Marriage and the Resurrection

Jesus and the Sadducees

Craftsbury, VT

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”

Luke 20:27-38

This gospel reading is one of those elephant in the room passages I gotta point out: Jesus says we aren’t going to be married in heaven. This teaching can be a hard one. As a newly-wed person, who has been so excited to give marriage advice to all the young couples from my lofty place of four months’ wisdom, this seems like bad news. I also know that marriage has not always been easy for people, often ends in pain, and is not always inspiring. I’m going to address these elephants so they don’t sit down and crash through the pews.

But to do that, I first need to talk about sports. Yes, sports.

We love living up here in Vermont, but if there’s one thing I miss, it’s the dominance of sports rivalries.¹ I grew up in North Carolina, where it was not optional to have a college team you rooted for from kindergarten on. UNC (the correct choice), NC State, and Duke, all bitter rivals, all fighting to the bitter end every basketball season once our hapless football teams fade into the background. What were we fighting for? Titles? Sure, but that’s not really what we were fighting for. We fought for bragging rights over your co-worker, feeling like your national reputation was just a little more prestigious, feeling associated with a winner, because we all want to be one.

Sports are amazing at taking our human social tendency to turn basic human desire into fierce competition, giving us an outlet for it, where instead of killing each other in a fight for reputation and resources and power, we put it in these really ephemeral, ultimately trivial confines, and remember to be a good sport.

Why am I talking about sports when Jesus is talking about marriage? Blame it on a 20th-century Catholic named René Girard. Girard argued that the history of humanity could best be explained through human desire, driving human growth, with “rivalries” occurring when our desires compete for the same limited things. While this starts as material needs, it does not end there. Once our resources are met, we do not stop fighting, but our desires keep us fighting for power, for status, even for things like moral superiority. Now, as a Catholic, Girard was not a Puritan demonizing all desire; it is good and God-given that we have desire, that we want things, for this is what makes us desire to love each other, to create beautiful things, to persist when it’s hard, to nourish life. But in our fallen world, sin corrupts our desire and turns it into all these fierce competitions. In other words, it’s a great thing if you love sports. But it’s a horrible way to go through life if you treat everything as a competition.

Here’s our gospel reading and our Sadducees come in. Like the Pharisees, the Sadducees see Jesus as a rival. They feel threatened by him because he threatens their own sense of spiritual authority. They may also be competing for their religion to have the correct theology of the resurrection, or lack thereof. So they don’t try to come to him with a sincere question, but a “gotcha” question to try and win: teacher, if a woman ends up with seven husbands, who gets her in heaven?

What is funny is that even the gotcha question shows a worldview deeply embedded in competition and rivalry—nevermind that the woman’s desires don’t matter much in their society, either. Who “wins” the girl, Jesus?

But in heaven, no human institutions will be there. Asking “who gets the girl” is like asking, “Who wins the Super Bowl in heaven?” (And if there is a God, he will say sorry Tom Brady, you already won enough of them on earth.) One day, I trust all our questions about heaven will look silly in light of the kingdom of God, and we and our loved ones will laugh with Jesus about it all.

If Jesus was laughing to himself before answering the Sadducees, he also sidesteps the whole issue that they are arguing in bad faith. He doesn’t say, “Come on, you guys don’t even believe in heaven.” Instead, he gives one of his hallmark examples of avoiding the traps of rivalry. He doesn’t get mad at them, but shows how their whole paradigm is wrong.

Jesus is trying to teach us how to avoid living in a cycle of endless, bitter rivalry, both in method and in destination. He’s trying to tell us that the kingdom of God will be a place where our relationships are totally transformed, where we don’t need the worldly institution of marriage to turn the passions of lust and social competition into something that nurtures life.

But even though the Saduccees’ question is in bad faith, it reflects some real anxieties we might have. What will heaven be like with the people I love? What will our love be like? And if we’re not married, what will that mean?

First, it’s important to note that Jesus doesn’t say that you won’t see your spouse. Rather, we can infer the opposite, for he reminds us that, “He is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.” (Luke 20:38) As we celebrated All Saints last weekend, we can still live in our blessed assurance that our loved ones who have died in faith are still alive in God, and by God’s grace, we may be too.

Second, it’s important to remember that, even when we take all the biblical teachings together, we don’t know specifically what heaven will look like. Revelation gives us images and visions that describe its reality in poetic terms, where the Lord God will be our light and there will be no more night (Rev 22:5), but with both heaven and hell, we still have to take their reality on faith without knowing the specifics. With hell, all I need to know is I don’t wanna go. With heaven, all I need to know is that whatever it will be like, it will be good; a place of basking in God’s love with all who love him, including our loved ones, but beyond the way we love now.

The teaching here is that marriage as an institution is given to mortals vulnerable to death, reflecting Christ’s love for and marriage to the Church, also full of sinners. God works with our sin, our mortality, and our vulnerability to our worst instincts, transforming all of this into something that gives us a taste of the eternal. Marriage takes our human passions for lust and social competition that tear apart social cohesion and gives us a structure to transform them into something truly beautiful, giving life to us and to our children. In a broken and alienated world, we have the chance to feel deep companionship, shared joy, and partnership.

But I know that not all marriages are successful or joyful, that they aren’t all easy, and many end in tragedy. Jesus is clear here that we should not make an idol of marriage. Painful marriages make that reality stark. Good marriages and joyful sports are not models for heaven, but rather, give an opportunity to practice the love of God that is beyond all rivalries, cross-shaped into self-giving love.

If we no longer need marriage in the resurrection, it’s because Christ, through the cross, will have already fully transformed us into the fullness of eternal beauty, as Paul said:

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. … I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. … When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

1 Cor 15:42-44, 50, 54

The gifts of this world, however good they are, are temporary. We are all “perishable goods” in the pantry of this earth. The love and the intimacy we share that are reflections of God’s love are not lost, but transformed and fully realized in the new creation. It can be hard to imagine a place with no marriage, or no sports, being a good place, but I have learned that even a place without college football can be quite a heavenly place.

Why is Craftsbury heavenly? Not because of the landscape (though it often is), but because of the love in this community. So as we think about how to apply this teaching to our lives, let us note the way that God breaks our natural propensity for self-centered rivalry. Let us remember that God didn’t wait for us to stop being self-centered to love us. He doesn’t even need our love to be mutual. He acted first, for Jesus went on the cross to break the cycle. And he resurrected to show that the reign of this world is more temporary and ephemeral than the amazing Game 7 of the World Series my Dodgers won, and that this means we ought not take the big and little fighting we get into as ultimate indictments on each other.

So, then, if we are to follow Jesus in his cycle-breaking, we should not wait for anyone in our lives to stop being self-centered to love them. Let us take this world full of fighting and practice living beyond rivalry the way that Jesus shows us. He did this by dying for us, letting us kill him rather than him destroy us. He wrote his sacrificial love into the cosmos even when we can’t see it. Let us love each other sacrificially in our marriages, in our town governance, in our social media, and in our societal fabric. Let us forgive each other and sacrifice for each other’s happiness. Let us love God with our whole hearts by loving our neighbors. Let us turn our desires into desiring God, wanting the things God wants, and if we can’t get there today, let us want to want the things that God wants.

Our marriages, if we are blessed, are like wonderful lamps that can bring us tremendous light in a dark world. It can be so hard to see them gone when we find ourselves in the dark of night (as we often do these days). But remember that in Revelation, “There will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” (Rev 22:5). So let us joyfully anticipate seeing those we love again in a way that can only make sense to God now, where we know pain and suffering will be no more. A place where we have no need of the lovely things that give us light now, for there the Lord God will be our light. Amen.

1. While I have been told there are Bruins/Canadiens hockey rivalries and Red Sox/Yankees, New England sports culture is not on the same level as college sports in the South.