Subtlety, subterfuge, strategic delay, even simple arrogance.  Students love to “stump the teacher.”  With riddles, circular arguments, rabbit trails and incomprehensible jargon, students delight in bemusing the teacher.  Used as a delaying tactic to avoid an assignment, undermine authority, or just to enter into a battle of wits, rarely is an attempt to “stump the teacher” intended to gain insight, knowledge or wisdom.  It is almost always an attack on authority or an attempt to derail the agenda.

It is possible I was that student.  The one who delighted to gum up the works in the classroom and frazzle the teacher with questions designed as stumpers.  But by God’s gracious providence, many of my teachers were strategically and intellectually more than a match for my impertinence.  Dr. Jessica Hunt, my high school math teacher would see my “stumpers’ coming a mile away.  With German frankness and lightening wit, she easily deflected my attempts to hijack discussion, graciously but firmly putting me in my place.  And Ms. Constance Sandidge, my 11^th grade English teacher would often say, “Howard Wheeler that is just nonsense!”

Language and intellect are God’s remarkable gifts to mankind, but in our fallenness, we often use them to sew together a flimsy verbal garment to shield us from shameful truths we don’t want to acknowledge.  One theologian noted regarding the Tower of Babel, that God confused the languages because through words we try to create an alternative reality to the one He created.  We adopt the mantras and memes of our time as the worldview that affirms us in our sinful choices and refuse to be challenged by the timeless truths of God’s Word. 

The Sadducees in the gospels are a perfect example of this.  Though wealthy, powerful, learned, and priestly, they preferred civil power to divine power, and contemporary opinions to timeless truth.  They rejected most of what the scriptures taught and, in fact, most of the OT scriptures as God’s Word.  They reduced the OT to the first five books of the Bible, disregarding the histories, the prophets, and the wisdom books as authoritative.  They rejected any belief in the immortality of the soul, angels, and the resurrection of the dead.  They rejected the promise of a Messiah.  They loved political power more than godliness, even though deeply connected to the priesthood and the sacrificial system. 

Jesus’ claims of authority threatened their place in society, their influence, and their affluence.   In John 11:25, Caiaphas, who was high priest during the last year of Jesus’ earthly life ironically declared, “do you [not] understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” 

While we rarely hear from the Sadducees, they, along with the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin, stand behind all the plots to silence Jesus.  And in Mark 12:17-27 they join the Pharisees, Herodians and scribes in the second of a series of three “stumper” questions.  Their aim is to embroil Jesus in either intellectual absurdity or a rejection the authority of scripture.  Either one of which will discredit him as a teacher and nullify his authority.  

And so, they present him with a straw-man scenario about seven brothers and a childless wife to mock the teaching about resurrection.  It was a famous theological riddle in Judaism that had long gone unanswered by those who taught a bodily resurrection.  Surely this would “stump the teacher” and derail his agenda.  But Jesus quickly spots that the problem is not in the puzzle but in the puzzlers.  The answer is really very simple. 

Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”

Life’s most puzzling problems have solutions rooted in the promises of God and in His power to keep them all.  Where are you looking for answers?  If you start in the wrong place you will surely end in the wrong place.  The Sadducees were smug and self-satisfied.  They sought no truth higher than their own experience and ignored the deeper realities of sin and redemption that consumed their daily lives in the ministry of the priesthood.  They had no hope beyond the things of this world and as Paul words aptly describe them,

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.  1 Corinthians 15:16-19

Join us as we examine Mark 12:17-27 and consider where we must begin to unravel the questions that stump us.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube.