The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
November 7, 2010
Vol. 13 no. 44
Is there any such thing as a saintly Sadducee? Sure, there had to be one or even one hundred, but their definition of what a saint was different from ours: you were holy insofar as you followed perfectly all the written law. Despite their intimidating demeanour few were perfect candidates.
Sadducees are the Greek rendition of “the Righteous Ones,” true believers in the written Word, the Torah, who would only accept the literal sense from the Scriptures, true fundamentalists. The Pharisees considered the Oral Law - interpretations of the Scriptures by earlier rabbis - equally authoritative. Whenever those bitter opponents, Pharisees and Sadducees, are mentioned together ganging up against Jesus, it proves hatred typically brings together enemies faster than love unites friends.
The Sadducees symbolize the dangers in remembering the wrong stuff. They remembered all the old sacred words, but these inked blots did not leap off the pages and live. The words just sat there to be remembered, so you just looked at them. The faith of the Sadducees was an odd mix of memorization and denying anything that wasn’t in the Book, on paper.
Since resurrection was not an explicitly Biblical idea, the Sadducees thought it was ridiculous to think about it, but that didn’t stop them from mocking Jesus by their riddle about the woman married to seven brothers. No one could be resurrected and given new life, they argued, because the old life inscribed in the Scriptures was good enough as it remained safe and sound and didn’t move. When they asked Jesus about marriage laws in eternity, they had forgotten that the God they were reading about was still living and from their perspective changing and developing. They had remembered the dead stuff.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan