The 1954 musical film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, directed by Stanley Donen, and starring Howard Keel and Jane Powell tells the story of a backwoods man named Adam and his new bride Milly who marries him after knowing him for only a few hours. On returning with Adam to his cabin in the mountains, Milly found out that Adam is just one of seven brothers (Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank and Gideon) living in the same cabin. And through a chain of hilarious events, Adam’s six brothers decided to have their own brides by kidnapping six girls named Dorcas, Ruth, Martha, Liza, Sarah and Alice. One Bride for Seven Brothers is really nothing more than a short narrative from the Bible but the lesson in it could turn out to be a blockbuster.
As the story has it, some Sadducees came to Jesus in what was apparently a premeditated attempt to justify and support their own belief and said, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘if a man dies childless, his brother should marry his widow and have children for his brother.' There were seven brothers among us. The first married and died. Since he had no children, he left his widow to his brother. The second brother also died, as well as the third, and the rest of the seven brothers. At last the woman died. Now, in the resurrection, whose wife will she be? All seven brothers had been married to her” [Matthew 22:24-28]. Jesus simply discarded their thinking as spiritual ignorance as evident in his words, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures or the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” [Matthew 22: 29, 30].
The basis for the Sadducee s’ belief was a mindset that the resurrection was a fallacy on the grounds that the idea of seven brothers being married to one woman at the same time was against the Law of Moses as well as counter-cultural. Theirs was driven by a thinking error that since all the seven brothers were married to this one woman in life at different times, and if there was really a resurrection the seven brothers would have to be married to her all at the same time. Jesus held the position that marriage is for this life only and not for the afterlife. The detail of Jesus’ position on the issue is that the husband ceases to be the husband to his wife once he dies and the wife also ceases to be the wife to her husband when she dies. And if that is the case, then Paul’s statement “For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband” [Romans 7: 2] reaffirms Jesus’ position. But the Christian marriage is unique in the sense that God has compensated it with a dual-linear nature in which the husband is not just the husband to his wife but a brother in Christ as well, and the wife is also not just the wife to her husband but a sister in Christ as well. Both the Christian husband and wife could spend eternity together, but only as brother and sister in the Lord.
If there is one lesson at all that we could learn from the Sadducees’ One Bride for Seven Brothers hypothesis, it is that no human relationship extends beyond the grave. They are all compromised by death. And in case you have not figured it out yet, the only connection between Stanley Donen's film and the Bible story is just the number seven. I pray that you discover life the way God intends.
K. George Olubodun
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