NO MARRIAGE IN HEAVEN?

Today’s Gospel passage introduces us to a small, but influential, group of Jews from our Lord’s time, of whom we hear much less in the Gospels than we do of their main opponents, the Pharisees. This other group was known as the “Sadducees”, named after Zadok (or Sadoc) the Priest who anointed King Solomon. They were dominated by the upper classes of the Jewish priesthood and tended to be more accommodating towards the political authority of the Romans than were the Pharisees, which did not make them always popular with the ordinary folk. The Sadducees also had some very important differences in religious belief from those of the Pharisees; for instance, they did not believe in angels, and most significantly for today’s Gospel, they did not believe in the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Since they were opposed to the Pharisees, whom Our Lord so frequently criticized, you might expect that they would have been Our Lord’s allies.

     Yet clearly, if they did not believe in the resurrection, they were not only opposed to the Pharisees’ faith, but also to Our Lord’s. After all, Our Lord and the Pharisees, for all their great differences, did believe alike in the Resurrection of the body on the last day. Therefore, the Sadducees think that they have found the perfect conundrum with which to outsmart Our Lord. They have seen how He has outwitted the Pharisees, and now they want to turn the tables against Him themselves. What better way of showing how ridiculous the idea of the bodily resurrection than the story they invent! In Jewish law, if a married man died childless, his widow was to be married off to his brother so that he could “beget children in his dead brother’s name”. So, the Sadducees surmise, what if a woman is married to a man who dies childless, then marries his brother, who also dies childless, and so on—marrying seven brothers in all...to which of them will she be married if there is a resurrection of the body? Doesn't this prove that there can’t be such a thing as the resurrection after all? Our Lord’s answer is very interesting.

     He in no way accepts the Sadducees’ argument as proof against the resurrection. He states firmly that “The sons of this age (i.e. this earthly life) marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age (i.e. heaven) and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.” This teaching is of great significance. It tells us that marriage is a state of union in this life only and that married couples here will no longer be “married” in heaven! Now before all loving married couples panic or protest, we need to recognise that Our Lord does not mean that we are no longer united with our loved ones. He means that the nature of the union between all the Blessed in heaven will sur-pass even the greatest joys that marriage can bring. Marriage, after all, is a state of life intended to bring new life into the world through the love of a husband and a wife. Therefore, there will be no new families in heaven—only the one great family of all the human race redeemed in Christ. This is difficult for us to understand now, of course, but if we are judged worthy of the resurrection we will not be distant from all those we love in this life, but closer than ever to them and all the saints.           ~    Fr. Paul Dobson