Wednesday
Wednesday
The Error of the Sadducees
Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.”
Matthew 22:29
The Pharisees and the Sadducees were in constant debate and disagreement with each other. For example, the Pharisees had constructed an elaborate theology of the afterlife, but the Sadducees rejected it, teaching that our souls and bodies die together. More basic were their different attitudes to Scripture, both of which Jesus criticized. The Pharisees added to Scripture (their traditions); the Sadducees subtracted from Scripture (its supernatural element).
During Holy Week some Sadducees came to Jesus with a trick question based on the law of levirate marriage. This ruled that if a husband died childless, his brother must marry the widow. “Well,” the Sadducees said, “there were once seven brothers. They all died childless until finally the woman also died. So whose wife would she be in the next life, since all seven had married her?” (author’s paraphrase). One can see the smirk on the Sadducees’ faces. They thought they were being frightfully clever and could ridicule belief in an afterlife as an absurdity.
Jesus began and ended his reply with a clear statement that the Sadducees were in error, indeed, “badly mistaken” (Mark 12:27). Moreover, their error was due to their ignorance. They knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.
As an example of the Sadducees’ ignorance of Scripture, Jesus referred them to the incident of the burning bush and what was implicit in God’s announcing himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God had established with the patriarchs a unique covenant of love. Did the Sadducees really think that such a covenant relationship could be broken by death? Still today many errors in the church are due to ignorance of or disrespect for the Scriptures.
The more basic cause of the Sadducees’ error, however, was another kind of ignorance. They assumed that if there were an afterlife, it would be the same kind of life as before. It seems not to have occurred to them that God could create another order of being in which marriage has been abolished. They were ignorant of the power of God.
For further reading: Mark 12:18–27