Mark 12:18-27 – God is God of the Living

BIBLE TEXT

Mark 12:18-27

SUMMARY

In their only appearance in Mark’s Gospel, the Sadducees attempt to draw Jesus into a legal debate about the resurrection. Jesus dismisses their question and asserts a new understanding of God’s relationship to the patriarchs.

ANALYSIS

The Sadducees appear only once in Mark’s Gospel and their appearance is related to one of their beliefs that sets them apart from their Jewish contemporaries. Unlike Jesus, the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and so they take this difference between them as an opportunity to test Jesus’ skills in legal argumentation.

At issue is a concept within the Mosaic law known as levirate marriage. Levirate marriage is the practice wherein a man marries his brother’s widow in order to produce children for them. The children would then be able to inherit the deceased man’s property and care for their mother in her old age. Debate over levirate marriage takes center stage in two Old Testament narratives that become part of Jesus’ genealogy in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Those authors trace Jesus’ lineage back to Ruth, who married Boaz through this practice, as well as through Tamar whose story focuses on the failure of men to understand the importance of levirate marriage.

In this case, the Sadducees use levirate marriage as a premise for constructing a hypothetical scenario meant to trap Jesus. They hope that the scenario they describe will force Jesus to either deny that some of the marriages were valid or to maintain that the woman is married to all seven husbands. As he did with other questions of this type, Jesus splits the Gordian knot by rejecting their premise all together. Of most interest is Jesus’ scriptural reasoning. In the Old Testament, the traditional phrase “God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob” was understood as a reference to the Israelite’s heritage and God’s kindness toward their ancestors in the past. Jesus takes God’s statement and interprets it as eternally present: God is still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and if he is still their God, there must be life remaining for them and that life will come in the resurrection.