Luke 20:27-38
As I return to you from the holy and devastating work of mourning a young person gone too soon, I’m clinging to the promise of the resurrection like a life raft far from shore. I have said before that I have no choice but to believe in the resurrection of the dead, because I could not survive if I didn’t. I believe that more and more as the years go on and the funerals and obituaries pile up. It is especially important to me in the case of lives cut way too short, young people taken by gun violence, mental and physical illnesses, tragic accidents, and addiction. I need to believe that their lives continue somehow, that the years that were stolen will one day be given back. It is not a sentiment that is unique to me, or to Christianity. It seems to be innate to humanity, an instinct deeper than our rational minds can comprehend. I find that even people who do not believe in God, or Jesus, or the Church, or the Resurrection, still recreate the framework in the face of loss. They speak of loved ones living on in the lives and memories of those who survive them, in the legacy they left and the art they created. They speak of a constant presence, of the lingering of the strongest parts of a personality. They look for signs of that life continuing, whether they be bright red cardinals visiting or an unexpected scent or a song that brings memories flooding back. In the face of death, humanity cannot help but grasp for signs of life, of something beyond. It is in our art, in our stories, in the traditional folk tales of cultures in every corner of the world. It is almost as if our God has created us in their own resurrecting, recreating image. In the depths of who we are, resurrection springs forth unbidden, stubbornly insisting upon the existence of a life that never ends.
The resurrection of the dead has always had its detractors. The Sadducees, a Jewish sect that rejected the notion of bodily resurrection, were despite their claims very interested in debating it with the Pharisees, one of several sects of ancient Judaism that did anticipate a bodily resurrection. Just as some nonbelievers today seem to be constantly thinking about and seeking out debate about the afterlife they claim does not exist, this particular group of Sadducees sought out Jesus specifically to bait him into an argument. Their question, as Luke points out from the very beginning, is not one asked in good faith. They do not believe in their own premise. They propose an extreme predicament; a cartoonish hyperbole of a woman married successively to seven brothers after a series of childless marriages and untimely deaths. They have invented this story for the sake of their bad faith debate prompt, unconcerned with the plight of an imaginary woman trapped in a horrifying cycle of loss and infertility. Their imaginations are so limited that they cannot imagine that the resurrected life would be any different from the current one. They cannot imagine a world in which a woman would be defined by anything but her marital status. They cannot imagine a life to come where a man’s possession of his wife wouldn’t matter.
I can almost feel Jesus rolling his eyes. I can almost hear the exasperation in his voice as he responds earnestly to their flippant question. The logic of this world does not apply to the new creation. The human constructs that dictate who belongs to whom and what relationships are legitimate and how property changes hands are entirely irrelevant in the kingdom of God. Relationships that were so often at their core transactional, commitments that it seems are becoming more and more conditional today, definitions of family that require contracts and legal documents and shared last names to be understood and respected—none of those systems translate to the kind of life we are promised in the life to come. The deaths that separated this poor imaginary woman from her unfortunate imaginary husbands are not permanent, not final, and her marital status in the resurrection died with her and is now resurrected into something greater, something more true than an earthly social contract.
As silly as the Sadducees’ story can seem, it is a question that continues to come up in our conversations about life and love and death. My great grandfather was married twice, once to Minelle, who died in childbirth at the young age of 21, and until the early end of his life to my great grandmother Franky. The three of them are buried together in the same plot in a historic cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, my great grandparents on either side and young Minelle in the center. It is an interesting choice, and a big question any time someone outlives their first spouse and remarries one or more times in their life. Where will they be buried? Who will be next to whom? In what order will the names be listed in the obituary? What will they all get up to when they reconvene in heaven? I’m sure many of you have such stories in your own families and have had some of these conversations around the dinner table or in the pursuit of ancestry research. In the resurrection, whose wife will Grandma be? In the resurrection, which of Grandpa’s wives will he live with? If I die first, what will my eventual reunion with my spouse look like?
Our questions are sometimes asked in jest, but there is often some real anxiety or curiosity beneath the snark. They come from a place of care, unlike the questionable intentions of these Sadducees. I don’t know if his first audience was receptive to Jesus’s answer, but I hope we can be, because it was remembered and retained and written down so that one day we might hear it too. “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.”
So what does this mean for us? What does this mean for those of us who have chosen to enter into Christian marriage? What does it mean for those of us who have not? What about those whose marriages were ended not by the death of a partner, but by the death of a relationship? Put simply, Jesus’s answer to our questions is the Gospel. It is good news for all of us, not just a few. Marriage, like the Eucharist, like Baptism, is sacramental- an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Sacraments and sacramental acts are things of this age that point us toward the age to come. Eucharist, Baptism, Marriage, and many other sacraments and sacramental rites reveal to us the deeper reality, the reality that will be ours in the resurrection. One of my favorite professors once told us that though it is impossible to love every single person we meet with the love of Christ, we can spend our lives striving to love one person that way. At its best, that is what marriage is. Two imperfect people striving to love each other like Jesus does, and through that striving to love the world the same way. Ultimately, all sacraments, including marriage, are temporary. They are stained-glass windows through which a little bit of heaven’s light shines into the world. They point us toward God, granting us glimpses of the deeper reality that we will one day know fully.
In the resurrection, God’s children are freed from the chains of death, the chains of depression, the chains of addiction, the chains of poverty, the chains of unchecked greed. In the resurrection, the sacraments that ground us and strengthen us will no longer be necessary, because the grace that they represent for us will saturate our reality like never before in this life. We will no longer need the Eucharist, because all our existence will be communion with our God. We will no longer need marriage, because all will be in sacred union with Christ, in love made new. We will no longer need confession, or absolution, or healing. Our imperfect relationships will be perfected; our broken families will be made whole in one universal family. We do not know what it will look like. We do not know how it will work. What we do know, what Jesus tells us, and God promises throughout scripture, is what it will feel like. We know the resurrection life will feel both familiar and new. It will feel joyful and content. It will feel like coming home and finding in that home a banquet that never ends, around a table that stretches into eternity. It will feel like good news for the poor, and the lonely, and the bereaved. It will feel like true reunion with all those we love and see no longer. On these promises, all our hope is founded. And it is a firm foundation indeed.
Mother A Writes 