No Marriage?

As my wife likes to say, though it’s not quite literally true, we met in a class on the immortality of the soul. Joseph Bobik led a little seminar at Notre Dame on philosophical arguments for the soul’s immortality. There were three students: Beth, myself, and Jay, my best friend, who later became our best man. Since we “met” there thinking about things eternal, we took it as a sign that our love was to be eternal.

So at first glance I don’t like our text for this week, Luke 20:27-40. What Jesus has to say about marriage in the kingdom seems on the face of it to suggest our love is not destined to be eternal, but to come to an end as we assume some sort of genderless, passionless existence like the angels. So what happens to this wonderful relationship with my dear wife (34 years now) then?

As usual, we need to look at the larger context of what Jesus is saying, and His main concern is to refute the Sadducees’ disbelief in the resurrection. They’ve come up with what they think is a reductio ad absurdum of belief in the resurrection, that there will be no way to sort out prior marriage relationships when a person has had more than one spouse.

Thinking about my own family and my father’s two marriages and at least two additional relationships with women, it’s apparent to me that the Sadducees would have no lack of actual examples in our time. Families have gotten so disordered, that even assuming a Christian conversion for all involved, there would be no way to put all those relationships back together in any way that made sense. So does that make an afterlife, particularly a bodily resurrection of all believers, absurd?

No, Jesus wants us to see a couple things. First, if we are to be raised up to live forever, there will be no need for procreation to preserve the human race. It’s an old understanding that has been almost lost in our time, but the primary purpose of marriage, of the human family, is the begetting and nurturing of children. But if humanity will continue forever without procreation, marriage is not necessary.

The second thing to see is that Jesus focuses on the primary relationship any human being is meant to have, a relationship with God. The point of being like the angels in verse 36 is not a genderless existence, it’s what Jesus says it is, being children of God. As whole, healthy, complete children of God we will first and foremost be brothers and sisters in Him. That will be our primary identity, not spouse or friend or parent or child of human parents.

For what it’s worth, and Jesus and Scripture as a whole are silent on this, I can’t believe that the special relationships between husband and wife, between parent and child, or between really good friends for that matter, will simply dissolve in the resurrection as we enjoy eternal life. Instead, as mystical and murky as it sounds, I see them somehow being transcended and taken up into that greater and more perfect love we will enjoy with God as our Father, through the grace of Jesus, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. To be like the angels will not be to have all those human connections we cherish disappear, it will be to have them perfected and restored in a life and unity that is like God’s own unity as the Trinity.

But, as Paul says about other marriage matters in I Corinthians 7:12, that last paragraph is “I, not the Lord.” I can’t prove it strictly from the text or from any other text. I can only hope that it is in the spirit of what I know from the text and from the rest of Scripture about our Lord and His eternal design for us. If it’s not as I say, it can only be something better, something more intimate and full of grace and joy. So as Jesus tells us here in verse 28, God is the God of the living, of life, and if “to him all of them are alive,” then we all will live abundantly and joyfully, no matter what our marital status is.