Luke 20:27-40 Commentary

The Resurrection and Marriage
27 Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. 28 "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. 30 The second 31 and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. 32 Finally, the woman died too. 33 Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"

34 Jesus replied, "The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection. 37 But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord 'the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' [b] 38 He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."

39 Some of the teachers of the law responded, "Well said, teacher!" 40 And no one dared to ask him any more questions.


Dig Deeper
I love being a minister and having the incredible privilege and responsibility of being able to spend my time serving in God’s church. I especially love the various aspects of my responsibilities that come with my role. Among those jobs and responsibilities is the need for me to respond to many biblical inquiries and questions that come mostly as a result of the online ministry at our church. It’s rare that a day goes by that I don’t get many requests or questions that require me to respond and answer as quickly as I can. The vast majority of those questions are very sincere questions that are important and are just great questions. They can range from doctrinal questions, to general questions about a biblical topic, to issues of praxis, and just questions of general advice and guidance. Occasionally, however, I get questions that just seem to be of a different nature. These are questions from people that I affectionately call “doctrinal snipers.” These types of questions generally come from people that have never actually been to our church, although occasionally it is someone who has visited once or twice, but usually it is people who read things or listen to sermons on our website. I can honestly say that I’ve never had anyone contact me and just complain about something that they’ve read or heard but we do get the doctrinal snipers. These are people who will ask specific questions about specific belief or doctrine, one after the other. They don’t seem to be sincerely interested in finding truth. They generally seem to be of the mindset that they are going to keep asking questions until they can find some belief or doctrine that they don’t agree with and have thus found the excuse they were looking for to not come to our church. It’s sad really, because in the few cases that I have seen this happen, it always turns out that these people do this ritually, going from church to church and dismissing them due to their doctrinal sniping, and they never commit themselves to a church family. They don’t really want to find truth they want to justify themselves.

I can’t help, as I read passages like this, to think of those doctrinal snipers. As Jesus arrived in Jerusalem he has been consistently challenged in his authority, in his view of Rome and the political situation, and now we have another group arriving on the scene to challenge him. This group, like those doctrine hunters, don’t seem to be genuinely interested in the truth. They have their beliefs and they don’t want to accept Jesus so they bring up a pet doctrine of theirs in order to justify their rejection of him. Sadly, though, in doing so, they will miss out. They will miss out on the kingdom of God and they would miss out on the very thing that they were denying.

The Sadducees were an aristocratic group of religious leaders and priests who were largely wealthy and had a fair amount of influence in Jewish religious and political affairs at the time of Jesus. They largely disappeared from the pages of history, though, following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Despite a few similarities, the Sadducees and the Pharisees were generally bitter rivals and disagreed on far more things than they agreed upon. The Sadducees were often priests and teachers of the law so they had a more formal presence than did the Pharisees who were largely a non-official pressure and opinion group. One of the striking features of the Sadducees that differentiated them from the Pharisees was that the Sadducees rejected any Old Testament Scriptures other than the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Because of this, they flatly rejected any belief in resurrection and believed that consolidating their formidable power base and passing on their legacy to their children would be the only way that anyone could experience eternal life of any kind. The Sadducees saw the belief in resurrection as dangerous because people who believe in resurrection don’t care as much about current power balances and you simply can’t control in the present age people who believe in a resurrection age.

The belief in resurrection or the rejection of this doctrine then, became the signature difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. As we can see demonstrated here, the Sadducees had honed down their arguments against the resurrection and surely saw the question that they presented to Jesus as one of their favorite and more “irrefutable” points against what they saw as a silly belief in resurrection.

But Jesus was gaining a great deal of popularity and notoriety which was an obvious threat to their power base, so they went to question him. Not because they had any desire to know the truth but because they wanted to go doctrine sniping, which would then allow them, in their own minds, to reject him outright. In that sense, they were so opposed to Jesus that they would eventually become willing to work with the Pharisees to bring him down and get rid of him.

The scenario that set up was a ridiculous one based on the real practice that came to be know as levirate marriages, a practice that found its basis in the Old Testament Scriptures (Gen. 38:8; Deut. 25:5). In those cases where a man died, his brother could step in with his widow and continue the dead brother’s line of descent even after his death. There is a bit of humor or even ridicule in bringing up such an example. If a woman were to exercise the full extent of the levirate marriage laws and go through all seven brothers of a family, a true black widow, then what would that mean for the beloved doctrine of resurrection? In the Sadducees mind the ridiculousness of an imaginary situation like this rendered the thought of some age of physical resurrection life in God’s age to come, as the Pharisees and most Jews believed in (as did the early church), quite impossible.

Jesus corrected them on two accounts. The first was that they fundamentally misunderstood, or refused to accept, the reality of the age to come. It certainly would be a physical existence in which God would raise the dead to life in a way that they were not currently alive. But the resurrection age will not be exactly like the present age in many ways. There will evidently be no need for reproduction so the need to continue a particular family line will be irrelevant. In that sense, people in the resurrection age will be like the angels that are in the presence of God. This does not mean that people will become angels, nor does it mean that resurrection will be some sort of ghostly spirit-like existence. Rather, the point is that people in the resurrection will live in a state that is beyond the reaches of death and decay. Jesus does not mean that those in the resurrection would not have bodies; quite the opposite. People will have bodies that have been redeemed (Rom. 8:23) and are quite appropriate for the reality of the resurrection age. Thus, their argument about the levirate marriages is a moot point because they completely misunderstood the resurrection and what God’s world will be like.

Their second problem was that they were completely wrong in assuming that there is no future physical and tangible resurrection age. To make his point, Jesus appealed to the book of Exodus, one of the books that the Sadducees actually accepted as authoritative. Even in a situation where opponents were coming to Jesus to try to ridicule him and snipe at his doctrine, Jesus demonstrated grace and patience in trying to appeal to a book that they could accept and show them the truth through that. Jesus pointed out for them that in Exodus 3 God identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God, says Jesus, is the God of the living not the dead. Why would he appeal to his covenant and promises to those men if they were long dead? It would only make sense if their souls were still alive somehow and they were awaiting the resurrection. God is the God of promise to those patriarchs and to all the righteous and for them to have their part in the promise of resurrection they must be alive to see it. That God identified himself, in the present tense, as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was a clear indicator that there was the hope of resurrection life for them even centuries after their death.

Some of the teachers that were present were impressed by Jesus’ response. Luke doesn’t tell us for sure, but we can presume that these were Pharisees or those that shared in the Pharisaical belief in resurrection. It is unlikely that these were Sadducees who had been convinced by Jesus’ arguments, and Luke doesn’t give us any reason to believe anything that dramatic had happened. The most probable thing is that they simply applauded the fact that Jesus had put the Sadducees in their place. What was clear, though, was that Jesus was wise and knew the Scriptures beyond anything that anyone had ever seen. Asking him any more questions would have only invited more embarrassment so no one dared to try any more doctrine sniping with Jesus.

There is one other important point that we shouldn’t miss in this passage. Admittedly marriage is not the primary point of teaching here but Jesus did reveal something important about our understanding of marriage, although there simply isn’t the space here to develop this topic fully. Marriage was instituted by God from the very beginning (Gen. 2:24) as his ideal plan for humans to live in community in this age but Jesus here reveals that marriage will not last in its present form in the age to come. This is important because it means that there must be a specific purpose for marriage in this age beyond two people coming together to form a union for eternity. In Ephesians 5:25-32, Paul says: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . . In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies . . . . After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’. This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”

What Paul revealed here is that there is a purpose for marriage that stretches beyond marriage itself. He says distinctly that that marriage is a great mystery that teaches human beings about the truth of the relationship between Christ and his Church. The institution of marriage is not something designed to make humans happy but it is the context in which we can develop the holiness that God calls us to have as his people and to learn about the reconciliation between God and his people.


Devotional Thought
The Sadducees perfectly display a common technique among those who would try to fight against Scriptural truths even down to this day. They try to find outlandish and ridiculous scenarios to make God’s truth look ridiculous and shut up those who would embrace God’s truth. What can we learn from Jesus’ response here to help us in dealing with those types of ridicule? What can you learn from Jesus today that will better prepare you to answer those who would reject part or all of God’s word?