Relationships in heaven

Luke 20:27-40

27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28 and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

    34 Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, 35 but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 Indeed, they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.” 39 Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” 40 For they no longer dared to ask him another question.

Psalm 145:20-21

20 The Lord watches over all who love him,    but all the wicked he will destroy.

21 My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.

What is heaven like?  One image in the Bible is that we’ll join the cherubim and seraphim in ceaseless praise, which, to be honest, seems like it would get a bit boring after a while, no?  I suppose the response is that, in God’s presence, we’ll be stripped of all desire but the for the Beauty of God. Even so, since I was a child I’ve found the concept of eternity a bit scary, like there’s just no way out, that even after 10,000 years you know you’ve got infinite more.  Again, boredom is probably not really an option, but it’s hard to imagine otherwise.  Or we could be throughly modern and assert that the experience of heaven will be tailored to each individual’s desires; that humanity is too diverse to have a one-size fits all experience.  Or perhaps you think question about heaven, while perhaps mildly interesting, is just idle speculation, that even if such a place actually exists it is beyond our knowing, that preoccupation with the life to come distorts the life of right now.  

Perhaps - but I think how we imagine heaven matters because how we imagine the culmination of our existence, the goal for which we were made, has everything to do with the nature of our existence here and now, the goals for which our earthly lives should aim.  What is the true nature and destiny of humanity?  It’s hard to live well with an inadequate answer to that question.  

Some Sadducees came to Jesus seeking to trap him.  We don’t really know much about the Sadducees beyond what is mentioned here and in similar passages, that they deny the resurrection.  This may make them sound like heretics, but this view was from marginal in first century Judaism.  I remember being scandalized in my first year of university when a religion professor told me that the Jews didn’t believe in the resurrection until rather late in the game.  But it’s true that most of the books in the OT make no reference to eternal life, and certainly nothing like the Christian vision of heaven.  If there is anything after death it is merely the gloomy underworld of Sheol, or Hades, where everyone goes regardless of how they lived, an existence barely superior to not existing at all.  It’s not until Daniel - by consensus the most recent book of the OT - that we get anything that resembles resurrections Christians imagine it.  Given that we often think point of religion is getting to the after life, it’s hard to believe that so many very religious people could deny life of the age to come.  By Jesus’ day belief in resurrection was the predominant position, but the presence of the Sadducees within the religion mainstream evidences it was hardly a given.  

In the law of Moses it said that if a married man died without having children, it was his brother’s obligation (if he had a brother) to marry the widow and raise children in his brother’s name, so that his name would live on, that an heir of his property would be established.  The Sadducees present a hypothetical where seven brothers all had the same woman as a wife, but none produced children.  In this scenario, though regrettable, everything proceeds in orderly fashion according to the law, but the Sadducees assert that it makes an absurdity of the after life, for then whose wife would she be?  

I have to say, I’ve never much liked Jesus’ answer.  Both when I was young, longing to be married, and now that I am happily married, hearing that this is just a temporary arrangement is disconcerting.  I imagine a scene where all the souls are just sort of milling about in heaven and I bump into my wife.  Like, what do we say?  Do we recognize one another?  Do we lock eyes with the Gotye song playing in our minds: “Now you’re just somebody that I used to know”.   

One of the fundamental issues for any image of the life to come is striking a balance between continuity and discontinuity.  Needless to say, there must be ways in which that life is different, that death gives way to life, darkness to light, corruptibility to incorruptibility, imperfection to perfection, estrangement to intimacy - that flesh gives way to spirit.   Within the Christian tradition there is ambivalence about embodied existence, often treating it as a cursed condition to escape, which more or less ignores the question of how we became flesh in the first place, not to mention that the Word itself became flesh.  And yet our ultimate destiny is union with the God who is spirit.  This story holds together the tension between the undeniable reality of our material finitude and our abiding longing for the infinite, the eternal.  

And Jesus’ point to the Sadducees, and to us, is that earthly life, life in the flesh, is all provisional, that we were created for this, and yet we were also created for more than this.  Marriage belongs to the age that is passing away, because it belongs to a certain mode of embodied existence.  We will no longer need sex and reproduction in the age to come, for we will be like angels in heaven, creatures with spiritual bodies.  The vision seems to be that, in the life of age to come, just as there will be no strangers and enemies, so too there will be no wives and husbands, that just as we enjoy perfect relationship with God we will be in perfect relation with one another.

At this juncture it’s something like necessary to engage in some speculative theology.  If we are going to inherit the life of the age to come - if we are going to be saved, be citizens of heaven, subjects in the kingdom of God, etc. - then we are going to have to be us when we get there.  You must be transformed, but not so much that you’re not still you.  And one of things it is to be a person is to exist in relationship to other persons.  It’s not merely that to be made in God’s image is to be made for relationship, but even that we really are those relationships.  It’s impossible for us to conceive of ourselves apart from them, in isolation.  This, I think (following David Bentley Hart) is one of the strong arguments for the salvation of all, for if not of all of us can be saved, how can any of us be saved?  Or to be more clear, what would it mean for you to go to heaven but for your mother or daughter to be sent to hell - how could that ever be heaven for you?  How could you possibly still be yourself and not feel pain at their absence?  If they are forgotten - if God’s performs a kind of spiritual lobotomy - then whoever occupies that space is no longer you, it’s some new creation without memory.  

The psalm we read captures this tension as well.  The penultimate verse says,  “The Lord watches over all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy”, which sounds like the standard good people go this way, bad people that way kind of statement.  But then the very next line declares, “My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.”  How is it that “all flesh will bless his holy name forever” if the wicked have been destroyed?  How can you reconcile these two statements made one after the other?  For me, the first is swallowed by the second, that the wicked may be destroyed, their wickedness purged, but the ultimate destiny of all flesh to be resurrected and bless his holy name forever.  

So even if we will not be married in heaven - even if every single person will be in perfect relationship to every other, the love of God and the love of our neighbor fully realized - I think we still have to insist that we will have memory, and that these memories are the very substance of our personhood.  The Good News of the Gospel is not merely that God can make some things right, or that the good things will overwhelm the bad things, but even that God can taken our broken histories, our griefs and disappointments, our failures and shame, and redeem them, can bring about a perfect end, not by discarding bits that didn’t fit, and not because every single bit was part of some complicated plan, but by transforming what was into something new, by taking our histories and history itself and preserving what was while also making it into what it should’ve always been.  Nothing will be forgotten, but all things will be made new.  That is the meaning of resurrection, for God is, “God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”