If someone's brother dies leaving a wife but no child,
his brother must take the wife
and raise up descendants for his brother.
They wanted to draw on what they viewed to be the implications of the possibility of the resurrection of the dead to reduce the idea to absurdity. A similar thing might be attempted today if someone tried to suggest that the earth wouldn't have sufficient space for all of the people who ever lived to live at once, and that, if it somehow would, it could hardly be a paradise with such crowded congestion. In other words, the temptation has always been to process the idea of the resurrection according to our temporary paradigms.
The Sadducees probably thought they had a pretty reliable paradigm to employ since they drew upon the law of Moses. But Jesus explained that the law was given to be specifically relevant to the current age, not the coming one. It was specifically created for a world in which death was the dominant reality. Thus it would not be necessary in the age to come. But Jesus went further, since we might still have imagined an unfallen world like Eden in which there was no death, as with Adam and Eve who were continuously preserved in life by God himself, but in which there was nevertheless marriage. But Jesus said that in heaven, even marriage itself, which was not an accommodation to evil, but a genuine good, would cease.
"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.
Marriage was instituted in part to populate the earth. But it was not how heaven was to be populated. Another reason it was necessary was to mitigate the effects of death and keep the human race alive on earth. But it would not have this part to play in heaven either. It was also given as a covenant sign of the relationship between God and man, between that of Jesus the bridegroom and his bride the Church. But in heaven even this sign would fade into the reality itself. People would no longer access God through the mediation of signs, but would, like angels, enjoy direct access to the vision of his face. Thus the world to come was not so much about whose natural children people happened to have been, but rather about the fact that they were the fully actualized children of God. There was a strong correlation in the Scriptures between beholding the vision of God and the reality of being among his daughters and sons.
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is (see First John 3:1-2).
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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.
Once we hear God say it it begins to become obvious that he doesn't interpret things in the linear fashion in which one thing must follow another in the way that we necessarily do. He is present in all times and in all places. Trying to analyze him with our time-bound paradigms is always going to be an exercise in confusion and frustration. Somehow, without fully understanding, we can understand that being known by God in the way that God knew and now knows Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is the definition of eternal life. His infinite capacity is such that all of the apparent contradictions in the world of time dissolve. What remains is he and his children, men and angels, worshiping around his throne, signing and dancing for joy in his presence forever and forever more.
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