Bible Commentary

22:29-33 - ²⁹Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. ³⁰At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ³¹But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ³²'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living."
³³When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.

If the Sadducees thought that they had cornered Jesus with an over-clever poser, they were shocked with a metaphorical slap in the face Jesus gave them. There was no put-down for a Jew more humiliating than to be told he knew neither Scriptures nor the power of God. These were the things that marked, so to speak, a Jew as a Jew and different from the Gentiles. Their very question was flawed because of these failures. ". . . do not know the Scriptures" should probably be understood as the failure to perceive and understand the significance of what they read. Not knowing "the power of God" is simply unbelief; the Sadducees simply refuse to take God seriously at His Word. "The question of the resurrection from the dead," observes Leon Morris, "is not to be solved by citing a convenient passage from somewhere in the Bible; it demands that we recognize God's power to do what he wills."1 Their failure was therefore a failure of the heart and mind, not of opportunity. This was all the more damning.

In a proper reply, Jesus states, first of all, that "people will neither marry nor be given in marriage." The mistake of his interlocutors was to imagine that life in the resurrection would essentially be a replay of life on earth though, perhaps, in a more blissful state.2. Jesus's point is that life in the resurrection will be of a different world order, diametrically different from anything we have experienced or can adequately imagine them to be. The mandate given to humans at the creation was to "be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen 1:28). Sex within marriage was God's gift that enables humans to fulfill this charge. It was always meant to be a temporal gift relevant only for life on earth. They are neither needed nor meaningful in the resurrection. In this respect, Jesus asserts, "they will be like angels in heaven." Humans in the resurrection shall have, we may assume, charges of greater grandeur laid upon them. This simile has, unfortunately, been carelessly muscled out of context and made to prop up the spurious notion that angels have not sex (or gender). One would have been more firmly grounded to suggest, instead, that—since all the angels in Scriptures we know by name are males and in the Old Testament they are referred to only in the masculine—that there are no female angels.

A second time Jesus needles his opponents to wake them up to the full light of their error, "Have you not read?" Jesus now recalls God's proclamation the Israelites to be "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exo 3:6, 15). Jesus's choice of this verse is revealing. Proclaimed by God to Moses when He met him at the burning bush and charged him to return to Egypt to liberate his fellow Israelites from their slavery, this belongs to the portion of Scriptures which Sadduces do hold as authoritative. Of course, therefore, they have read it. That perhaps may have been the force of the specific and highly pointed "to you" at the end of the question (v31). What they have failed to do is to fathom its significance for the question at hand. Now Jesus draws it out for them; God, Jesus says, is "not the God of the dead, but of the living" (v32). But what does Jesus mean by this? And how does he draw such a conclusion from the original proclamation? It has to be admitted that Jesus's logic of induction is not immediately apparent. The thing, of course, is that in the original proclamation, as Yahweh spoke to Moses, He should have said, "I was the God of Abraham, the God of . . . " since the patriarchs have long since been dead. But using the present tense, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of . . ." He implies that the patriarchs are alive. God is the God of the living. In reciting the proclamation (which they hold to be authoritative) they unknowingly affirm the resurrection of the patriarchs that they unbelieving mock as here. The patriarchs are alive, kept by the power of God which Jesus asserts the Sadducees did not know.

Once this becomes clear, the Sadducees can have no reply. Nor do we hear one. Whatever impact Jesus's exposition may have had on them, it impressed greatly the crowds, though even among them we do not know if the seeds thus sown fell upon shallow soil and were soon scorched and withered, or fell among thorns and were soon smoothered, or grew to produce a crop a hundred times what was sown (Matt 13:3-9).

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