“Seven Husbands?! Oy Vey!”
Or, God’s ‘Family Values’
Some thoughts and quotes on marriage:
• Married life is full of excitement and frustration:
* In the first year of marriage, the man speaks and the woman listens.
* In the second year, the woman speaks and the man listens.
* In the third year, they both speak and the neighbors listen.
• A husband is living proof that a wife can take a joke.
• Definition of a Husband: a man who buys his football tickets four months in advance and waits until December 24 to do his Christmas shopping.
• The theory used to be you marry an older man because they are more mature. The new theory is that men don’t mature. So you might as well marry a younger one…
O.k., we could go on all day about marriage and the challenges and jokes –I hope we could also go on about the joys and blessings, but these are not always as easy to define—the truth is, marriage is hard work!
So when I think about this poor woman, married seven times to seven brothers from the same family—wow! It boggles the mind to imagine such a situation—it sounds both humorous and sad at the same time. The questions put to Jesus about marriage and heaven by a group of Sadducees also seems bizarre and provocative—you can tell there’s something behind the questions—this is more than curiosity about a social custom. Levirate marriage (this is what it is called when a man marries his brother’s widow) was a way of ensuring the family line continued. We are entering the ancient culture of male and female and the values that determined their relationships. The values reflect a male-dominated society. Marriage was central in maintaining stability in a dangerous and changing world. That stability was related to the family and extended family. You married someone in the extended family, not an outsider. Bearing children was important to sustain the family. Families were their own welfare system, their own economies. Marrying outsiders or having children by outsiders produced “unstable” offspring. Women must be guarded. They bore the children, which was a blessing if they belonged and a curse if they came from outside. This is the background of the Sadducees’ ‘case’, but this is not the real issue at hand.
Why on earth are the Sadducees even asking this question of Jesus? It would help to know a bit about who the Sadducees were and what they believed. We can think of the Sadducees as one of several sects or denominations within Judaism: there were Pharisees—the ones whom Jesus most encountered and debated—they were mostly concerned with the keeping of the Law codes, and of proper worship and living a moral life—They were also the party concerned with social justice issues—the care of the poor, the widows and the judgment of the wicked in the life to come. But some (by no means all) of the Pharisees took a good thing—the Law of God—and turned it into a way of boosting their own power and egos—in their minds, they were the only ones who were truly “righteous”, but to Jesus, they were self-righteous fools who burdened the common people with rules and standards which were impossible to fulfill.
The Zealots were a small sect—they would think of themselves as Jewish Patriots—freedom fighters, seeking to throw off the oppression of the occupying Roman Empire. They engaged in a low-level guerilla war with the Romans for decades, and so the Romans and some Jews though of them as terrorists and assassins. We believe that at least one of the 12 Disciples (Simon-not Simon-Peter) was a Zealot, who converted from a violent revolutionary to become a follower of Jesus. And then there were the Sadducees-mostly upper class and educated, who read scripture in a more conservative way, and as Luke tells us, the main thing that was distinctive about them was that they did not believe in a bodily resurrection from the dead. So if the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection, why would they ask such a bizarre question?—That was their point—it was a bizarre question—by asking such a question they are ridiculing those like the Pharisees and Jesus who do believe in a resurrection—it’s sarcastic and meant to point out the absurdity of the whole notion of bodily resurrection. They are very clever in how they choose to ask the question about resurrection—they frame the question around a hot topic in the day—a hot topic today–they went for family values. It’s a clever choice because everybody knows that family — marriage and parenthood — is the bedrock of society, the human institution with the clearest eternal importance. The Pharisees knew that one of God’s first commandments to humanity was to “be fruitful and multiply. Putting the question to Jesus was an attempt to discredit him in the eyes of those for whom family values meant everything. The Sadducees had Jesus right where they wanted him.
Or so they thought. Jesus offers an interpretation of a passage from Exodus to back up his view that God will indeed raise the righteous at the end of the age:
Jesus said,
“Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there. Those who are included in the resurrection of the dead will no longer be concerned with marriage nor, of course, with death. They will have better things to think about, if you can believe it. All ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. Even Moses exclaimed about resurrection at the burning bush, saying, ‘God: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob!’ God isn’t the God of dead men, but of the living. To him all are alive.”- Lk. 20:34-38 The Message paraphrase
It sounds like Jesus is cleverly dodging the question of marriage by reframing it, but he uses the absurd question to proclaim something truly radical: Marriage is not of eternal importance. It does not define who you are in God’s eyes. God’s understanding of “Family Values” just might be different than we think.
It’s still radical to say. When women get married, most still change their names. Couples planning their wedding speak of the day as “the most important day in our lives.” Getting married is one of those cultural norms– the things one must do in a given culture to be considered good and successful in life–things like getting an education, having children, and owning a home, being financially successful. Think about it — what chance would a potential candidate for president have if he (or she!) had never been married—or married more than once? We’ll know in a year. In our culture, marriage plays a huge role in defining who’s trustworthy, who’s successful, and who’s blessed. Even with a divorce rate hovering around 50%, marriage is still seen as a measure of your value as a person in our society. Single people over a certain age who are single by choice are looked at with a mixture of pity (women) and suspicion (men).
But not so for Jesus. “Marriage is a major preoccupation here, but not there.”
That changes the conversation about family values. How we live in relationship with spouses and partners and friends matters—I think one of the thing that Jesus came to proclaim, along with resurrection and eternal life—was a radical re-imagining of what it means to be family. Where’s the Good News in this? What is God’s preoccupation?
Whether you’re single by choice or not, whether you think you have a vocation to singleness or you’re hoping to marry, or if you’re married, happily or not–your life — your real life, your full life, your living into your vocation and experiencing God’s abundant blessings — is not based on your marital status one way or another. Your life in Christ is your real life.
Life in Christ is not without loneliness, whether you’re single or married. But it’s a full life. You were created for love, and love is here. You are part of a big family- -you have been set in a community of brothers and sisters in Christ, children of one God. Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families (!) can find it hard to hear this as good news, but it is. No matter what our family life was like, the promise of God is that this one’s different; it’s the place we discover who we really are in Christ, whom God calls us to be.
And then think about this blessing of family– however you define it– you have the opportunity to see the family you live with as intentional Christian community, created for the same purposes that all communities are created. It’s a place where our faults and our gifts provide opportunities for us to learn to forgive and to receive forgiveness with one another, a place where we can learn to pray and question together. As in any place where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, it’s a place where Jesus is present to help us help one another become mature, who we are in Christ. These are God’s family values.
I am glad that Jesus quoted from the book of Exodus to demonstrate to his opponents why he believed that God “is God not of the dead, but of the living, for they are all alive to him.” This is certainly my experience, and I pray it is your experience as well—we worship a living God and life in Christ is a life that never ends. Death is not the last word. The death of relationships or the death of our bodies does not end this story. Life has the last word. That’s what’s of eternal importance. It’s the life of the resurrection, and it’s available to all. AMEN
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Well, it works…