Knowing The Word in Luke 20:27-40, Sadducees Ask About the Resurrection

In his commentary on Luke, Leon Morris explains the Sadducees were conservative, aristocratic, high-priestly Levites, who were worldly-minded and very ready to cooperate with the Romans, who enabled them to maintain their privileged position in Jerusalem. They rejected the oral tradition that meant so much to the Pharisees, accepting only the written Scriptures. They denied the doctrine of the afterlife with its rewards and punishments, considering them as compromised ideas brought in from Persia. These Sadducees come to Jesus to test his views of the so-called resurrection. They construct a scenario in which a woman ends up marrying seven brothers based upon the law of the levirate marriage in Deuteronomy 25 that prevented a family line from dying out. When a husband died without producing children, his brother was to take his widowed wife and marry and have children with her. They ask Jesus the question because they believe there is no possible answer, illustrating the impossibility of resurrection. The Sadducees have failed to see that life in the age to come will be different from this age. Life in heaven will be significantly different from anything on earth. When place and time cease to matter, human relationships will be totally different. In speaking of the saved, Jesus declares that resurrection will be their means of attaining to the life to come. People come together in marriage to preserve the human race, but where there is no death marriage is not necessary. Jesus then shows that resurrection is implied in the Old Testament talking about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Sadducees have it wrong. If God is the God of non-existent beings, then he is not God!

Luke 20:27-40

27 There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, 28 and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. 30 And the second 31 and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. 32 Afterward the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”

34 And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, 36 for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. 37 But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” 39 Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” 40 For they no longer dared to ask him any question.

Prayer: Remember, O Lord, we beseech thee, the souls of them that have kept the faith, both those whom we remember and those whom we remember not; and grant them rest in the land of the living, in the joy of Paradise, whence all pain and grief have fled away; where the light of thy countenance shineth for ever; and guide in peace the end of our lives, O Lord, when though wilt and as thou wilt, only without shame and sin; through thine only-begotten Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Liturgy of John Chrysostom and Basil the Great