Well, here we go again. Jesus can’t get away from the haters. The religious big shots are relentless. They want so badly to trip him up.

But before we get to the riddle they throw at him, we have to remember where we are.

Jesus is in Jerusalem, teaching in the shadow of the Temple (you know, the place he was just flipping tables over?). He’s surrounded by people who’ve spent their lives learning how to protect what they have.

The air’s thick with fear and ambition. Everybody’s calculating what this strange rabbi might cost them. So when the Sadducees step to Jesus, this isn’t a genuine search for wisdom. It’s the kind of question you ask when you’re sure you already know the answer.

It’s the kind of question you toss out when the goal isn’t truth but control. The Sadducees aren’t trying to learn. They’re trying to keep things the way they are, to freeze the world in a shape that benefits them. So, the woman in their story never stood a chance. She was never meant to.

Some Sadducees approach Jesus with a question. It sounded theological, but it wasn't. It was a trap, dressed up in the language of Torah and concern for proper interpretation.

"Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote that if a man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow and produce an heir. Now suppose there were seven brothers, and the first married a woman, then died. The second married her, then died. Then the third, and so on, all seven of them. Finally, the woman died too. So in the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”

Whose wife will she be? That's the question they asked.

But notice what they didn't ask. They didn't ask her name. They didn't ask what she thought. They didn't ask what she endured, passing through the hands of seven men, one after another, like property transferred from owner to owner. They didn't ask whether anyone cared about her grief, her losses, her humanity. She … was not the point.

She was a hypothetical. A prop. A game piece moved around their theological chessboard. The Sadducees weren't concerned about her. They were concerned about winning an argument with Jesus, about protecting their power, about maintaining the systems that kept them wealthy and comfortable.

But here's what we need to understand: this woman, even though she's hypothetical in their story, represents something devastatingly real. She’s a stand-in for every person who’s been treated not as a human being made in the image of God, but as fuel for a system that runs on human expendability.

The levirate marriage law that the Sadducees referenced wasn't about compassion. Let's be clear about that. In an economy where women couldn't own land or inherit property, where survival depended on attachment to a male kinship network, this law offered a bare minimum of protection.

But make no mistake: This law was about property management. It ensured that land stayed in the family line and that the dead man's name continued. The woman's survival was secondary, almost accidental. She mattered only insofar as she could produce an heir and keep the machinery of patriarchal inheritance humming at full capacity.

This’s what systems of commodification always do. They treat people and other things like commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace. They take human beings and reduce them to their usefulness.

They ask not "Who are you?" but "What can you do for us?" Not "What do you need?" but "How can we use you?"

And when you no longer serve the system's purposes, or can't produce, perform, or contribute in the ways the system demands, you become disposable.

The Sadducees knew this. They built their entire existence on it. They were the religious and Jewish political elite, the aristocracy who controlled the Temple in Jerusalem.

They collaborated with Rome, collected taxes, and ran the temple economy like it was IBM.

They got rich by turning worship into a transaction, by rejecting people's sacrifices as "unsuitable" and then selling them back at inflated prices through the temple marketplace. You know the Sadducees’ own special gift emporium and butcher shop.

They needed people to believe that God’s blessing only came through proper sacrifice, through correct ritual, through their gatekeeping.