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.
This would seem to be a real problem if resurrection was nothing but a continuation of this present life. The premise of the argument demonstrates that the resurrection anticipated was not any nonspecific and spiritual life after death but a physical and corporeal resurrection of the body. But what of someone who had been married more than once, as the law in some cases demanded? Jesus had a high view of marriage, and had said that divorce had only been permitted by Moses because of the hardness of people's hearts. He had said that what was joined by God must not be separated by man. Given that he also seemed to be in favor of the idea of resurrection the Sadducees must have thought they found the perfect trap.
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.
The resurrection of the dead was indeed to be of the physical bodies of those deceased and not a mere transmigration of souls, nor some entirely spiritual and otherworldly heaven. Yet it was not merely more of the same, not simply a continuation or a restarting of life as it had gone on before. The age to come was to be something more, not less than this present world. There was to be, not an emptying out of creation, but a greater fullness, such as could not be guessed beforehand. There was to be a life, not less real, but more, with such fullness that those destined to share it "can no longer die". They are like angels, not in the sense of having become purely spiritual creatures, but in the sense of fully embodying their identities as children of God, drawing their life from him to such a degree that the flow of that life could not be interrupted. They took on their own perfection by participating in the changeless nature of God.
What of the meaning of marriage, and the great regard in which Jesus held it? It was held so highly precisely because of the way it pointed toward and prepared the way for the marriage feast of the Lamb, the great Bridegroom, with his bride, the Church. But after the resurrection, when that truest marriage feast was consummated, there was no longer need for the sign. This is not to say that people specially united in love during this present life would not maintain a connection in heaven. Nothing of love is really ever lost, no matter how it appears to be. It is only the specific shape of that love that would change as sign and symbol gave way the fullness of vision.
That the dead will rise
even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,
when he called '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.
Taking a passage from a book of Scripture of which the Sadduccees would not dispute the canonicity Jesus quoted and explained a passage that, although it did not directly speak to the resurrection of the body, nevertheless pointed toward it. The fact that to God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were still in some sense alive pointed forward to the time when they would have the fullness of life. They were his creations, and they had not been abandoned to death. That they were alive in the presence of God made it all but necessary that they would one day experience the resurrection of the body. But it would not be to the broken state in which we experience bodies, but something more like Eden, in keeping with the fullness of life which had always been his plan.
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