Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection
The Sadducees were willing to believe only that which they found explicitly taught in the books of Moses, the Torah. But in this literalistic reading they remained primarily at the level of the letter of the text and remained closed to the Spirit which could alone give life.
For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (see Second Corinthians 3:6).
The letter alone led the Sadducees to insist on the finality of death. The letter, closed in on itself without the breath of the Spirit that original animated its writing, constrained them to an understanding that was of this world, merely human, and therefore foolish.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways (see Isaiah 55:8)
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God (see First Corinthians 3:19).
The Sadducees argument did not depend on a limitation of the Scriptures themselves, but rather on their own limited imaginations. They refused to accept the idea of a resurrection because the only idea of a resurrection they could conceive was self-contradictory and absurd.
Finally the woman also died.
Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be?
For all seven had been married to her.
Jesus explained that the age to come was not identical to the present age, not merely a prolonging of life as was thought by the Sadducees. There was a strong continuity with that life, even a continuity of the life of the physical body itself. But there were also things which would not continue, things that were intended as symbols that merely pointed toward it would cease. Reading a moment in the Scripture as though it was absolute and final did not allow for the spiritual readings of such moments as symbols that were archetypes that foreshadowed the age to come.
The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age
In our age we marry because we by doing so we continue to propagate our species. Since we, as yet, are still subject to death, this still has a very practical purpose that will no longer be necessary in the final age. Also, at the same time, marriage is a sign that points forward to the marriage feast of the Lamb. Once that feast is fully consummated we will be defined primarily by new relationships, ones that don't merely point toward eternity and help us practice for it, but which are themselves rooted in our eternal identities.
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.
In our age we often meet with a similar skepticism about the resurrection of the dead, and for the same reason as Jesus did. Those around us are unable to imagine it in the context of their understanding of our current physical reality. In some ways the blame for this is on us who have not clearly presented our hope, and perhaps have not done so because our beliefs themselves are weak or unclear. Yet for all of that, and to help us counter our own weaknesses we have the examples of the martyrs, like the seven brothers in the reading from Second Maccabees. The example of their deaths are a proof that is harder to answer than many clever arguments. Beyond even those examples we have the "everlasting encouragement and good hope" that our Lord Jesus Christ himself has given us in his own resurrection from the dead. We see in him both continuity with what was, a body that can be touched (see John 20:17), and can eat a breakfast of cooked fish (see John 21:9), but also new characteristics, such as passing through walls (see John 20:26) and the inability to suffer. Jesus himself demonstrated definitively the firmness of our hope in a real, not merely imagined or metaphorical, resurrection of the body. May we share in the endurance of Christ so that we may truly look forward to our joyful hope, to life in the age to come.
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