Not the God of the Dead

We might think of the Sadducees as the conservatives of first century Jerusalem. Many of the ideas floating around the fragmented and fractious world of Judaism prior to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD struck the Sadducees as new-fangled and altogether unsupported by the Torah. So a few days before Sadducean chief priests conspire to have Jesus executed by the Roman authorities, a group of Sadducees conspire to trap Jesus with a question designed to make his belief in the resurrection seem foolish, even silly. But the Sadducees hadn't reckoned with the magnitude of God's power or the extent to which he would go to keep his covenant promise to rescue a wayward humanity from death.