom of heaven, and inheritance in a life beyond this, he was preaching a message proudly opposed to their laws and ways of life. This man, who the Jews would come to call the awaited Messiah, spread a message of God in direct opposition to their own. In their view of the law and of the word of God, no one who spoke of resurrection and life after death was speaking for God in any capacity.
This belief of no life after death is what sets up the Sadducees’ question to Jesus here in Matthew 22:23-46. They come here of course not with the intention of learning about marriage after the resurrection, but with the intent of trapping Jesus in a trick question. One of the laws of Israel that the Sadducees were familiar with was the teaching of “Levirate marriage” In Deuteronomy 25:5-6 – a law describing the successors in marriage of a widow. By stretching this law to its extremes, they were hoping Jesus would provide an answer not covered by Levirate marriage, offending Jewish teachings & breaking the law, a jail-worthy offense and a means of silencing their biggest dissenter of the time.
But here comes Jesus with the response in Matthew 22:29-32 – “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead – have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” Not only does Jesus provide new divine insight of the resurrection and the disposal of our earthly bodies for blameless angelic beings after death, topics the Sadducees did not consider legitimate, but in the same breath renders their intent moot by giving them an answer from Exodus 3:6, when God first revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush, using their own God-given law to invalidate their line of question. Boom. This is like the WWE Smackdown of Israelite scriptural debate.
But we can do better than be merely entertained – we can learn from all Jesus has to say. Especially convicting to me is this particular line: “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” Here we had a group of people who knew the word of the Lord and applied it as the law of the land. But to them it was merely a tool, something purely logical and utilitarian, some way with which to wield power and authority of their own. We know however, that all Scripture is God-breathed and holy. As Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” Every piece of Scripture in the Bible contains value and wisdom, not just the Pentateuch. The meaning for it, as Jesus demonstrates in explaining God’s power over death, extends beyond simply the law into educating, uplifting, correcting, and celebrating.
But Scripture is only half of what Jesus mentions – alongside the power of God. Jesus knows His Father’s power extends beyond the living – over all who were as well. He knows the Sadducees’s denial of an afterlife is wrong, for as he tells Martha in John 11:25, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” To deny that the Lord’s power extends over the dead is to miss out on the incredible power of God. But to believe in Jesus, that He is the resurrection and the defeater of death, is to be right and just. So arm yourself today with the knowledge of Scripture, and remind yourself of the power of the Lord. Pour over the word of the Lord and ponder it always. And hold fast to our awesome and mighty God. For we know with these two things, we can overcome any adversity that would deny the Lord’s power.
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