Image: Three attempts to trap Christ. Holkham Bible Picture Book. England, 1327-1335 © British Library, London / Alamy
From a young age, many of us are shaped by fairy tales, especially those popularized by Walt Disney. These stories often follow a familiar pattern: a young woman faces adversity, such as a wicked stepmother. Along the way, she receives help—a fairy godmother or magical beings. Against all odds, she triumphs and marries a handsome prince. As the story closes, we hear the timeless phrase: “And they lived happily ever after.”
As we get older, most of us know that “happily ever after” is unrealistic. I want to ask every married couple this question, and I want the young people to pay attention. Is marriage always a fairytale, a happily ever after? Of course not. Loving someone for a moment is easy. Loving someone for decades is more difficult. And no one gets to see how Prince Charming and Cinderella are getting along after ten, twenty, or thirty years together. They live in an ageless realm, where no tempers are ever lost. No tears are ever shed. No dirty socks are ever left on the floor. There are no resentments, betrayals, cold shoulders, or misunderstandings. It is simply “happily ever after”.
And while I could go on about the poisonous “happily ever after” mindset, we have bigger fish to fry. We have to talk about the resurrection from dead, which all too often, we picture as a mere fairytale.
Although, the scenario painted by the Sadducees is anything but that. It’s more of a horror show. Seven brothers marry one woman in succession according to the laws of levirate marriage, which said that if a man dies without having children, his brother should marry her and raise up children in the deceased brother’s name. Two things were, ideally, prevented in such a scenario: the woman would be provided for and the dead brother’s name would not be totally forgotten. This tells us the Sadducees are operating with a completely different understanding of marriage than we have today—where marriage, far from being about love, is simply a partnership for men and women (but let’s be honest, men especially) can take care of their biological needs and to have children who will carry on the family name and steward their family’s resources into the next generation. Under this scenario, the woman arrives in the world to come, only to be confronted with a problem that stretches the law of Moses to its breaking point. Seven brothers are there waiting, each with a valid claim on her. This isn’t reuniting with a beloved spouse. This is a nightmare.
And the Sadducees knew this. They knew that the resurrection was incompatible with an eternal application of the law; otherwise, you run into a host of impossible problems like this one. So they lay this trap for Jesus, hoping he will say something anti-Torah so they can destroy his reputation.
But Jesus says no such thing. In fact, we might say that his response shows that the Sadducees have gotten to the heart of the matter. There is a profound difference between this age and the one to come. There’s so much of a difference that it’s hard to describe what the raised are like. Jesus uses a word here that is used nowhere else in the New Testament, which can be translated “like the angels”. Those raised from the dead aren’t literal angels, but that is the best analogy available. They don’t marry anymore. They aren’t given in marriage, like the poor woman in the scenario. They don’t have children. They aren’t subject to biological urges anymore. In fact, the raised have a mastery over all those things, just as Jesus does at the end of Luke’s Gospel. After he is raised, Jesus is still a material human being, but it is glorified materiality. He is not subject to space and time constraints, as we see on the road to Emmaus. He’s not subject to hunger, but he eats so his disciples don’t get the wrong idea about him. Those raised from the dead are no longer subject to the rules that govern this world. That realm is utterly unlike this one. The old distinctions based on class, gender, wealth, race, religion, and any number of things no longer apply. That is at the heart of the kingdom that Jesus incarnates in his very person.
And here’s the kicker. Jesus finds resurrection in the Torah itself; the first five books of the Bible which were the only ones the Sadducees accepted. Moses himself revealed this when he “spoke of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not God of the dead but of the living, for to him, all of them are alive.” Here, Jesus is not speaking as a rabbi but as the very Lord he is referring to. When Luke and Acts use the term Lord, it often refers to Jesus directly, beginning in chapter 2: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” That term, “Lord”, used as a placeholder in the Old Testament for the unpronounceable name spelled YHWH, refers directly to Jesus. Jesus—this first century Galilean Jew, is not only their Lord and God, but the Lord and God of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith: Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Leah, Rachel, and their children. Jesus is the Lord, who walks with the Hebrew people through chaos, calling the people to turn from their evil ways and live. He is the Lord who brought them back from exile, who worked out his purposes in people from the great king Cyrus to the humble Mary. He is the Lord who descended to our state, not in triumph but in humility, subject to everything the rest of us are subject to in this realm of existence. And he is the Lord who doesn’t raise an army, doesn’t call for insurrection, but goes to the cross for us, exposing the lie that the powers of this world have the final word. Jesus, our true King, Lord, and God, does, giving a criminal paradise as he dies with him. And he is our Lord, here and now. In every circumstance of our life, whether joy or grief, rage or sadness, pain or happiness, Jesus is Lord. And he is ultimately Lord over death itself.
We don’t know what the world to come will be like. But we do know this: it won’t be a fairytale ending. It won’t be a “happily ever after” that we can conceive of. What Jesus has prepared for us is utterly beyond “happily ever after”. It is life in his presence, forever. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.