There are some topics that are forever controversial when it comes to Church teaching. Untold thousands of preachers have shied away from speaking a difficult truth with love when it comes to marriage, tithing, and morality throughout the years. While it would be next to impossible to determine what the most difficult
teaching to embrace is, I will tell you that this week’s Gospel ranks as one of the Gospel passages or teachings that is virtually guaranteed to start a fight wherein people end up hating me. The absence of marriage in heaven sometimes seems to be second only to lengthy debates about whether or not there are pets in heaven…

But instead of ignoring the difficulty or confusion arising from Jesus’ explanation that "The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage,” we would do well to dig for the spiritual lesson He wants us to have. Nothing that Jesus says is random, and if He wants us to know that marriage is intended for this life but does not exist in its present state in the next life, then it must be important.
 
While I don’t understand it from an experiential standpoint, I can certainly sympathize with married couples’ confusion or frustration that their most
important relationships would just be tossed aside once they reach paradise. After all, if you spend a lifetime learning to love and be loved by someone, you would think that should continue into eternity. After a certain point, it’s all someone knows. Everyone knows those older married couples who are almost literally inseparable: they have built their life together for so long that they essentially forget how to function without one another. I was blessed last month to celebrate the funeral for a woman who had been married for sixty-four years, and her husband passed away just a week after her funeral. Such love is both beautiful and rare, and it heightens the sting of this Gospel.

But rather than perceiving marriage’s absence in the afterlife as a slight, I think we should instead understand it as a commentary on what the point
and purpose of every vocation is supposed to be.
As a priest, my vocation is intimately bound up with the salvation of souls; priests are called to pour themselves out in imitation of the sacrifice that they make present in the world through the sacraments they are charged with performing. I truly love being a priest and working in the mission field of saving souls. But I don’t anticipate exercising my ministry in Heaven, because the job is done. There is no sin,
so there are no confessions. There is no sickness, so there is no anointing. We will be forever in the presence of Jesus Christ, and so the Eucharist is no longer necessary to be fully in communion with Jesus in the next life.
 
In this same way, if we truly understand marriage to be a sacrament intended to lead one’s spouse, children, family, and as many people as possible to Heaven, then we can better understand why it doesn’t exist in the same manner there as it does on earth. It isn’t necessary in Heaven, because the goal has been achieved. None of this is to say that there won’t be a bond of love between earthly spouses when they are in the next life; but their love was always intended to lead each other into the infinite love offered by Christ for His Church, of which we are members. Theologians have debated throughout the ages what relation we have in Heaven with those we knew on earth, but the more important reality will always be the eternal love of God for which we are called to strive in any vocation. May each of us prayerfully fulfill our vocation not only to grow in holiness ourselves, but also to lead those we love most to Our Lord in Heaven.