Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection,
came to Jesus and put this question to him
The Sadducees "say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit" (see Acts 23:8). Like many modern materialists they attempted to prove their point by showing the absurdities that would apparently follow if their was a resurrection. They relied on a sort of Scriptural minimalism, accepting only the five books of the Torah and not any of the subsequent Scriptures, books in which the truth of resurrection becoming increasingly difficult to deny.
There was a twofold and related problem with the way the Sadducees reasoned. They did not know the Scriptures or the power of God. Their approach to Scripture caused them to only engage with the parts of it where God seemed to play by their rules. And their approach to his power was to close themselves to hearing about it in their interpretations of what they did read in the Torah as well as their unwillingness to hear any new word from God beyond those books.
Last of all the woman also died.
At the resurrection when they arise whose wife will she be?
The modern version of this would be like someone who was willing to see in the Scriptures only good stories of positive moral value but who was ready to regard anything apparently supernatural as subject to ridicule and scorn. One with this approach to the Bible might well reject the idea of the resurrection of the body using what is in our day a common argument. That argument is to ask where everyone would fit if each generation was simultaneously alive on earth. But this clearly succumbs to the same problem, resulting from the same inability to realize that God's power might have consequences so far reaching that our conventional ways of thinking about life might be insufficient. It results from a disordered desire to tame or to disarm God, to keep him out of his creation entirely, or else to limit him to one moving piece within the creation.
But it is not only the Sadducees nor their contemporaries who are misled. Rather, all of us are limited in our apprehension of the Scriptures and the power of God. All of us tend to slip into categorizing God as one among many created things, subject to the apparently immutable laws of the universe, and therefore limited or impotent in his ability to solve dilemmas which seem to us to be intractable.
Jesus said to them, "Are you not misled
because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?
Jesus invites us to see beyond any particular instance of imposing imagined limitations on God by inviting us to come to know the Scriptures and the power of God. This is actually an invitation to come to know Jesus himself who is the Word of God who was in the beginning with the Father, and who is himself the power of God and the wisdom of God (see First Corinthians 1:24).
As for the dead being raised,
have you not read in the Book of Moses,
in the passage about the bush, how God told him,
I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob?
Jesus is inviting us into the eternal now of God. This is the same eternal vantage point that Jesus occupies, which allowed him to say, "before Abraham was, I am" (see John 8:58). The living God is still in relationship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because they are related to this eternal present in which God dwells. When we realize the surpassing power of God, and the way he has related himself to us, we can infer that whatever happens in the age to come when the dead are raised, it need by no means be subjected to any limits we might imagine. This God who is beyond all time and space desires us to share in his own transcendence. The only cost to us is our preconceptions and habitual ways of thinking. What the Sadducees needed was to repent and have their minds renewed. And we too need to avail ourselves more of the renewed spiritual minds that Jesus desired his followers to receive.
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God (see Romans 12:2).
The story of Tobit and Sarah demonstrates that even in our conventual categories before the age to come God is more than able to intervene and bring conclusions of surprising joy where there was previously only hopelessness and despair.
So Raphael was sent to heal them both:
to remove the cataracts from Tobit's eyes,
so that he might again see God's sunlight;
and to marry Raguel's daughter Sarah to Tobit's son Tobiah,
and then drive the wicked demon Asmodeus from her.
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