Mark 12:18-27

¹⁸ Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. ¹⁹ “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. ²⁰ Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. ²¹ The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. ²² In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. ²³ At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?” ²⁴ Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? ²⁵ When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ²⁶ Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? ²⁷ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”

Now it is the turn of the Sadducees to try to trap Jesus which means that one of the few things that united all the leadership was a hatred of Jesus. A sect within Judaism, the Sadducees maintained the temple (and so were particularly likely to be annoyed by Jesus’ cleansing of it) and generally were wealthy. They were often opposed to the Pharisees because of their fundamentalism: they only accepted the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and did not believe in angels, spirits or (as we learn here) life after death.

This may surprise us but belief in an afterlife came relatively late to Judaism. Undeniably, one finds references to a place called “Sheol” in the Old Testament, especially in the psalms, but there the dead experience only a dark, shadowy existence that could never be described as paradise. Until just before the time of Jesus, people thought the only immortality they could hope for was through their children – and thus the reason why childlessness was considered so negatively for a woman. The Jews found it very hard to conceive of a human being existing without both body and soul so those who, life the Pharisees, believed in an afterlife, imagined it concerning the whole person, not just the soul. Indeed, this has entered Christianity for, in the creed, we say that we believe in the resurrection of the body. It was the Greeks, notably Plato, who separated body and soul and saw the latter as superior.

Although they differ on many things, the Sadducees and the Pharisees do agree on one – that this extremist new teacher must be silenced. And so, this time it is the former who set at rap for him. Deuteronomy 25:5-6 states that if a man dies without any children, his wife must marry his brother and, which may seem even stranger to us, their children will be considered those of the dead brother. We saw earlier that divorce was not uncommon in Judaism and so, of course, was remarriage after the death of a spouse. Thus, we can imagine that, if you considered the afterlife just as a continuation of our life on earth, this could cause problems. In many ways, the thinking of the Sadducees resembles that of many secularists today.

Jesus’ answer shows how ignorant they truly are of scripture. He explains that life after death will be very different from what we know on earth. For one thing, people do not die twice and so there will be no need for reproduction. Love, of course, will still exist but it will be much greater and very different from what we experience now.

In verse 26, Jesus turns to an argument for life after death based on the nature of God. In Exodus 3:6, God tells Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob even though these men had died centuries before. Jesus states that God would not identify himself with someone who no longer existed, that he would not undertake a covenant that ended only in death. In other words, the essence of God is love and that love is, like God himself, eternal. Note also that nothing is said here about the punishment of the wicked in the after life.

Finally, note that Jesus does not say that the soul is immortal nor that eternal life is part of human destiny. He sees resurrection as a gift from God. And Jesus, of course, will be the first and best example of this teaching.