There's No Marriage In Heaven! (Luke 20:27-38)

‘Behold I am making all things new’. Everything is about to change. Pain and injustice are about to be wiped away. The earth is going to be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Death itself is going to be abolished, and marriage and family are going out along with it! Like it or lump it, nothing is going to be like what it used to be, and if we are going to follow Jesus then we had better start adjusting our lives accordingly.

Personally, I think that if we could get this right, that we would probably get everything else right, and I think that it’s when we lose track of this that we lose track of everything.

I suspect that the problem is that for most of us white, middle-class, land-owning persons who live in a country under no immediate threat of war, pestilence or famine, we envisage the Kingdom of God as being something quite a lot like what we experience now, but a little more widespread and with a few improvements. All the nasty people are gone for instance, so that there won’t be any more lying or stealing going on, so that everyone respects everybody else’s privacy and property rights.

Jesus says ‘No, no, no! The Kingdom that is coming will be so unlike anything you experience now that you will barely recognise yourself. The whole world is going to be recreated, and the body is going to be recreated, and we’re all going to relate to each other in an entirely new and powerful way.’

We don’t know exactly what that will look like, but we know enough from Jesus and we know enough of Jesus to know that it will involve us all in somehow being intermingled quite intimately with each other in some sort of intensely spiritual community, sharing relationships of love, compassion and self-giving with God and with each other. That may all seem a little threatening or it may all seem a little too wonderful, but the bottom line is that it is all going to be very different. And if we are going to follow Jesus in this world then we are going to have to live a life that reflects a sincere belief in the coming of this Kingdom.

That’s why, in some ways, it’s much easier to become a Christian if you’re a drug-addict or a sex-worker. Because you realise from the start that coming to Jesus means that everything has got to change. When you’re white and middle-class, on the other hand, coming to Jesus only means that certain things are going to require minor adjustment, or so it would seem.

It’s interesting that in the two chapters in Luke prior to the one this story is taken from we read of a pair of wealthy, middle-class, land-owning males who come to Jesus, both wanting to be part of the new world coming.

’What have I got to do to be a part of this new world?’ the first guy says to Jesus. ‘I’ve been living my life by the book for as long as I can remember. Is there anything more I need to do?’ ‘Yes’ says Jesus ‘Go and sell everything you have, give the money to the poor and then come and join me here as a roaming homeless evangelist living for the gospel’. And that guy realises that he doesn’t really want to be a part of the new world that Jesus is talking about.