A Riddle About Seven Brothers

A third group comes over, and Mark tells us the one thing about them that decides the conversation: the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection. They have come to a man who teaches that there is one, carrying a puzzle that has plainly been used before.

It starts with a real law. Moses wrote that if a man died leaving a wife and no children, his brother was to marry the widow and raise up children in his brother's name. There was no cruelty in that. A childless widow in that world had no pension and very little to fall back on, so the law kept her fed and kept a dead man's line from disappearing.

Then comes the puzzle, built to be airtight. Seven brothers, one after another. The first marries her and dies with no children, the second marries her and dies, and on it goes down to the seventh, and then the woman dies as well.

In the resurrection, then, whose wife will she be? For all seven were married to her.

You can hear that it is a routine, too neat to be a real question, with seven brothers as a number chosen for effect. Jesus answers in two parts and the first part is blunt: he asks whether their mistake is that they know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. That is a hard thing to say to men whose whole standing rested on knowing the scriptures.

Then he takes the puzzle apart. When the dead rise, he says, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they will be like the angels in heaven. He is not saying relationships end. He is saying they had pictured the next life as this one with better weather, and their riddle only works if every arrangement carries over unchanged.

Then he goes after the larger mistake, and he goes at it from their own side of the table: the Sadducees held Moses in the highest regard, so Moses is where he takes them.

Have you not read about the burning bush in the Book of Moses, how God told him, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob"?

The argument is in a tense. God did not tell Moses that he was their God once. He said I am, and he said it centuries after all three of those men had died and been buried.

He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Then he tells them they are badly mistaken, and he does not soften it. The men who came to make the resurrection look ridiculous are told they do not know the book their position was built on.