In today’s Gospel reading, the Sadducees come to Jesus with a trick question. They don’t believe in the resurrection, and they want to make the idea sound ridiculous. So, they pose a scenario drawn from the law of levirate marriage: a woman is married to seven brothers, one after another, each dying childless. “In the resurrection,” they ask, “whose wife will she be?”
It’s an absurd question — not because resurrection is absurd, but because the Sadducees can’t imagine that God’s world could ever be any different from their own. They cannot see beyond the limits of patriarchy, beyond the categories of property and possession, beyond the old world order where women’s value is defined by men. Actually, they can’t even imagine that there might be something beyond the boundaries of this world.
But Jesus refuses to play by their rules. Jesus tells them: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 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.”
It’s not just that there are no weddings in heaven — it’s that the whole structure of patriarchy, with its hierarchies and exchanges, its ownership and control, collapses in the face of resurrection. When Jesus says, “They cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God,” he’s announcing a revolution in how we understand life itself. Resurrection life is not an extension of this life — it is a new kind of life. If heaven is free from the domination of patriarchy, then God’s intention for humanity has always been freedom — not hierarchy, not ownership, not control.
Now, Luke’s Gospel doesn’t let us keep this vision safely locked away in the afterlife. The Gospel insists that the kingdom of God is already breaking in — here, among us. Every healing, every meal shared with outcasts, every woman welcomed into Jesus’ circle — all of it is resurrection breaking into real time.
So, when Jesus says that in the resurrection there is no marriage, no giving away of women, no system where people are defined by possession or productivity — he’s not talking about some distant utopia. He’s revealing what God wants now. What we say about heaven is what God desires for our life here. If there is no patriarchy in heaven, then patriarchy is not of God.
Think of what that means in Jesus’ context. In the ancient world, a woman’s survival depended on being attached to a man — father, husband, brother, or son. The law of levirate marriage was a survival mechanism in a patriarchal system. It ensured that a man’s name and property lived on through heirs, and that a widow had a roof over her head. But it was also a law that kept women trapped inside that system — a system that defined them by their ability to bear children, to perpetuate male lineage.
When the Sadducees ask, “Whose wife will she be?” Jesus hears the deeper assumption: that she must belong to someone. And Jesus says no. No ownership. No transfer. No property. In God’s new world, she belongs to no one but God. She is a child of the resurrection, fully alive in her own right. The resurrection, Jesus says, is not about resuscitating the old order — it is about God creating something entirely new.
The Sadducees’ problem wasn’t that they didn’t know the law — they knew it too well. Their imagination was trapped inside it. They wanted assurance that their systems — their categories, their hierarchies — were ordained by God. They couldn’t imagine that God might have a different idea about what life means. Their world was tightly ordered: men on top, women as property, religion serving politics, and God contained in the pages of a book. Jesus came proclaiming a kingdom that shattered every one of those assumptions. The Sadducees’ god was a god of maintenance; Jesus reveals a God of resurrection — a God whose creativity cannot be constrained by human imagination.
Jesus ends with a thunderclap: “Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” The resurrection is not a doctrine about corpses; it’s a declaration about God’s nature. God is the God of the living — the God who brings life out of death, hope out of despair, justice out of oppression. And if God is the God of the living, then any theology that keeps people small, silenced, or subjugated is a theology of death. Resurrection faith refuses to settle for systems that crush or exclude. To live as resurrection people is to live between two worlds — this one, marked by death and domination, and the one God is bringing to birth, marked by justice and joy.
We live in the “already” and the “not yet.” The kingdom is already breaking in, but not yet complete. That means resurrection isn’t just about what happens after we die — it’s about how we live now. If there is no patriarchy in heaven, we work to dismantle patriarchy now. If there is no hierarchy of gender in heaven, we honor the fullness of every person now. If in heaven there is no ownership, no oppression, no giving away of women as property — then our calling is to build communities now where that reality is already true.
When Jesus speaks of resurrection life where “they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” he’s not erasing our embodied selves. He’s revealing a future where our bodies are no longer bound by systems of control. The resurrected body of Christ still bears its wounds — but those wounds no longer define or limit him. They are glorified. The risen Christ is a body beyond binaries — both human and divine, scarred yet radiant, finite yet eternal. The resurrection tells us that embodiment matters — and that it will be transformed. That means our bodies now — trans bodies, disabled bodies, fat bodies, brown bodies, queer bodies — are not mistakes waiting to be corrected. They are sacred vessels of God’s creativity.
God’s image was never binary. God is one, and three, but never two. The Trinity itself breaks our binaries — Creator, Christ, Spirit — endlessly relational, fluid, dynamic. To be made in God’s image is to share in that divine diversity. For too long, Christianity has imagined a God who looks suspiciously like the men who hold power. We’ve pictured God as male, as white, as muscular, as dominant. But the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a poor brown Jew, born to an unwed mother, executed by the state, raised in a body still marked by wounds. The early Church worshipped a disabled God. If that’s who God is, then holiness has nothing to do with perfection or power — and everything to do with vulnerability and transformation.
When the Church insists that only certain bodies reflect God’s image — male, straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied — it commits the sin of singularity, reducing divine diversity into a human idol. Resurrection calls us out of that idolatry into the freedom of divine expansiveness. Resurrection is not a private hope — it’s a public act of resistance. It says that death — in all its forms — does not have the last word. Death looks like patriarchy, racism, transphobia, classism, and all the systems that deny people’s full humanity. Resurrection says: those systems are not eternal. They can and will be undone.
The Sadducees wanted to know whose wife the woman would be. Jesus wanted them to know what life itself could become. The resurrection, then, is not just God’s promise for the end of history; it’s God’s protest against everything that denies life now. To imagine resurrection is to stretch our imaginations beyond all the binaries we’ve used to order the world — male/female, rich/poor, worthy/unworthy, citizen/stranger, saved/lost.
The God of resurrection delights in complexity. Creation itself teems with diversity: ecosystems that defy categories, species that change and adapt, colors that blend and blur. Why should humanity be any different? When we insist on rigid binaries — and enforce them with violence, theology, or law — we are refusing to see the image of God in its full spectrum. God’s kingdom is not a hierarchy; it’s a living, breathing ecosystem of grace.
The unnamed woman in the Sadducees’ question is a stand-in for every person whose worth has been defined by someone else’s system. She’s every woman who’s been told her body belongs to another. Every trans person told their body is a mistake. Every queer person told their love is less. Every person of color told they must fit into white norms to survive. Every poor person told that their poverty is a moral failure. And Jesus says: in the resurrection, none of that is true. She is no one’s possession. She is God’s child. She is alive. And so are you.
If we take Jesus seriously, then our task is not to wait for heaven — it is to make space for heaven’s reality to break in now. We do that every time we name the image of God in someone the world devalues. Every time we make room for those whom patriarchy erases. Every time our liturgy calls God not only “Father,” but also “Mother,” “Creator,” “Spirit,” “Friend.” Every time our church policies ensure that trans and nonbinary people are affirmed, not tolerated.
Every time we refuse to let old categories limit God’s imagination for new life.
The resurrection is already happening — in us, around us, through us. Jesus’ words to the Sadducees echo across the centuries: “They cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God.” Children of the resurrection. That’s who we are. Not keepers of old hierarchies. Not defenders of outdated laws. Not gatekeepers of tradition. But bearers of new life.
We are called to imagine a world beyond fear and control — a world without patriarchy, without binaries, without death-dealing categories. A world where everyone is fully alive in the love of God. That’s the good news of the resurrection — not just for someday, but for right now. Amen.
