Tuesday Morning in the Temple

174:3.1Be­fore Je­sus could get started with his teach­ing, an­other group came for­ward to ques­tion him, this time a com­pany of the learned and crafty Sad­ducees. Their spokesman, draw­ing near to him, said: “Mas­ter, Moses said that if a mar­ried man should die, leav­ing no chil­dren, his brother should take the wife and raise up seed for the de­ceased brother. Now there oc­curred a case where a cer­tain man who had six broth­ers died child­less; his next brother took his wife but also soon died, leav­ing no chil­dren. Like­wise did the sec­ond brother take the wife, but he also died leav­ing no off­spring. And so on un­til all six of the broth­ers had had her, and all six of them passed on with­out leav­ing chil­dren. And then, af­ter them all, the woman her­self died. Now, what we would like to ask you is this: In the res­ur­rec­tion whose wife will she be since all seven of these broth­ers had her?”

174:3.2Je­sus knew, and so did the peo­ple, that these Sad­ducees were not sin­cere in ask­ing this ques­tion be­cause it was not likely that such a case would re­ally oc­cur; and be­sides, this prac­tice of the broth­ers of a dead man seek­ing to beget chil­dren for him was prac­ti­cally a dead let­ter at this time among the Jews. Nev­er­the­less, Je­sus con­de­scended to re­ply to their mis­chievous ques­tion. He said: “You all do err in ask­ing such ques­tions be­cause you know nei­ther the Scrip­tures nor the liv­ing power of God. You know that the sons of this world can marry and are given in mar­riage, but you do not seem to un­der­stand that they who are ac­counted wor­thy to at­tain the worlds to come, through the res­ur­rec­tion of the righ­teous, nei­ther marry nor are given in mar­riage. Those who ex­pe­ri­ence the res­ur­rec­tion from the dead are more like the an­gels of heaven, and they never die. These res­ur­rected ones are eter­nally the sons of God; they are the chil­dren of light res­ur­rected into the prog­ress of eter­nal life. And even your Fa­ther Moses un­der­stood this, for, in con­nec­tion with his ex­pe­ri­ences at the burn­ing bush, he heard the Fa­ther say, ‘I am the God of Abra­ham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Ja­cob.’ And so, along with Moses, do I de­clare that my Fa­ther is not the God of the dead but of the liv­ing. In him you all do live, re­pro­duce, and pos­sess your mor­tal ex­is­tence.”

174:3.3When Je­sus had fin­ished an­swer­ing these ques­tions, the Sad­ducees with­drew, and some of the Phar­isees so far for­got them­selves as to ex­claim, “True, true, Mas­ter, you have well an­swered these un­be­liev­ing Sad­ducees.” The Sad­ducees dared not ask him any more ques­tions, and the com­mon peo­ple mar­veled at the wis­dom of his teach­ing.

174:3.4Je­sus ap­pealed only to Moses in his en­counter with the Sad­ducees be­cause this re­li­gio-po­lit­i­cal sect ac­knowl­edged the va­lid­ity of only the five so-called Books of Moses; they did not al­low that the teach­ings of the proph­ets were ad­mis­si­ble as a ba­sis of doc­tri­nal dog­mas. The Mas­ter in his an­swer, though pos­i­tively af­firm­ing the fact of the sur­vival of mor­tal crea­tures by the tech­nique of the res­ur­rec­tion, did not in any sense speak ap­prov­ingly of the Phar­i­saic be­liefs in the res­ur­rec­tion of the lit­eral hu­man body. The point Je­sus wished to em­pha­size was: That the Fa­ther had said, “I am the God of Abra­ham, Isaac, and Ja­cob,” not I was their God.

174:3.5The Sad­ducees had thought to sub­ject Je­sus to the with­er­ing in­flu­ence of ridicule, know­ing full well that per­se­cu­tion in pub­lic would most cer­tainly cre­ate fur­ther sym­pa­thy for him in the minds of the mul­ti­tude.