A proper narrative of scriptures is based upon the power of God

By John Pearring

Saturday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
I Maccabees 6:1-13 
Luke 20:27-40

Our Saturday, 11/25/23, reading from Luke (20:27-40), challenges Jesus with a ruse — sloppy proof that heaven is a ridiculous concept. In Mark’s version of this encounter with skeptical Sadducees, Jesus answers the manufactured tale of a many-married woman in heaven by describing a crucial error in knowledge. 

Luke leaves out Mark’s important verse. The New Jerusalem Bible translated verse 24 in Chapter 12 of Mark: “Surely the reason why you are wrong is that you understand neither the scriptures nor the power of God.”

According to Jesus, the question posed by the Sadducees about an incomprehensible heaven — which confirmed they did not believe in heaven — comes from a narrow understanding of the observable world, a veiled pursuit of knowledge due to a limited grasp of divine power.

The Sadducees were classic modernists who made fun of positions that did not fit their narrative. Today’s framing, the construct of practically all science’s many branches, fits the same narrative. The observable world trumps all mystical and spiritual implications, including the divine.

Science is “the acquisition, through observation and experimentation, of knowledge in an evidentiary world.” Jesus told the Sadducees they did not know the scriptures or God. Their proposed problem of the woman in heaven didn’t include all the evidence. Jesus didn’t contradict their notions of mystical and spiritual things. He noted their dismissal, their mistaken distance from a critical portion of the evidence before them.

To observe the world, one needs to know how they should see, plus what and who they are looking at. The Sadducees were quoting scripture but had left out an essential element — how they should see.

Scripture provides the key to observation. Using every literary tool known to humankind, God explains who he is, his creation, sin and corruption, redemption, and the coming kingdom. The repetition of so many approaches to God’s teachings forms us to expect and discover a broader and deeper understanding of God. That Mark adds a critical verse is a marker for further study. 

Jesus assisted the Sadducees in seeing the meaning and purpose of the Word by presenting himself to them. He spoke with divine authority. When we only read the scriptures through our eyes, we ignore the lens God offers us. God’s telescope, microscope, and reading glasses uniquely focus on the Word. Our eyes see through a “glass darkly,” a dirty window. We resort to imagining most of what we think lies beyond this life with our limited observations.

We need God to show us what’s going on through his aperture, and that’s what Jesus did with the Sadducees.

He told them to surrender to the author of the universe. All power and authority comes from God. The power of God, by almost any definition, cannot be reigned in and bound by our limitations.

The Sadducees did not have a proper relationship with God. Consequently, they were misled by their premise for scientific understanding and were plugged into a power rife with missing insights and insufficient amperage. Worse, the power they chose to believe confused them.

Their misled state did not allow them to recognize the scriptural picture of resurrection. Jesus noted this temporary life. To the Sadducees, a seven-time married woman in this life would still be a seven-time married woman in any subsequent existence. A further life could not exist because of the narrow framework provided by the only life they could see. Everything dies. Resurrected life would be chaos. So, no resurrection.

Sadducees went further, as do today’s sciences. Angels, demons, and indeed any spiritual world creatures do not exist. Resurrection is absurd because life ends, and restructuring society and living conditions is a horror show.

Some commentators surmise that the Sadducees snickered when they challenged Jesus with their question. “Now then, at the Resurrection,” they posited, “whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?” He would not escape their clever framing.

Like so many skeptics today, the Sadducees disliked contradictions. They assumed that a restored body comes with all the same unsteady relationships, mental incapacities, physical deficiencies, and clumsy social order of the person who died. If you lost your reputation, it was still gone. When you turned into a man or woman, your childhood was gone. When you contracted leprosy, your health was gone.

Life restored doesn’t upend such fixed things. A resurrected life would return a person to the same messes and muddles they had left behind. Seven men, married in their first life to the same woman, point out the ultimate chaos for resurrection. Who would call her their wife in the next life?

The Sadducees were partially correct. Resurrection requires a life after death and a life with a restored body. Their restoration view, however, left out the initial design of creation, a perfect world populated by immortal beings. The initial creation chose death over life, not God.

The Sadducees also left out the ultimate conquering of death through the resurrected Body of Christ. The Sadducees only knew a world where sin ruled the universe.

At the time of Jesus, the evidence of his life, death, and resurrection, indeed the evidence of the coming Kingdom, sat hidden in the Talmud and writings of the Prophets. Jesus did not condemn the Sadducees. He said they had been misled. Theirs was a condition of a constrained, tightly packaged quasi-reality.

Today’s confused skeptics suffer from cognitive dissonance when truth confounds their grasp of things. They stumble, change the subject, and are forced to dismiss data that ultimately disputes their understanding. Jesus knew the Sadducees’ grasp and used it to truth’s advantage. “You have answered well,” the skeptics told him. 

We can only pray that the same truth Jesus spoke will convert today’s skeptics.

After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, the Sadducees disappeared over the next 40 years and were all but erased from history. In my imagination, their position likely fell apart after Jesus’ teaching. If not, the Sadducees died as they had lived. There would be no afterlife, no resurrection, and no angels would come to their aid.

On our secular modern world stage, the Sadducee narrative has returned to power. The evidence presented to the world through their eyes reflects a limited God, incapable of restoring the universe or crafting the coming Kingdom. Scripture remains a mystery of parables and a series of unbelievable tales. The Word is a dusty book, modernists believe. The one who died and rose again is a fairy tale at best.

This falsely elevated stage creaks underneath the painted surface. Jesus lived among those who followed him, and he is reforming creation in the Eucharist, the Church, and the indwelled Spirit. We are the evidence of the Word. It is written upon our hearts. We are not misled by a corralled science, and a boxed in God.

The prayers of we, the supplicants, are heard by the glorious presence of the Almighty God. The angels are sent to heal us, removing the darkness in our eyes so we can again see God’s sunlight. We are free to join together because the same angels are driving the wicked from us. We are already being restored by a God who loves us. We all suffer from cognitive dissonance, and God can reorient our knowledge and vision of the Church. This allows us to be proper witnesses to others.