Of God and eternity, we're guessing from hints, often taken from answers to questions that we weren't even asking. This teaching that I struggle with, that those who are considered worthy of a place in the resurrection are neither married nor are given in marriage, this teaching wasn't a general teaching on the nature of heaven by Jesus. It was an answer to the Sadducees who didn't believe in heaven.

In fact, they were trying to trap Jesus in a type of argument called a reductio ad absurdum. They were trying to show that through the laws of levirate marriage, a woman who had been in a situation such as the one they described in their parable would end up being married to seven different brothers in heaven. The idea was that they were showing that the rules of earth and the rules of heaven simply cannot coexist.

It is simply an absurdity to say that someone who follows the rules of God could be in the resurrection because she would end up in an ungodly state. She would end up married to seven different people. The idea was to show that the very idea of the resurrection was ridiculous, internally flawed, laughable.

But Jesus dismantled that argument, not by giving a complete description of heaven, but rather by exposing their base false assumption that relationships in the resurrection remain the same as they are on earth. The reason that I struggle with this teaching about marriage, the reason I shy away from it, shows something more useful than simply that I love my wife or that I have a tendency to fixate on difficult questions. It shows that I, like the Sadducees, when I imagine heaven, imagine my current existence just a bit better and maybe with some of the sadness removed.

I think it's a natural tendency for many of us. Heaven is said to be the place of supreme happiness. So understandably, when we try to imagine what it might be like, we imagine what makes us happy and then we try to extend it out into eternity.

Heaven in our minds therefore becomes earth, but just a bit better and a bit longer. But of course, days like Remembrance Sunday show us why that idea of heaven just doesn't work. It's easy to imagine a nicer version of your life stretched out into eternity when there is enough goodness now that you can imaginatively stretch it outwards.

But Remembrance Sunday forces us to confront the reality that there are those who have lived through such horrors that any resemblance between heaven and earth would be for them utterly devastating, utterly untenable. If we were to say to a soldier dying alone in the mud of the Somme, a captive on a train to Auschwitz, a Tutsi mother watching her family die at knife point, a Palestinian father watching his baby starve to death, an Israeli sister praying for the return of her captive brother, that the only hope of heaven would be that it would be like earth but maybe a bit better, they would surely despair. They would surely say no, heaven cannot be anything like what I am experiencing now, it must be something entirely new.

Remembrance pulls us away from the idea that perfection can be just an imagined extension of what we have now because we are faced with the reality of human suffering. When we face the evil that human beings can do to each other we recognise that heaven, as Jesus taught, must be something totally different to earth. These examples of the evil that human beings can do to each other are not only awful because they represent loss of life, they're awful because they represent loss of humanity.

We are horrified when we recall and when we see human beings treat each other with barbarism because we know deep within ourselves that human beings were made for relationship. Our knowledge of this is so intrinsic that facing its absence even in memory or theory tears the fabric of who and what we are. When God the Holy Trinity made the heavens and the earth, they did so because their love, their relationship was so overflowing that they chose to call into existence all that is so that it could join in their love.

Genesis describes the idea of what that beginning was like, describes human beings walking with God in a garden, talking face to face as you and I are now. It was a picture of intimacy, of intimate loving relationship. A relationship in which human beings were not only able to receive love but also give it.

When we think of the love that human beings were created for, we tend to focus on the love between God and human beings but actually this under-represents the glory of what God designed. Human beings were made not just to love God but to love one another, to love creation, to love the plants and the animals and the rocks and the stars in and through their love for God. God the Holy Trinity created all things to find their meaning in the other.

In this way, God the Holy Trinity created to reflect their inner life. God is love and loving relationship by manner of existence. The father is a father because of the son.

The son is a son because of the father. The spirit is who the spirit is because they are the love shared between the father and the son, personified. Each person is in and through the other and so it was meant to be with us.

Even the star a billion light years away was meant to find its meaning in being observed and loved by the child who gazed at it from their backyard. Just as that child was meant to be dignified by knowing that the light from a billion light years away shone on them and gave them meaning. We are made in a network of relationships but Remembrance Sunday stands as a stark reminder of how deeply and repeatedly humanity has fallen short of this ideal because it forces us to recall the moments in our history where the horrors of war have overcome the network of relationships for which we were made.

And yet even the act of remembrance draws the fallen back into loving relationship. Their names echo through history as we remember their courage, remember their fighting, their service, fighting though they ought not have had to. We hear their echo and know that love for them means doing more to make sure that there are fewer memorials in the future in honour of their sacrifice.

Returning to the idea of marriage, Saint Paul in Ephesians chapter 5 implicitly explains why there is no marriage in heaven. He explains that marriage is a symbol of Jesus's relationship to the church, a mutually giving relationship of self-sacrifice and adoring love. Rowan Williams said that marriage is an icon of God's love.

It's meant to show everyone else what God's love kind of looks like. But in heaven that symbol finds its perfection. No longer does one individual give their all to another individual but rather all are joined together in perfect mutual relationship through God the Holy Trinity as was always meant to be.

Perhaps Remembrance Sunday also is a symbol and a symbol in need of fulfilment. Now we remember in mingled grief and love the evil that those who have fallen in war have endured. Now we resolve to do what we can to ensure that their fates are not repeated.

Now we mourn that their fates are being repeated. And yet in the perfection of the symbol perhaps one day we might look at our fellow human beings and feel the love for them which inspires us to act to their benefit before the evil occurs. But perhaps the perfection of the symbol of Remembrance Sunday will be that we no longer need to remember at all because instead we will look forward and ensure that good is done not evil mourned.

May we ever more be aware of the network of relationships for which we were made. May that network be our guide so that in the name of God the Holy Trinity we may become living reminders of the hope that heaven comes not to replicate earth but to redeem and transform it. Amen.