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(Parallels: Mat_22:23-33; Mar_12:18-27.)
Sadducees.—In order to judge aright their conduct, as also to judge aright Jesus’ way of acting with reference to it, we must first remark that they, when they speak of the resurrection, mean thereby not merely the continuance of the soul after death, but also the bodily revivification of the dead, which the popular faith expected at the ðáñïõßá of the Messiah. They conceived the seven brothers, not as successively reanimated one after another subsequently to death, but as awakened contemporaneously with the last deceased woman ἐí ἐó÷Üôῃ ἡìÝñᾳ , and cannot now imagine with whom she must then anew connect herself. Secondly, that they knew this doctrine only in the travestied, grossly sensuous form, in which the pride and the earthly-mindedness of their days had clothed it, and with this form reject therefore the idea that lies at its basis. The case feigned by them had been perhaps often used by themselves, or by those of their sentiments, in order vividly to set forth the unreasonableness of this popular faith. Finally, that they had hitherto appeared less publicly and less hostilely than the Pharisees against our Lord, on which account also He does not deal with them so severely as with the others. As frivolous friends of the world, they had hitherto moreover felt themselves less than the proud Pharisees offended and injured by our Lord. But before the end of His public life it was to appear, as it actually does in this interview, that unbelief and earthly-mindedness hate and assail the King of truth, not less than the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.
Luk_20:28. Moses wrote unto us.—See Deu_25:5-10. “Thus do they commence, purposing to prove irrefutably (although they, scarcely suppressing derisive laughter, only propose a question as to this), that this Moses in this, as in all his laws, cannot possibly have presupposed a resurrection.” Stier. By the representation of the palpable unreasonableness of the belief in it, they wish to furnish an indirect apology for their own unbelief. Since the whole emphasis, in the case here presupposed, must be laid upon the fact that children are not left behind, we cannot be surprised that this, Luk_20:31, is mentioned even before the ἀðÝèáíïí .
Luk_20:34. And Jesus answering.—The very fact that our Lord accounts so unreasonable a question, and one proposed with so dubious an intent, yet worth the honor of an answer, may be regarded as a sign of His condescending grace; but in particular the contents and tone of His words are a striking revelation of His wisdom and love. He answers this time not as in the former case with a cutting stroke, but with a more extended development of thought. Matthew communicates it simply and definitely; Mark gives a livelier dramatic representation thereof (comp., e. g., Mar_12:24 with Mat_22:29); Luke goes a freer way, and has here also some singularia of the utmost importance, Luk_20:34-36. Comp. with Mat_22:30; Mar_12:25. On the other hand he passes over the beautiful commencement of the discourse of our Lord: Mat_22:29; Mar_12:24, in which Jesus discloses the twofold source of their censurable error.
The children of this world.—Not an intimation of the moral character of the men who are here described (De Wette), as in Luk_16:8, but in general all who live in the pre-Messianic period of the world.—They marry and are given in marriage.—This is not here, as in Luk_17:27, stated as a proof of carelessness and worldly-mindedness, but on the other hand as a consequence of their present condition, which however shall cease with the beginning of the new period of the world.— ÊáôáîéùèÝíôåò .—Those who are accounted worthy to inherit the future world (comp. 2Th_1:5) are those in whom the moral conditions for the attainment of future blessedness are found.
Luk_20:35. To obtain that world.—The Messianic áἰþí is conceived as coinciding with the resurrection of the righteous, Luk_14:14, which is here exclusively spoken of. It is a privilege which is not communicated to all, but only to the ἐêëåêôïῖò , while those who at the moment of the ðáñïõóßá have not died but are found yet living, are here not farther spoken of. But of those who have become participants of the highest privilege and have been awakened to the new life, our Lord now declares that they then never marry nor are given in marriage. In other words, the whole question of the Sadducees rests upon an incorrect conception of the future life. Marriage is here represented simply by occasion of the case feigned as the summary of all merely sensual, sexual relations; essentially the same thing is taught which Paul announces, 1Co_15:50.
Luk_20:36. For neither can they die any more.—The cause, why there is then no longer any need of any marriage or any need of sexual propagation, since death has now ceased to reign, nay, has become a physical impossibility, while previously it might have been called a law of nature.—For they are equal unto the angels, ἰóἀããåëïé . In Matthew and Mark: ὡò Ü ̓ ããåëïé ïἱ ἐí ôïῖò ïὐñáí . With masterly tact our Lord here, by the way, vindicates against the Sadducees the belief in the existence of angels as personal beings, Act_23:8. At the same time it appears from this that the holy angels are raised not only above the danger, but also above the possibility, of dying. Finally: They are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection (sharers in the resurrection). This last statement brings us here to the idea of a Divine sonship, not in the ethical, as in Mat_5:9, but in the physical, sense, as in Luk_3:38. God is the ground of a new life imparted to them, and they may therefore be called His children; other children and therefore other marriages have no longer a place. By a so purely spiritual representation of the life of the resurrection, Pharisaism is at the same time opposed, which continually loved most to dream of a feast in the bosom of the patriarchs: “Jesus shows that both parties, the Pharisaical and the Sadducean, were involved in like error, and that neither had grasped the higher sense of the Scripture nor a just idea of God.” Von Ammon, Leben Jesu, iii. p. 216.
Luk_20:37. ̓ Åãåßñïíôáé .—So firm stands this hope before the eye of our Lord, that He speaks not in the future but in the present, without this, however, entitling us to assume that He taught a resurrection ensuing immediately after death.
Even Moses has disclosed.—“Note the carefully chosen ἐìÞíõóåí , which denotes the proclaiming of something hidden. Êáὶ Ìùûóῆò . Even Moses, to whom ye appeal for the proof of the direct opposite.” Meyer. As to the question how far this appeal of our Saviour to the Pentateuch affords a proof that the Sadducees acknowledged only this part of the Old Testament canon, see Lange on Mat_22:31; and as to the force of the argument which our Lord here uses for the doctrine of personal immortality, see Stier, ad loc. If here nothing but a dialectical dexterity and Rabbinical hermeneutics had been displayed, our Saviour’s answer would then hardly have made so deep and mighty an impression. It is true, in the words: “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” the primary sense is: “The God who during their life was the protecting God of these men,” and it would of itself, from the fact that God had once protected them, not necessarily follow that this protection still endured centuries later. But the protecting God had been at the same time the covenant God; at the establishment of the Covenant, there had a personal communion between Creator and creature come into existence, and since He therein named Himself their God, He had therewith assured to them the full enjoyment of His favor and fellowship. And should this enjoyment restrict itself only to the limits of this life? Of a being that had lived in fellowship with God, should there soon be nothing more extant than a handful of dust and ashes? Would not God be ashamed to name Himself centuries after their decease a God of wasting corpses? Impossible! Then He would at all events have had to say: “I have been the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God as the Personal One contracts a covenant with men, and calls Himself after them. They must therefore be eternal, because they are the children of the Covenant of the everlasting God.
Luk_20:38. For Him all are living.—This sentence Luke adds to the declaration which he has in common with Matthew and Mark, “God is not a God of the dead, but of the living.” A sublime declaration, especially if we do not limit the ðÜíôåò to the íåêñïß alone, but refer it to all creatures, which we commonly distinguish into living and dead. This distinction is in the Divine view entirely removed: for Him, áὐôø ͂, there are only living ones, whether they may have breathed out their breath or not. This is a proof, therefore, that even the death of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could be for God no hindrance to be called enduringly their God. The visible world of men and the invisible world of spirits both stand before God’s eye as one communion of living ones. Into the question of the connection between the uninterrupted life of souls after death, and the future resurrection of the body, our Lord does not here particularly enter.
Luk_20:39. And certain of the Scribes.—Perhaps some of the Sadducees belonged to these, and therefore gave utterance to a better feeling than the wonted one, but more probably we have here to understand them as being Pharisees, who it is likely had not all left the field, and who certainly could never have been more inclined to forget their recent defeat, and frankly and openly to praise our Lord, than just now, after He had thus publicly humbled their deadly enemies. Luke expressly points us (Luk_20:40) to the fact that this extorted praise came in the place of farther questions, which no one ventured longer to address to the Saviour. In order not to be entirely superfluous, they render homage to the Victor, while they do not venture any longer to challenge the enemy again. From Mat_22:34-40 and Mar_12:28-34, it appears however that after the Sadducees, there still came forward a scribe with the question respecting the chief commandment. See Lange, ad loc.
2. In order to do full justice to the argument here used by our Lord for the resurrection, we must recognize that this rests not upon the abstract grammatical signification of the words in themselves, but upon the rich sense of the whole declaration, and that our Saviour does not assert that in this utterance the resurrection is taught, but only that it is thereby silently presupposed. By a just deduction, He derives the hope of eternal life from a declaration in which certainly no one without this index would have discovered it. What He finds therein is, however, primarily nothing more than the germ of a faith against which they scoffingly come forward, but a germ which, for His celestially clear view, was perfectly and necessarily contained therein. He shows therefore here in a striking manner how, even in the oldest documents, declarations appear which, if they are maturely weighed, must have necessarily led to faith in immortality, although thereby it is not meant that He could not have cited any stronger and more unequivocal declarations concerning these from the Prophets and Psalms. No wonder that even in later Rabbins, the proof here brought by Jesus is often repeated in a different way, and therefore at the same time an indirect confirmation of its usefulness has been afforded. See Schöttgen, Horœ hebr. ad h. l.
3. A very special attention is deserved by the exceedingly peculiar manner in which our Lord here establishes the doctrine of the resurrection. Far removed from the position of philosophers, who seek to deduce their ideas of immortality from the nature of the human soul, and therefore will demonstrate the doubted by the unknown, He finds on the other hand the firmest ground of eternal life in the personal fellowship of man with God. But herewith He gives us also indirectly to know that man, for the full persuasion of His own immortality, must first have become assured of personal fellowship with God, and have become conscious of it. He thereby points the Sadducees to the inmost ground of their doubts, which lies nowhere else than in the sundering of their inner life from Him, and designates at the same time the true ground of hope for the future, and the sole way to perfect certainty thereof. The religious philosophy and apologetics of earlier and later times, would certainly have lost nothing if they had followed this example more faithfully, and had not adventured the attempt to demonstrate the immortality of the soul to those who do not as yet believe in the living God, and have not even a faint conception of personal fellowship with Him. The deepest experience of our own heart teaches us that without these premises the faith in immortality is partly uncertain, partly unrefreshing, and that man, so long as he has not found God, loses also himself. This way moreover all the believers of the Old, nay, even those of the New Testament have walked; only after they knew themselves assured of God and His favor, did they gain certainty also of eternal life. See Psa_16:10-11; Psa_73:25-26; Psa_84:12; Rom_8:38-39. But this inmost ground of divine hope is absolutely impregnable, so long at least as all the nerves of the inward religious life are not destroyed.
4. The question whether and how far the immortality of the soul is taught in the Old Testament is by this utterance of our Saviour sufficiently answered. Certainly, as a dogma that could be dogmatically proved by a number of loci classici, this doctrine in the Old Testament is not present in a developed form. The reference to reward and punishment in the future life, would have been in the whole Mosaic economy no profitable, but rather a heterogeneous, disturbing element. Only through the gospel, and not through the law, could life and immortality be brought to light, 2Ti_1:10. Immortality was therefore no such dogma of the Old Testament as, for instance, the unity and holiness of Jehovah. Comp. Hävernick, Vorlesungen über die Theologie des A. T. pp. 105–111. This however does not exclude the fact, that for the individual expectation of believers, there existed a firm ground and wide field. If any one was conscious that God was his God, then he knew also that He would everlastingly remain so, and that whoever had experienced His fellowship might fall asleep in the hope of hereafter beholding His face in righteousness, Psa_17:15. Taking all together, we may say that the hope of a Jacob, a David, an Asaph, and others, was quite as firm but not quite as clear as that of the sons of the New Covenant is. “Moreover we have here to consider what doctrine of immortality is understood.—The rationalistic doctrine is nothing better than the doctrine of Sheol. Everything depends upon gaining the conception of life after death, not that of bare existence. The latter has no religious interest whatever.”
5. The conception of God, from which our Saviour here proceeds: God, no dead unit but the living God, is not only that of the Old but also that of the New Covenant, and the metaphysical foundation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. A similar relation to that between God and the creature exists also between our Lord and His people, since His life in them is the inmost ground of their immortal life, see Joh_14:19.
6. From this didactic discourse of our Lord, it results that the Christian conception of angels has not only an æsthetical and ontological, but also a very decided practical significance. As the angels stand in personal relation to man (see Luk_2:14; Luk_15:10), so are we also called hereafter to take part in their joy; and whoever now affirms that there are no angels whatever, converts thereby the prospect opened to us by our Lord, of becoming hereafter ἰóÜããåëïé , into a vain illusion.
7. The declaration that those who have risen again do not marry, but are like the angels, has often been used as an indirect argument against the angelic hypothesis of Kurtz a. o. on Gen_6:2. On the other hand, we must not fail to note that our Saviour speaks undoubtedly of that Which the angels do not do, but not of that which they never could do, and that the present purely spiritual life of the angels may very well have been preceded by a previous catastrophe or fall of some of them.
8. With utter injustice some have seen in that which our Lord says about marrying and giving in marriage, an indirect disparagement of marriage. The history of celibacy proves, in opposition to these, what consequences the anticipation of the angelic state here portrayed has for public and private morality. “Grace and the Holy Ghost do not remove the propensities of nature, nor destroy them, as the monks dreamed, but where nature is distorted the Holy Ghost heals it and puts it exultingly on its feet, brings it again to its true condition.” Luther. It even appears indirectly from the Levirate law, that a second marriage cannot possibly have in itself anything immoral. But this doctrine does indeed imply an earnest warning against such matrimonial connections as establish no higher than a merely sensual fellowship. Not as man and wife, but ἰóÜãåëïé , shall the redeemed see one another again, and only that in married love is eternal which in its ground is spiritual. From this position we learn to understand the counsel of the Apostle, 1Co_7:29-31.
9. In the example of our Lord an important intimation is given to Apologists, how they also may best vindicate against the Sadducees of our day the revealed truth; in such wise, that is, that they place themselves on the impregnable ground of the Scriptures; that they show how the imperfect form in which the truth is represented, does not of itself entitle us to reject its substance also as unreasonable; that they lay bare the innermost grounds of the ignorance which conceals itself behind the escutcheon of all so-called, highly vaunted science. In this way even the simplest Christian gains the right of exclaiming to the apostles of unbelief: ðïëὺðëáíᾶóèå !
Starke:—Cramer:—God’s word becomes to many the savor of death unto death, 2Co_2:16.—Brentius:—The posterity of the Pharisees and Sadducees have ever wrought great harm to Christendom, and there is in the last days even something worse to be feared, 2Ti_3:1.—The devil is a singular enemy of marriage.—Bibl. Wirt:—Human reason searches out in matters of religion unreasonable, things wherewith to subvert the truth of the Divine word.—Let men content themselves with what Christ has revealed to us of the future world.—Quesnel:—The remembrance and recompense of the righteous cannot be lost.—When a man’s ways please the Lord, He maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.—The silence of enemies not always a sign of conversion.
Heubner:—Insipid as this objection of the Sadducees is, quite as insipid are all others against the facts in the life of Christ.—The darkening or suppression of the Scriptures has either despotism in the faith, or anarchy in the faith, as its result.—Belief in the angels pervades the most intimate and highest relations of man.—It is very comprehensible why the Scripture even here reveals to us many things concerning the angels.—Christ’s argument no empty, delusive argument êáô ̓ Ü ̓ íèñùðïí , as the heroes of accommodation say.—Arndt:—The repulse of the Sadducees: 1. The assault; 2. the defence; 3. the consequences resulting therefrom.—W. Hofacker:—Christ over against the Sadducees of His and our day. We direct our eyes: 1. To the Sadducees; and 2. to the position which Christ has taken in reference to them.—C. Palmer:—God, a God not of the dead but of the living.—On this rests a. the hope of eternal life to those whose God He is, b. but whoever will have such hope must become spiritually living.—Tholuck:—On the feast of the dead: Before God the dead live (Pred. ii. p. 264 seq.).—Another in the six sermons upon Religious Questions of the Time, 1845, 1846, p. 60 seq., and at the feast of the dead: Whereby may a man become firm in his faith in an eternal life?—Dr. B. ter Haar, Theological Professor in Utrecht:—For Him all are living: 1. They live; 2. they live to God; 3. they all live to Him. Therefore an imperishable, a holy, a blessed, a social life.—Van Oosterzee:—They are equal to the angels of God in heaven: 1. What there will fall away? What is incompatible with angelic perfection. Our Lord says the angels marry not, sin not, die not; we shall therefore cease to be a. sensuous, b. sinful, c. mortal, beings; 2. What will there remain? what is kindred to angelic perfection: a. the angelic purity that was here striven after, b. the angelic love that was here cherished, c. the angelic joy that was here tasted; 3. What will there begin? what arises from angelic perfection: a. higher development, b. more perfect communion, c. more unlimited complacency of God, than the soul here upon earth enjoys.—In conclusion, the momentousness of this teaching of our Saviour: 1. For the frivolous Sadducees; 2. the high-minded Pharisees; 3. the sincere but weak disciples even of the present day.
Footnotes:
Luk_20:30.—[Omit all after the figure,] according to the reading of B., [Cod. Sin.,] L., 157. The greater fulness of the Recepta appears to have arisen from old glosses and from a certain impulse of completion. See details in Tischendorf.
Luk_20:33.—The most exact arrangement of words appears to be that of B., L.: ἡ ãõíὴ ïῦ ̓ í ἐí ôῇ ἀíáóôÜóåé , ê . ô . ë ., “The woman, therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife does she become of the seven?” [Cod. Sin. has simply: å . ô . á . ôéíïò åóôáé ãõíç .—C. C. S.]
Luk_20:34.—The ἀðïêñéèåßò of the Recepta is apparently only an interpolation from the parallel.
[Luk_20:37.— Ἐðὶ ôῆò âÜôïõ , i. e., in the division of Exodus which takes its name from the account of the burning bush. As is known, the division of verses not being used anciently, the only way of referring to a particular passage was to designate it by the name of some remarkable person, or object, or circumstance mentioned in it. Comp. Rom_11:2.—C. C. S.]
[Luk_20:38.— Èåὸò äὲ ïὐê ἔóôéí íåêñῶí ἀëëὰ æþíôùí . It is hard to translate this so as to make it both perspicuous and concise. “A God of the dead … of the living,” implies that the dead and the living are regarded as two actually existing classes, in which sense it would be, of course, impious to affirm that God was not the God of both. The absence of the article before íåêñῶí and æþíôùí of course indicates that they are conceived indefinitely, as two possible classes, of which it is denied that the former can have any covenant relations with God. As God affirms, nevertheless, that the departed patriarchs still stand in covenant relation to Him, the inference is necessary, that they cannot be íåêñïß in any true sense. They (and all their spiritual posterity) are destined to immortal life.—C. C. S.]
[Luk_20:40.—Van Oosterzee rightly reads ãÜñ , with Tischendorf, Meyer, Tregelles, Alford, on the authority of B., L., (Cod. Sin.,) 5 cursives, and the Coptic version. As Meyer remarks, ãÜñ was not understood. It was not perceived that the subsequent silence of the scribes was foretokened in the unwonted modesty into which they had been awed, and which appears in their concluding remark.—C. C. S.]