Daily Devotional • June 18
A Reading from 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.
Meditation
The Sadducees thought they would trap Jesus with their hypothetical, but instead they managed to draw from Jesus an insight about marriage. Marriage, it would seem, is provisional, temporary, even, in a sense, unnecessary—and, perhaps most surprisingly, inexorably tied to death: “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. Indeed, they cannot die anymore.”
In order to understand this, we can examine the close relationship between marriage and procreation. Marriage—an institution that fosters responsible procreation, that builds a solid and durable doorway through which men and women invite the next generation into this world—is part of our species’ defense against death. Before the promise of eternal life, marriage represented the means by which the human race could coninue into the future in the form of sons and daughters.
But part of the good news of the Resurrection is that marriage is, in an eternal sense, no longer necessary. The single and celibate among us therefore already have some taste of this truth. What of Christian marriage, then? It no longer has a death-defying purpose as its most fundamental, but a life-affirming sacramental one: we no longer marry to preserve ourselves, but to embody the fruitful relationship between Christ and his Church, to grow the family of the faithful.
In Christ, the mission of the married and unmarried become one: to welcome newcomers into the body of Christ. It is in the light of this reality that the Sadducees’ question looks rather ridiculous, but it offers a new kind of hope to all of us.
James Cornwell lives and teaches in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their six children.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Episcopal Church in Connecticut
The Diocese of Mytikyina – The Church of the Province of Myanmar (Burma)
