The Pharisees and the Sadducees: the Democrats and the Republicans, the Liberals and the Conservatives of Jesus' day. But just like today, just as not all Democrats or all Republicans think and act alike, just as not all Democrats are liberals and not all Republicans are conservatives, so not all Pharisees or all Sadducees all agreed on every issue. It is true, however, that the Pharisees had the support of the common people while the Sadducees had the support of those in power. In fact the high priests were mainly Sadducees.

We don’t hear too much about the Sadducees in the Gospels, certainly not as much as we hear about the Pharisees. The reason for that is that the Pharisees tended to be out among the people more than the Sadducees and thus in more contact with Jesus than the Sadducees. Because Jesus is so often seen in confrontation with the Pharisees, we can easily get the impression that Jesus disagreed with them more often than not.

The truth is just the opposite. Jesus, if he was to be labeled, was more a Pharisee than a Sadducee. Where Jesus and the Pharisees locked horns was not about the Law or the importance of the Law. Both agreed that the Law was given by God for the betterment of the people, to be a source of instruction and a guide to their daily living. Rather when Jesus took on the Pharisees, it was not about a point of the Law so much as the fact that the Pharisees seemed to demand more from the people than they demanded of themselves. That Jesus would not tolerate.

While the Pharisees often made exceptions to the Law and truly understood that the Law was made for human beings and not the other way around, the Sadducees held the Law to be primary and allowed few if any exceptions. Sometimes, in their strict observance of the Law, they could make themselves look like fools, as certainly was the case in today’s Gospel reading.

The case they pose to Jesus, while far-fetched, had a valid point according to the Law. A man’s property could only be handed on to a male heir, not a female, only a male. If a man died without a male heir, the Law demanded that his brother marry his widow and produce a male heir. The brother obviously would now have two wives. The poor woman in the Sadducees’ story eventually had seven husbands and died childless. Silly story, but both probable and one that fulfilled the demands of the Law.

The reason why the Sadducees made up this story in the first place was that they wanted to trap Jesus. They knew that Jesus like a good Pharisee believed in the resurrection of the dead. He taught it and taught it openly. The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. They simply concocted a crazy-enough story they believed would make resurrection talk look and seem quite foolish.

To be sure, neither the Pharisees nor the Sadducees understood what life in death was all about. The Pharisees believed that death was not the end of life, but did not know what kind of life awaited them in death. They wanted to believe there was something more.

Perhaps they wanted to believe in resurrection because they believed that God was good and that God would reward in a life to come those who did good in this life but seemed to come up short when it came to this life’s blessings. Perhaps. To be sure, belief in a resurrection of the dead was a relatively new belief among the Jews. Neither Abraham nor Moses nor any of the prophets taught there would be a resurrection of the dead.

The Sadducees, unlike the Pharisees, believed as Jews believed for centuries that at the end of this life, that is it. There is no more. If we live a good life and seem to have more bad happen to us than we deserve, so be it. If we are scoundrels in this life and seem to have more than our fair share of good fortune, so be it. That’s the way it happens. Nothing we can do about it but accept it. They were skeptics, to say the least. And so in their unbelief about life in death, they came to Jesus with a question they were sure would stump him.

Of course, as always, Jesus turned the tables on his adversaries and simply pointed out to them that they had no idea about what life in death is all about and not because they did not believe in it either. Neither the Sadducees nor the Pharisees, nor any of Jesus’s followers, for that matter, nor we today as well, have any idea what life in death is all about. We simply believe in the resurrection to life everlasting.

What that means and what it will be like, we have no earthly idea. We simply believe. That is not to say that we do not want to know, would not like at least a glimmer of understanding about what awaits us in death. We do and we would. But we don’t and we can’t. We simply believe, and for believers, that is enough.

In the meantime, in the meantime, we still have a lot of living to do – and that is precisely Jesus’ point to the Sadducees. Jesus once said to someone who wanted to follow him but who asked to delay beginning his discipleship until he buried his father to let the dead bury the dead. In the same way Jesus is saying to the Sadducees, let God worry about what life in death is like. Between now and then take care of the here-and-now.

Our God is a God of the dead as well as a God of the living, but God is certainly not dead. God is very much alive, alive in us. For God truly does most of the work God does in this world in and through you and me. That is why God blesses us. That is why we have the gifts we do. When we are called to see and seek and serve the Jesus we see in everyone we meet and when we do precisely that, what we are doing is doing God’s work here on earth. When we refuse to see Jesus in another, God’s work is left undone.

If there are those in this world who believe that God is dead or that there is no God, perhaps one of the reasons they so believe might be the fact that they do not see those of us who believe in God doing the work, the ministry God calls us to do. For the truth is that whenever we deliberately refuse to love as God loves us, what we are in fact saying is that God is dead for us.

It is not enough for us to simply say that we believe in God. It is not enough to say in prayers as we did in today’s Psalm, "I will exalt you, o God my King, and bless your Name for ever and ever." Words are important. What we do, how we live out what we say we believe, is even more important. But the truth is that we exalt God, we bless God’s name by living our lives the way God would have us live them.

The Sadducees got caught in their own trap. What was ultimately important even in their way of thinking was not who would be married to whom in the life to come but whether or not we lived as God wants us to live in this life. In the example they gave to Jesus the people involved were doing just that. They were doing what their Law and their faith demanded.