Mk 12:18-27
18Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] and put this question to him, 19saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, ‘If someone’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.’ 20Now there were seven brothers. The first married a woman and died, leaving no descendants. 21So the second married her and died, leaving no descendants, and the third likewise. 22And the seven left no descendants. Last of all the woman also died.
23At the resurrection [when they arise] whose wife will she be? For all seven had been married to her.” 24Jesus said to them, “Are you not misled because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God? 25When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven. 26As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, [the] God of Isaac, and [the] God of Jacob’? 27He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled.”
RESURRECTION: Resurrection from the dead can be understood either as the restoration of a dead person to the conditions of the present life or as the conferring upon the deceased of a new and permanent form of life. The first is properly called resuscitation, while resurrection in the second sense is the real object of biblical belief. Resurrection as restoration of natural life is found in the stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Jesus himself restored the life of the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Naim, and his friend Lazarus. Resurrection to a new life was something the Jews looked forward to, when the righteous among the dead would be raised collectively. It is said of Jesus who rose on the third day. It is his resurrection to glory and immortality.
Resurrection is a late belief in Israel; the Old Testament is generally silent about the afterlife. Passages about the dead rising were used metaphorically of Israel’s restoration or as prayers of hope, a cry from the heart, against the inevitability of death. The belief evolved only in Hellenistic times, influenced partly by belief in the immortality of the soul.
In Jesus’ time, the resurrection was believed by the Pharisees and most of the people. The Sadducees, as the evangelist notes in the Gospel, rejected it. Jesus clearly taught the resurrection from the dead in his arguments with the Sadducees.
The resurrection of Jesus is the watershed of belief in the resurrection. It is the resurrection of the Messiah, which designates Jesus as the Son of God. It is nothing less than a new creation, the inauguration of the new age of glory.