Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman whose...
Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman who had several husbands, each of whom died in turn, was of the same kind. Yet Jesus' answer proved completely unexpected. He immediately rejects not only the traditional solutions to the problem, but also the very perspective from which it is posed; He breaks, so to speak, the traditional paradigm of thought. And this is hardly surprising: for Jesus the world is the Kingdom. That is the only way He perceives it.
Such a perception does not come easily to us, whereas He was born with it. It is not that He is unable to look at the world differently, but such a view is unnatural to Him. That is why He sees unexpected and paradoxical answers to traditional questions. In this case too, the Saviour answers quite differently from what might have been expected. As always, He speaks of the Kingdom: there are no dead in it, just as there is no concept of marriage in the earthly sense. People do not, of course, become angels after the resurrection, but in some respects their life truly becomes more like the life of angels than that of people in the fallen world.
Everything is different in the Kingdom, entirely unlike what the overwhelming majority of Jesus' contemporaries imagined. For the fullness of life there is absolute: each person has his or her own fullness, yet for everyone it is absolute. There are no dead there, whereas our human mind imagines even the Kingdom within the familiar paradigm of life and death. We often imagine even immortality not as a new quality of being, but as the endless continuation of its present earthly quality, with all the relationships of this earthly life and all its problems, some of them truly insoluble if extended unchanged into infinity. This, in fact, is precisely what the Sadducees were doing when they presented their opponents with problems like the one they put to Jesus.
But He answers in His own way, from the Kingdom, from that fullness of true life which alone can be called life in the genuine sense of the word. And those who questioned Him fall silent. They have nothing more to say: the world disclosed to them in the Saviour's answers is too unlike the one to which they are accustomed, as different as heaven and earth.
3
3:1 In the last days - The time of the gospel dispensation, commencing at the time of our Lord's death, is peculiarly styled the last days. Grievous - Troublesome and dangerous.
3:2 For men - Even in the church. Will be - In great numbers, and to an higher degree than ever. Lovers of themselves - Only, not their neighbours, the first root of evil. Lovers of money - The second.
3:3 Without natural affection - To their own children.Intemperate, fierce - Both too soft, and too hard.
3:4 Lovers of sensual pleasure - Which naturally extinguishes all love and sense of God.
3:5 Having a form - An appearance of godliness, but not regarding, nay, even denying and blaspheming, the inward power and reality of it. Is not this eminently fulfilled at this day?
3:6 Of these - That is, mere formalists.
3:7 Ever learning - New things. But not the truth of God.
3:8 Several ancient writers speak of Jannes and Jambres, as the chief of the Egyptian magicians. Men of corrupt minds - Impure notions and wicked inclinations. Void of judgment - Quite ignorant, as well as careless, of true, spiritualreligion.
3:9 They shall proceed no farther - In gaining proselytes.