Answering an Impossible Question
Read Mark 12:18-27
“Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!” –Mark 12:26-27
There were many different sects of Judaism in the first century. We’ve talked mostly about the Pharisees, but the Sadducees also had beef with Jesus. The Sadducees believed that only the Law of Moses (the first five books of the Bible) was binding and true. They rejected all the other writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, as well as the oral traditions that the Pharisees relied upon to interpret the Torah. Because there was no explicit reference to an afterlife in the Torah, the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. (Hence, we can imagine how stinging Jesus’ rebuke—“Have you not read the Book of Moses?”)
The Sadducees brought a question before Jesus that they were sure would stump him. To understand their question, we first have to understand Levirate law (described in Deuteronomy 25:5-10). If a man died and left behind a childless widow, it was the responsibility of his brother to marry the widow and to provide an heir, so that his name and lineage might live on. The Sadducees raised a hypothetical question: What if this second brother died before he provided an heir? Wouldn’t it be the third brother’s responsibility to marry her? And let’s say this happened seven times, so that seven different brothers were married to the same woman in her lifetime. In the next life, to whom would she be married?
It is worth pointing out that, according to Moses’ law, a man could be married to two or more women at the same time, but a woman could not belong to more than one man at the same time. The Sadducees were sure they had found an airtight argument—surely the following of Moses’ law in this lifetime could not create a situation incompatible with Moses’ law in the life to come!
Jesus told the Sadducees they were in error—not only because they did not know the scriptures, but also because they did not understand “the power of God.” When the dead arise, Jesus explained, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, for they will be like the angels. While we might celebrate Jesus’ affirmation of resurrection, the way in which he refuted their argument is quite perplexing (and perhaps a little unsettling).
The covenant of marriage (that humans should live in partnership with one another) was part of God’s good design for creation. The apostle Paul held up the metaphor of marriage as a way of understanding Christ’s relationship to the church (Eph 5:29-32), and Jesus himself often used the image of the “wedding feast” as a way of talking about God’s kingdom. So why did Jesus say there would be no marriage in the life to come?
The truth is, none of us knows what life will be like in heaven. And for those who have experienced the loss of a partner in this life and then remarried, I don’t know how those relationships will exist in the life to come. I do believe that we will continue to know and love one another. When Jesus appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, his appearance had changed, and in some cases, they did not immediately recognize him. Yet Jesus made himself known: by speaking their names, in the breaking of bread, in the invitation to see and touch his wounds. So we can be sure that there is some continuity between this life and the life to come.
When pondering unanswerable questions like the one the Sadducees proposed, I often defer to the words of Paul to the Corinthian church: “We don’t yet see things clearly. We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!” (1 Cor 13:12 **)
Until then, Paul says, we must rely on faith, hope, and love. These three, Paul maintains, will remain—both now and in the life to come. And the greatest of these is love. We can trust that love will remain in the next life, and therefore we can hope that the bonds of love that tie us to one another will continue—even if in a different form—in the life to come.
We do not understand yet, O God, what life will look like in the New Creation to come. But give us faith to trust in Your power. Give us hope to anticipate our reunion with You and with loved ones in the life to come. Give us love to hold onto one another as best we can in this life You have given us. The rest, O God, we leave in Your hands. Amen.
[** I use here The Message translation. The more traditional language reads: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”]