The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age
and to the resurrection of the dead
neither marry nor are given in marriage.
The Sadducees, unlike the Pharisees, did not believe that the dead would rise (see Acts 23:7-9). Part of the reason for this is that they believed that such a resurrection would involve logical contradictions. But they reasoned in this way only because they assumed that a resurrection would mean the dead coming back to life in the world as they knew it, in fundamentally the same condition in which it they the deceased left it.
It was evident that the idea that the dead would return unchanged to an unchanged world posed at least as many problems as it solved. The Sadducees were however correct to assume that God would not simply abandon this creation in favor of some entirely new and different realm in which his creatures could live. What was on the table was not some otherworldly and spiritual afterlife but specifically the resurrection of the body. This creation was good, the Sadducees might have reasoned, but it the finite nature of it limited even God in how he could intervene in it. Against that point of view Jesus argued that the age to come would be both similar to but different from this age.
They can no longer die,
for they are like angels;
and they are the children of God
because they are the ones who will rise.
That people would no longer die meant that the institution of marriage itself would then have fulfilled the purpose for which it existed. All of the love that existed between those married couples would persist, but there was no longer the need to raise up new children to replace those taken by death, to ensure the survival of a family legacy. The life-giving and generative aspect of marriage was only a shadow of the life-giving love which those deemed worthy now received directly from their relationship with God himself. Those in that age were like angels in this way. Angels never had anything like marriage because they themselves were not subject to death. Further, beholding God directly they did not need mere symbols as pedagogy about divine Fatherhood, Sonship, or Spirit of love whom they shared. So it would be for the children of the resurrection. Those whom the blessed truly loved in God during their earthly life would remain united to them in the age to come. But as to family all would be children of God together.
Jesus assured the Sadducees that it would involve an even greater contradiction to assume that the dead were simply annihilated, for it would assume God's power was subject to merely human limitations. God himself spoke in such a way as to indicate that he was still in ongoing relationship with the faithful dead of the Old Testament.
That the dead will rise
even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called ‘Lord’
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him all are alive.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had not yet risen, but if God was still in relationship with them it was reasonable to conclude that he was not yet finished with them. The creation was good. The body was good. These spiritual fathers were definitely not annihilated or even unconscious. These very facts spoke to an eventual bodily resurrection and a renewal of this world as being so consistent with God's revelation as to be inevitable.
For our part we often view the world through the lens of the Sadducees, assuming that the way things are is the way they must always remain. This is ultimately a recipe for despair and hopelessness of the magnitude experienced by King Antiochus. It causes us to make too much of things that are not meant to last, even of the best of those things, at the expense of those which can endure forever. It causes us to choose things which will only matter in this age over and against being ready for the age to come. The cure for this viewpoint, the way to shatter these gloomy glasses, is found in the Scriptures themselves and in knowing the power of the God whom we follow. Whatever the contradictions we seem to see, whatever problems some irreconcilable, we should realize that they only seem that way to us. For to God all things are possible.
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