Life in the meantime

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Clare L. Hickman

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale

November 9, 2025—Proper 27C

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

On the one hand, the answer Jesus gives to the Sadducees’ question is meaningless. Because they’re not actually worried about this hypothetical woman and her fate in the afterlife. They’re simply one more delegation from the religious establishment, looking to delegitimize Jesus. In this case, they’re hoping to demonstrate how ridiculous the idea of the resurrection is.

But on the other hand, Jesus responds in earnest, pointing out that we can’t really imagine what a life beyond this mortal world would look like. This life is all that we know, and this flesh is all we have, through which to think and feel and experience the world. So we should not waste time writing those experiences—not to mention our worries and rules and sensibilities—onto a future reality that lies far beyond our capacity to imagine.

“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage;” Jesus retorts, “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” (Luke 20:34-5). Which is mostly to say, get away from me with your trick questions in which some poor woman wakes up from the dead with seven husbands, Lord have mercy.

On a third hand, though, Jesus’ statement was understood by some early Christians as an indication that they shouldn’t be getting married at all. Because there was no point, given that the second coming was imminent. Because they were supposed to be beyond such earthly concerns. Because marriage was somehow … not Christian? Jesus never married, after all … and he was waaaay beyond marriageable age!

Seriously, as much as we struggle with whether Christians should be allowed to get divorced, this teaching from Jesus really does give us reason to question whether Christians should be encouraged to get married in the first place.

Of course, that interpretation only held water for those early decades, when people still had reason to understand (to hope) that Jesus was speaking of a near future, rather than a point that lies beyond our experience of time.

Still, it’s easy to understand why the Thessalonians believed that the second coming was imminent. As a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Sea of Tranquility asks: “I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important. That we’re living at the end of history. That now, at the end of all these millennia of false alarms, Now is finally the worst it has ever been.”[i]

It’s always tempting to believe it’s the end. Which then inspires people to act in ways that they might not, were the world not about to end. They might, indeed, stop having children. Or sell their possessions. Or stockpile weapons. Or begin to look at the world as a cosmic battle between good and evil, in which any means can be justified.

Sadly, it rarely seems to inspire people to do everything they can to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for those in prison. Which, honestly, if you’re a Christian who’s expecting the imminent return of Jesus, you’d think that’s exactly what you’d want him to find you doing!

Setting aside what happens to a religious life that centers on the endtimes, let’s return to the question of marriage. Obviously, even the early Christians who heard those words of Jesus as encouragement to refrain from marriage had to modify that idea as the decades passed. Given how poorly it works as a long-term strategy, they realized that they had misunderstood what Jesus was saying, that they hadn’t grasped the contrast he was drawing between the life of the flesh—in which we are born and we die, marry and have children, have things and lose things—and the resurrection life.  

It’s also possible that they didn’t fully understand what it was he was saying about marriage. At least, it’s almost certain that we aren’t hearing it the way that it would have hit at the time. Because when we hear the word marriage, it’s hard not to hear it through a modern, western lens. In which marriage is about love, partnership and connection. And yes, also about children and financial stability. But even that is a long ways away from the world in which a woman whose husband dies before she’s borne him an heir would then be married to his brother. So that there’s a chance for her to give birth to a son who carries his bloodline. So that his property would stay within his family.

The key concern here, in what the Hebrew Bible outlines as Levirite marriage (marrying your late husband’s brother) is the control and guarantee of inheritance. Honestly, it’s the same concern that underlies biblical laws about adultery. It’s not so much about fidelity and betrayal, as the possibility that your property might go to another man’s child, if your wife has sex with someone other than you.

It’s possible that Levirite marriage was also devised for the economic protection of the widow: she is married to her late husband’s brother, so that she isn’t left unprotected in a world in which her security is limited.

On both counts, you see: the significance and purpose of marriage is economic. Which suggests that the thing Jesus is emphasizing about the afterlife is not the absence of love, sex and companionship (though who knows about those): it’s the absence of the need to do such things as control your inheritance. It’s the absence of the fear a widow might have about being left impoverished and without protection.

In the resurrection life, in a life that is governed only by God and not by our world’s greed and unconcern, there’s no need to worry about your estate. And we won’t need laws to ensure the safety of the vulnerable.

Resurrection life will be different, is the point. And the mistake the Sadducees make (other than thinking they can trick Jesus), is the suggestion that the world to come will reflect the world of the meantime. In response, and over and over in his teaching, Jesus maintains that the hope, the goal of a faithful people, is to live in the meantime in ways that reflect the world to come.

To live, as though the primary purpose of your wealth is not to preserve it for yourself and your descendants. To live as though care for the poor and vulnerable isn’t an issue, because the compassion and responsibility are shared by all. To live as though the return of Jesus, whenever it might occur, will find us living in all the ways he modeled and commanded us.

 Your kingdom come, O God, and Your will be done. On earth, as it is in heaven.

[i] quote from Olive Llewellyn, in Part V of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel