When the Sadducees encounter Jesus with a technical question, he responds by humanizing and placing divine value upon each character in the Sadducees’ hypothetical scenario. Jesus’ response is about resurrection and about naming people as children of God and of light. The answer Jesus gives the Sadducees is about God, whose presence means life. This is about God’s promise of resurrection in the face of death, and about life in the face of and in spite of death.
Like Job, who was surrounded by the remnants of his lost life and still proclaimed hope, Jesus is in the midst of palpable tension that very soon will lead him to his own death, and yet he proclaims life. The author of this hope is God, whose very naming of a person brings that one to life. These texts proclaim hope in the face of hopelessness, and urge us to do the same.