Whose Wife Will She Be?

"Teacher," they said, "Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?"
Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
Matthew 22:24-30

In Arthur Koestler’s book, Darkness at Noon, Comrade Rubashov suffers incarceration by his former colleague Ivano in the course of losing his leadership role in the communist party. Ivanov maintains that if they allow Rubashov to “think through” his situation, Rubashov will confess to whatever they choose to accuse him of. Both men recognize Rubashov’s innocence, but Ivanov foresees that if Rubashov agrees to make his life coherent, he will excise from his claims to justification anything inconsistent with showing himself totally devoted to the goals he has espoused. If he made his life's objective the triumph of the party, he will exclude from his being anything that goes against the party - even his wish to continue living. Ivanov anticipates that Rubashov will not even want to make a claim for continuing his life, let alone fight for it.

It is our anomalies, dysfunctions, impulsiveness and inconsistencies that implicate the most human and, therefore, the most incarnational aspects of our existence. We ALL live because we are indwellt by the living God-without His breath, we do not breathe. However, we conduct life in the gap between our behaviors and our ideals. Unless one's ideals are very circumspect and rigid that gap does not narrow with age, experience, conversion, sanctification, moral training, ethical behavior, self help gurus, awakenings, self-realization, etc. In fact, the gap between behavior and ideals widens-gets worse- with aspiration and love. The higher you aspire, the more you love, the more certain you will be found a hypocrite-you can only avoid it by narrowness and fixety.

In fact, we can never even give a coherent account of ourselves: our accounts always rend and contradict; we can never manage even the most superficial facts, so we always allow, if not, intend incoherence and contradiction. Coherence, then, requires us to eradicate our contradictions and inconsistencies. The impetus for coherence elevates to pre-eminence in the human condition the violent dilemna: cut off what is incoherent or be cutoff. As actors in the public domains of politics, church and schools, as counselors, mentors, parents, teachers, spouses in the private domains of psychology, prayer, marital and familial relations, when we acquiesce in the demand for coherence we re-establish the violent dilemna as an imaginaire: to cut off what is in one that defies coherence or to suffer punishment and exclusion unto abandonment, death, exile or torment. The one incoherent can not continue unchecked.

The Communist Party referred to the violent end of the incoherent as physical liquidation. The incoherent became "gone." We, too, have our quaint terms like "excommunicated," "divorced,"
"emancipated," "ineligible," "unfortunate," "chose not to come along," "Republicans in Name Only" and the like. We invent them at a rate unanticipated even by the likes of George Orwell, and hang them throughout the blogosphere.

Conservatives will assert that the problem for Koestler’s characters is that they have devoted themselves to the Communist party. The objective for which they are called to give account is irretrievably flawed. But, in fact, it is the totality of a claim like “coherence,” of “giving a consistent account of oneself” that is flawed.