Week 9 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: 2 Timothy 1:1-3, 6-12; Psalm122 (123); Mark 12:18-22

Arguments against another person's religious beliefs often take the form of trying to make those beliefs appear irrational, absurd and ridiculous. Even if faith is beyond reason, expanding the horizon of reason and giving it new things to think about, believers still want it to be rational. We believe that what seems to us now to be paradoxical and even contradictory will be seen not to be so when the mysteries are finally illuminated for us.

Jesus is on the receiving end of such a criticism in today's gospel, an attempt to show that what he believes is ridiculous. A woman ends up marrying seven brothers in fulfilment of the Law - whose wife will she be in the afterlife? The Sadducees, who put the question, did not believe in the resurrection of the dead - their question aims at showing such belief to be absurd. Other such arguments in the ancient world asked how there would be space for everyone, or who the rightful owners of property would be if it had been occupied and used by different people at different times.

Jesus responds 'in kind' to the Sadducees. He does not do what he normally does in answering questions, shifting the argument to a deeper level of understanding. He simply compounds what they would have regarded as nonsense by speaking not just of resurrection but of angels - the Sadducees did not believe in them either!

But the main point of his response is the second part, where he invites them to think again about God, and how God speaks of himself, as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Here they were on shared ground. The Sadducees would have accepted this. 'And you think He is the God of the dead?', Jesus asks, a question which now threatens their faith with absurdity. They cannot say 'yes, he is God of the dead' but saying 'no' implies that the patriarchs are alive in God.

The encounter is unsatisfactory, perhaps the most unsatisfactory in all of the gospels. Nobody comes to believe in Jesus as a result of it, nobody agrees to follow Jesus onto a deeper level of understanding. It serves to remind us that this kind of religious argument is usually sterile, leaving all the participants in exactly the same place as they were at the beginning.

Jesus does make an effort, even if it seems uncharacteristically restrained. He not only counters their argument but invites them to think again - about their understanding of God, about God's power in creation and what it might reach to (invisible realities as well as visible), about the testimony of scripture (he appeals to Exodus, part of the Torah, the only section of the Bible the Sadducees regarded as authoritative) that Israel's Lord is God of the living.

The Sadducees - the high priestly caste, guardians of the Temple system - were at the heart of the opposition to Jesus and were a main target of his criticism of contemporary religious practice. The encounter we read about today is just the opening skirmish in what was to become an ever more violent rejection of Jesus and an ever more vocal, and even violent, critique by him of what the Temple system was doing to Israel's faith. 

The final answer to their skeptical question comes later, with the resurrection of Jesus himself after they had brought about his death. And - horror of horrors! - the fact of his resurrection will be announced to the women by 'a young man dressed in white' (Mark 16:5). He was, it seems, the angel of the resurrection.