Jesus, for His part, answers quite seriously. Do ye not therefore err?
He says. The meaning of " therefore " (δια τουτο) has been disputed. It is often read in
an anticipative sense, as if Jesus meant: Are you not misled for this reason,
that you are ignorant of the Scriptures and of the power of God? Weiss says
this has no analogy in the New Testament. However this may be, it is certainly
more natural, and yields a deeper and more apposite meaning, to make the words
retrospective. The very question of the Sadducees-the very fact that they have
stated such a monstrous case-shows, not that the life of the world to come is
totally incredible, but that they have totally misconceived it. They have
assumed that it must simply reproduce this life, and renew all its relations;
whereas, according to Jesus, it is so constituted (ver. 25) that questions
involving these relations, in certain aspects, can never arise there at all.
Marriage has its roots in nature, has reference to the succession of
generations on earth, is what it is, so far, because of man's mortality; but
where there is no death, there is no marrying nor giving in marriage, and
therefore the question is inept.
This, of course, is not to be misunderstood, as if in the life to come
there would be no relation, or no peculiar relation, between those who have
been intimately connected here. All it denies is that there will be any natural
relation out of which the difficulty of the Sadducees could arise. But what of
that? Even on earth, that which is merely natural ought to pass, and in every
true marriage actually passes, into something spiritual. Husband and wife not
only become one flesh, but one mind, one soul, one spirit. This relation, which
has grown out of the other, or into which the other has been raised and
transfigured, does not perish with it; on the contrary, it is capable of
immortality and destined for it. The man and the woman who, to borrow St. Paul's
words, "are not without each other in the Lord" here, will not be
without each other in the Lord there. They will owe the completeness of their
Christian life to each other even in the resurrection world. This truth, which
cannot be touched by the vulgar puzzle of the Sadducees, ought to be noted in
all its generality. A natural relation, whatever it may be-of husband and wife,
of parent and child, of brothers and sisters in the same family -has no
necessary permanence. All experience shows this. Such relations either lapse
into nothingness,-a shocking phenomenon, but by no means rare,-or by God's
blessing are elevated into spiritual ones, which have the capacity and the
promise of immortality in them. One of the best blessings which the faith in
immortality brings is its hallowing influence on the natural affections. It
begins at the very beginning that transformation of them which secures to us
their joy for ever.But Jesus not only declares, he explains the error of the
Sadducees. They were the enlightened people of their day, and despised the
believers as fanatics and obscurantists, but it was on their own side that the
darkness lay. Doubt should be humble, and there is a severe reproof in the
words of our Lord: Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.
Here our Saviour clearly teaches that the Scriptures, meaning of
course the Old Testament, contain a revelation of immortality. It may not lie
on the surface, nor be visible to a careless or Sadducean reader, but it is
there. If Jesus saw it, as He did, it is idle for verbal interpreters to say
that they cannot find it in so many words. The very scripture that Jesus quotes
has been the subject of pedantic comment. "Have ye not read in the book of
Moses, at the bush, how God said to him, I am the God of Abraham, and the God
of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the
living." What kind of logic, it is said, have we here? Plainly the words
mean, "I am He who was the God of Abraham," and then the argument for
immortality is gone. To lay stress on the present tense (I am the God) is
inadmissible, if for no other reason than that the verb is not expressed either
in Greek or Hebrew idiom. But this line of objection is beside the mark. Jesus
does not argue from the tenses, like a grammarian, but from the spiritual
relations involved in the case; the revelation of immortality is made in this,
that God has pledged Himself to man to be his God. The goodness and
faithfulness of our Creator, and the value of our human life to Him: it is
there that the promise lies. Faith in immortality is an immediate inference
from faith in God. Once we know what He is to man, and what man is to Him,
eternal hope is born. Because He lives, they who are His shall live also. Can we
exhaust the friendship of God in seventy years? Or, on the other hand, can we
believe that He really loves us, takes pains to guide us, to teach us, to
discipline our character, to raise us from natural into spiritual life, to make
us His children, only that at the end of so short a time he may let souls so
dear to Him, that have so loved Him and been so loved, that have cost so much,
go out into the dark, and never miss them? No, God is not so loveless, and
cannot be so bereaved. Neither death nor life will pluck His children out of
His hand.
This is the spirit in which Jesus reads the Scriptures, and finds in
them a revelation of immortality. And it is remarkable that wherever the great
hope comes clearly to the surface in the Old Testament, it is in this spiritual
connection. "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took
him." When a man has walked with God, this is the only possible issue of
his life. God takes him ; not nature, not disease, not an accident, not
death, but He whose friendship gave life the promise of eternity. And so
repeatedly in the Psalms. "I am continually with Thee; Thou hast holden my
right hand." Here is the experience of God's friendship, close,
uninterrupted, and faithful, which works the supreme hope, and the hope shines
out in what immediately follows. " Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel,
and afterward receive me to glory." The writer of these words argues
precisely as Jesus does in the passage before us; he feels that what God is to
man-God who is from everlasting to everlasting-is so great, so tender, so
divine a thing, that even death cannot touch it. In the last darkness he can
say, "I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me." We find, too, the
same interpretation of the same subject in that magnificent passage in Hebrews
(xi. 13-16), the boldest in expression of any in the New Testament, which
speaks of the faith of the patriarchs. " Now they desire a better country,
that is, a heavenly, wherefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their
God, for He hath prepared for them a city." It is God, the writer means,
whose faithful love, experienced all through this life, calls forth in the
hearts of His people a hope which goes beyond life; it is God's present
goodness which has the promise of an immeasurable, inexhaustible goodness as
yet unseen. And God dare not frustrate the hope He has Himself inspired. He
would be ashamed to be called our God, if He led His people to live and die in
an expectation that was never to be fulfilled. Christ tells us, for His part,
that He would not have suffered an illusory hope to root itself in His
disciples' hearts. "In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were
not so, I would have told you." The whole argument for immortality is
there; it is God who inspires the hope, and God is faithful. (James Denney, “The
Sadducees and Immortality. Mark XII. 18-27,” The Expositor Fourth series
10, no. 6 [December 1894]: 402-6)
