Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children, and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children, and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be? For all seven had married her.”
Jesus said to them, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when people rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead but of the living; you are quite wrong.”
Mark 12:18-27 NRSV
The Sadducees were the aristocratic, priestly party—custodians of property, power, and privilege. Like many scientific materialists today, they were steeped in causal reasoning and a this-worldly frame of reference. Seeking to embarrass Jesus publicly, they posed a calculated question: seven brothers die in succession, each leaving behind a widow bound by Levitical law to marry the next in line. Since the Sadducees denied the resurrection, yet knew that Jesus affirmed it, their question was meant as a trap—“In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”
There is no wonder in the question. No trembling. No awe. It is a problem constructed within the limits of a closed system—spirit excluded, transcendence dismissed.
Jesus answers by naming their double error: they know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. Resurrection life, he says, does not replicate earthly arrangements. Marriage and procreation belong to the conditions of mortality. In the resurrection there is no such necessity; existence is of another order.
Then he turns to the Torah itself—the story of the burning bush. God declares to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Not was. Am. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
If God lives in relation to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then their reality is not extinguished. They live in God. What does this mean? Are the dead in some sense alive—alive in spirit, alive in relation?
If “alive” means continuing to exert formative influence, then my own parents remain alive in me, though their physical deaths occurred years ago. Hardly a day passes without their shaping presence. Their gestures, convictions, and habits still move within my life. If being alive includes enduring effect, then those who have formed us continue to participate in our existence.
The Sadducees were likely unconvinced. Their worldview left little room for spirit except as reducible to material processes. For them, reality was bounded by what could be counted and managed. Though they lacked our modern language of neurons and neurotransmitters, their assumptions were no less restrictive.
Jesus’ invitation, however, was not merely to accept an afterlife, but to expand the horizon of reality—to include the living God, divine intention, and human interiority. Such an expansion is unsettling. It destabilizes closed systems. Yet it also opens the possibility of what Kierkegaard called “fear and trembling”: the dawning awareness of a numinous depth pressing in upon ordinary existence.
The question is whether we will remain within the safety of a sealed materialism—or allow ourselves to stand before the living God, whose presence refuses confinement to our categories.
Gary Huffaker, husband of Suha, father of Erich, Steven, and Danielle is a retired Kaiser Permanente ophthalmologist and Integral Theory enthusiast.