From the Sunday Note, with additional thoughts:
Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection,
came forward and put this question to Jesus, saying,
“Teacher, Moses wrote for us,
If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child,
his brother must take the wife
and raise up descendants for his brother.
Now there were seven brothers;
the first married a woman but died childless.
Then the second and the third married her,
and likewise all the seven died childless.
Finally the woman also died.
Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be?
For all seven had been married to her.”
Jesus said to them,
“The children of this age marry and remarry;
but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age
and to the resurrection of the dead
neither marry nor are given in marriage.
They can no longer die,
for they are like angels;
and they are the children of God
because they are the ones who will rise.
That the dead will rise
even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called out ‘Lord, ‘
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;
and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,
for to him all are alive.”
Sunday’s Gospel, Luke 20:27-38
Odd to consider, but the Sadducees’ seven-brothers-as-sequential-husbands scenario could (in theory) happen even under Jesus’ teaching on marriage. Christians are not to divorce and are normally not free to re-marry if they do divorce. However, if either the man or the woman in the marriage dies, (or if either one dies subsequent to a divorce) the remaining one is free to marry. May marry even a sibling of the one who died. But six more in a sequence as suggested here? Theoretically…but can we imagine either potential partner would be willing to chance a 3rd attempt, much less four beyond that?
Under the Mosaic Law, the provision for marrying the deceased brother’s wife was for her good and the good of the family—an honored place, and not poverty, was provided for the widow, with protection of her original husband’s property for herself and children she might yet have who would stand as his descendants.
Of course, the real point as the Sadducees use it here is to ridicule the whole idea of Resurrection. The Sadducees were “old school” Jews in Jesus’ day. They accepted only the original 5 books of the Bible as authoritative, and as they read them, those books did not teach resurrection of the dead. My original home Sunday School teacher, my grandmother, had a saying: “The Sadducees did not believe we will be raised from the dead and live forever, and so, that made them ‘sad, you see.’” For Sadducees this life on earth was it. They had no hope of anything beyond it. Rewards from the Lord had to be here and now, in cash, cattle, kids (your only Social Security, after all) and high honors as the Temple’s elite priests. This narrow branch of Judaism did not survive the 67-70+ AD War with Rome and the destruction of the 2nd Temple.
Jesus directly refutes the Sadducees’ no-afterlife stance, basing his argument on a crucial passage in Exodus, one of their accepted books. In Moses’s experience with God at the burning-bush-that-is-not-consumed, the Lord identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (present tense, now, so they are alive in relationship with Him). (See Exodus 3:1-6, 14-15)
Life does not stop at the time of earthly death, but marriage does. As long as we are embodied souls, we males and females bond (delightfully!) and are given the privilege of cooperating with God’s producing the next generation of humanity. We leave that privilege behind when we die, that is, when He calls us into a new and everlasting life, an expanded vision of life far beyond the limits we experience now.
No matter what situation we find ourselves in at this moment, marriage-wise or otherwise, Christ calls us to look forward in hope. We can take the last line of our second reading as a prayer for ourselves. “May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ.” (2 Thessalonians 3:5) In all situations, hope.
For further reflection:
A wider point peeks out from behind what Jesus says about no marriage in heaven. The primary relationship between a human being and anyone else is that human being’s relationship and his or her Maker. In that, the married are no different from the unmarried. All of us, with or without spouses, must prioritize our relationship with God.