Jesus' opponents sometimes arranged for Him a kind of examination in the Jewish theology of their day...
Jesus' opponents sometimes arranged for Him a kind of examination in the Jewish theology of their day. The question about a woman who had been married several times in her life was used by opponents of faith in the universal resurrection, chiefly representatives of the priesthood, as an argument in debate: indeed, whose wife would she be if she met all her husbands alive? This was one of those standard "difficult" questions from the Sadducees to the Pharisees, to which there were their own "elegant" answers. Jesus, as is not hard to guess, was being tested on His knowledge of such answers.
He speaks about something entirely different: the life of the Kingdom, which is completely unlike the life of the untransformed world with its laws. He wants to show those asking Him that trying to apply the coordinate system of the untransformed world to the life of the Kingdom is a path that is a dead end from the start. In the Kingdom there is no earthly marriage not because the differences between men and women disappear there, but because the very quality of life changes there; even humanity as such changes, in both of its modes, male and female.
The problem about which those who doubt the resurrection ask Jesus could arise only in the completely incredible case that the resurrection became not the triumph of the Kingdom with its new life, but merely the return of all the dead to their former, untransformed life. In the world where time and cause-and-effect relations are an absolute reality, where no effect can be the cause of itself and where time is irreversible, there is indeed no way out of the situation described by the Sadducean theologians. In the untransformed world it cannot occur: its laws do not allow it.
The world where it is possible is ordered differently; different laws operate there, there is no linear time so familiar to us, and therefore the situation can be resolved in the most unexpected way. Jesus gives two examples as illustrations: God, for whom there are no dead, so that for Him Abraham, Isaac, and other great spiritual leaders, long dead for us, are alive; and David, who calls his "lord" the One who in our untransformed world has not yet been born.
It is no wonder that Jesus' opponents fall silent: what He has said does not fit into any framework of any theological schemes. Neither does the Kingdom He brought into the world.
