Breathtaking! Bold! Beautiful! Like nothing you’ve seen before!
Those are the words that Roger Ebert (of the Chicago Sun-Times) used to describe the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come. Similar words were used by my wife’s co-worker, in reference to this 1998 film, which got us intrigued enough to watch it.
The film was based on the novel of the same name by Richard Matheson, whose earlier work, I am Legend, was set for the screen in Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man (1971) and Will Smith’s I am Legend (2007). What Dreams May Come was written for the screen by Ronald Bass, who is known for the Dustin Hoffman-Tom Cruise film Rain Man, along with other relationship-driven films, such as My Best Friend’s Wedding and Sleeping with the Enemy.
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So what happens when the work of a man known for science fiction is interpreted by another known for relationship stories? You get the tale of a lost relationship hoping to be mended, with the mending set in a fantastical place—one masquerading as heaven, but is not. In this heaven, God is nowhere to be found and all who enter it can create their own lush and beautiful reality, as long as they can focus long enough on what they wish to create.
Loosely based on portions of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1472), What Dreams May Come was a disappointment. Its premise is an extension of New Age thinking, which says that you can make your own reality here on earth, and applies it to the afterlife. This wasn’t exactly what Dante, or God, had in mind.
What Dante did have in mind was the idea of a man going through hell (literally) in order to reunite with the love of his life. Beatrice is his motivation for traversing all of the circles of hell, purgatory, and paradise, so that he might once again be with she who had passed away before him.
What Dreams May Come, whose title was lifted from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, contains faulty theology, but its core premise intrigued me. It reminded me of a question I’ve had since I met the love of my life: Could we get remarried in the resurrection?
An odd question, I know. It does seem to fly in the face of the catechism some of us once knew, which says, in part: “Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
An answer to my question (Could we get remarried?), in light of this, could go something like: “No, if you’re enjoying God forever, marriage will get in the way of that. Besides, Jesus said, ‘For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven’ (Mark 12:25).”
This deserves a two-part answer.
I don’t know about marriage to another human being intruding upon a relationship with God then, in the next life, because the goal is to not permit that to happen in the here and now. If marriage to another person can be made to not intrude upon our relationship with God in this life, then why would it be intrusive in the next?
(I’ve once heard that this life is heaven practice, that this is where we learn priorities and behaviors that prepare us for the next life. I think that the Apostle Paul may agree with this notion, for, as Pastor Greg has recently reminded us, Paul had said that “godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (I Timothy 4:8).)
Whether it’s here and now or then and there, the idea is to maintain priorities: God first and all others second. As I told my wife, when I first introduced myself, “I want to be a part of your life knowing that I’m in second place, right behind God; and I want to know that you’re comfortable knowing you’re in second place—right after God.” With these priorities, I don’t believe that time and place play any part in the equation.
But what of what Jesus said about marriage in the next life? As Hamlet would say, “Ay, there’s the rub!”
From the looks of things—like the English Standard Version, quoted above—Jesus appears to have said that marriage isn’t part of the resurrection. But, as with the film I discussed above, looks can be deceiving. The actual meaning lies beneath the surface.
The context of the statement was Jesus’ response to an effort at entrapment by the Sadducees—those who don’t believe in the resurrection, so they’re sad, you see. 😉 Their attempt and his answer is found in Mark 12:18-27.
The passage begins by saying the Sadducees are agnostic regarding the resurrection; yet they asked him about it, anyway, to try and disprove the concept. Their attempt refers to the Levitical law that says if a man should die without a child, his brother should marry the widow, in order to preserve the family line and name.
The Sadducees proposed a ridiculous hypothetical; they suggested that this practice had occurred with seven brothers, none of whom could raise up a son. They further suggested that Jesus, because he hadn’t answered the question of to whom the woman would belong in the resurrection, he then couldn’t explain the resurrection, either, since he couldn’t sort out this family-lineage scenario to their satisfaction.
In the midst of his rebuttal to their hypothetical, Jesus said, “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25). Or did he?
Well, that’s how the English Standard Version translates the Greek. But that may be an imperfect translation.
A possibly better translation, given the context of the passage, has to do with how women were being viewed, especially by the Sadducees: as possessions, as a means to an end, as a way to create sons who would maintain the lineage of the man.
Jesus says that the resurrection eliminates this selfish view of women as possessions. The ancient Syriac Peshitta version of the Bible translates the above verse from Mark this way: “They do not take wives, nor are wives given to husbands.” That is, they’re not taken by men, nor are they given to other men as possessions. Rather, in the resurrection, we all belong to God.
If we all belong to God, we would then belong to each other as we willingly give ourselves one to another—in much the same way that New Testament marriage calls for us to willingly belong to and submit to one to another (Ephesians 5:21), out of love for one another and out of reverence to God.
With this in mind, the sense that I get of what Jesus told the Sadducees is that the Old Testament view of marriage—found in Deuteronomy 25:5–10, where women are the possessions of men, for the sake of the family name and little else—will be done away with in the resurrection.
It’s not that marriage will be done away with, altogether. Meaning, there may be marriage in the resurrection, after all, and it may actually look like the sort of New Testament marriage that my wife and I currently enjoy and look to get better at, as the days go by.
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This is not a theological certainty. Or even a theological assertion. It’s just the hope of my heart, based on what I believe Jesus has said on the subject, as he addressed an actual theological certainty.
In watching the theologically faulty What Dreams May Come, I had to take a closer look at marriage and how it might look in the resurrection, in the life after this—for heaven is but a momentary stopover, on the way to the resurrection, where God has for us new bodies, and a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1). With that closer look, I now have hope, as a late-middle-age man, that I may indeed be able to once again marry my wife, if I can somehow see her in the resurrection to come.
My body is faulty. I’m dealing with what may one day be a difficult end-of-life scenario, in a battle with rheumatoid arthritis. As I fight the good fight, I’m thankful that I’m not fighting it alone. God is with me, by his spirit, and he has sent me an ally, a partner, one whom I can now hardly imagine life without.
She is the love that I had never known until Our Father had introduced us. God brought her four thousand miles from home to eventually meet me in Vineland, New Jersey. I wonder how far I might have to travel to meet her, once again, when I have finally, as Hamlet had said, “shuffled off this mortal coil.”
—Kevin Hutchins
*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.