NOTES for Mat 22:23-33
More than anything, we want to know what awaits us in another life and whether it exists. This is probably the main impulse behind the construction of every religion, their central concern. But it is another life precisely so that we do not try, like the Sadducees who came to Christ with their question, to draw it in detail in our imagination. Just as an infant in its mother’s womb cannot understand the laws of this world, neither can we understand the laws of the other world. Two statements would already be enough for us: God will be all in all, and we will be like the angels in Heaven. But unlike all other religions, Christ says something astonishing, something that the Sadducees are quite unable to grasp. The Kingdom of the age to come will not resemble the Hellenic paradise, where souls enjoy the climate and the landscape. The Sadducees, who love everything Greek, imagine it in precisely this way. The Lord, however, speaks of the resurrection of the dead as a natural consequence of the fact that God is the God of the living. Clearly, this is difficult to reconcile with the words about being like the angels in Heaven. Apparently, the word about resurrection contains a mystery that cannot be explained rationally.