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.
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20:27 Mat 22:23; Mar 12:18.
20:28 Deu 25:5.
20:34 The children of this world - The inhabitants of earth, marry and are given in marriage - As being all subject to the law of mortality; so that the species is in need of being continually repaired.
20:35 But they who obtain that world - Which they enter into, before the resurrection of the dead.
20:36 They are the children of God - In a more eminent sense when they rise again.
20:37 That the dead are raised, even Moses, as well as the other prophets showed, when he calleth - That is, when he recites the words which God spoke of himself, I am the God of Abraham, .It cannot properly be said, that God is the God of any who are totally perished. Exo 3:6.
20:38 He is not a God of the dead, or, there is no God of the dead - That is, tho term God implies such a relation, as cannot possiblysubsist between him and the dead; who in the Sadducees' sense are extinguished spirits; who could neither worship him, nor receive good from him. So that all live to him - All who have him for their God, live to and enjoy him. This sentence is not an argument for what went before; but the proposition which was to be proved. And the consequence is apparently just. For as all the faithful are the children of Abraham, and the Divine promise of being a God to him and his seed is entailed upon them, it implies their continued existence and happiness in a future state as much as Abraham's.And as the body is an essential part of man, it implies both his resurrection and theirs; and so overthrows the entire scheme of the Sadducean doctrine.
20:40 They durst not ask him any question - The Sadducees durst not.One of the scribes did, presently after.