Fellow Christians, you can breathe a sign of relief because – despite what you may have heard or assumed – we have overwhelming evidence that there is sex in the resurrection.
I’m going to present that evidence here, but first I want to examine why some Christians believe that one of life’s greatest pleasures has no place in paradise.
While the Bible never addresses the matter directly, many Christians infer that sex is incompatible with the resurrection based on the following Gospel passage in Matthew, also recounted in Mark and Luke. Jesus doesn’t speak on sex here, but he does say that people don’t get married in the resurrection:
That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring 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. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” (22: 23-32)
The End of Marriage (As We Know It?)
Because Jesus says there’s no getting married in the resurrection, many Christians assume there is no sex in the resurrection. Sex and marriage are tightly entwined in Judaeo-Christian ethics, so this conclusion sounds plausible initially. But it only works if you isolate this passage in Matthew from its context, i.e. the rest of Matthew and the wider Gospel and Old Testament narratives. And I think we should be careful not to read into Jesus’ words what he did not actually say.
The immediate context for this passage is the Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ attempts to entrap Jesus with difficult questions; they want to discredit him before the people or get him arrested by Rome. Just prior to this episode, the Pharisees confront Jesus in the temple with a tricky question about paying taxes. Jesus knows what their game is and famously shuts them down (“Render to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s….”).
When the Pharisees’ efforts fail, the Sadducees take a turn with a question about (levirate) marriage in the resurrection.
Importantly, these questions posed to Jesus don’t come from a place of sincerity; the Pharisees and Sadducees are attempting to trick him, not attain true understanding. In fact, the Sadducees don’t even believe in the resurrection; they just want to embroil Jesus in controversy to hasten his downfall.
Their bad intentions frame Jesus’ response. While Jesus does answer their questions, he also makes them look foolish (Matt 22:34). His words to the Sadducees also cut to the heart of their corrupt thinking on marriage.
The End of Levirate Marriage
According to Jewish law, the custom of levirate marriage meant that the brother of a deceased man was obliged to marry the man’s widow if no male children were born from their union. This custom, while potentially protecting women, is deeply rooted in patriarchal practices in which women were seen as property. The main point of levirate marriage, as expressed in Jewish law, was not to protect the woman but to protect the inheritance of the firstborn son. In the Sadducees’ example, a woman is passed along like property to seven brothers after each of them dies in turn. The Sadducees effectively ask at the end: “To whom does she belong in the resurrection?”
When Jesus says that “people are neither married nor given in marriage” in the resurrection, maybe he means that marriage as the Sadducees know it will be no more. Maybe marriage as they know it – the social and legal institution that considers women male property, that safeguards a firstborn son’s property rights for the next generation – doesn’t need to exist in the resurrection. For one, because no one dies!
When Jesus says people don’t get married in the resurrection, we need to understand what the Jewish concept of marriage was then because it’s very different from ours now. We read the passage and assume Jesus is speaking to our concept of marriage, but he wasn’t. He was speaking to first-century Sadducees. He was responding to a question specifically involving levirate marriage, which is based on the certainty of death. Of course Jesus rejected that kind of marriage in the resurrection. But how might Jesus have responded to questions about other (non-levirate) marriage scenarios?
“Like the Angels in Heaven”
There’s another clue that Jesus was speaking particularly to levirate marriage, which is grounded on human mortality.
Following Jesus’ statement that people will not marry or be given in marriage, Jesus says that people (instead) “will be like the angels in heaven.”
New Testament scholar Ben Witherington writes that Jesus does not actually define what quality of the angels precludes marriage in the resurrection; however, he (and others) argue that the implied trait in question is immortality.
In other words, in the resurrection, we will be like angels in the sense that we will be immortal.
But while immortality precludes the need for levirate marriage, it doesn’t necessarily preclude all marriage. After all – Adam and Eve were immortal, at least before the Fall. So if Jesus was indeed referring to the immortality of angels as a reason why there is no marriage in the resurrection, he must have been referring to levirate marriage only. Otherwise what he’s saying doesn’t seem to square with the rest of Scripture.
Will Sex Always Require Marriage?
Even if Jesus was denying all marriage in the resurrection, sex in the resurrection is still possible.
Here’s why.
In Genesis – before the Fall – Adam and Eve do not “get married” the way we do. There’s no ceremony or even an official decree. Yet God commands them to have sex: “Be fruitful and multiply.” (Gen. 1:28)
The absence of marriage (at least as a legal institution) before the Fall, where sex is nonetheless enjoyed, suggests that we can still look forward to sex in the resurrection without “marriage” per se.
The Genesis narrative implies that marriage, or at least the “act” of getting legally married, wasn’t needed in a perfect world, while sex definitely was. Maybe that’s where we’re headed in the resurrection!
To that point, Witherington explains that the Greek words Jesus uses for “marry” (γαμοῦσιν) and “be given in marriage” (γαμίζονται) refer to the act of marrying, not the state of being married. Adam and Eve certainly enjoyed the latter while they were in paradise, without the former.
Jesus elsewhere tells his followers that if they want to understand what he’s saying about marriage, they need to go back to the beginning; their ways of thinking have been corrupted by a world stained by sin (Matt. 19:8). Indeed, Jesus came to take us back to the beginning when our connections with God – and each other – were perfect and without the need for law.
Sex was part of that original male-female relational perfection.
I’m not sure a perfect world needs the social and legal institution of marriage. It seems like Eden didn’t. But it’s hard for us to see sex without the “institution” of marriage in a perfect world because in our fallen world, which is all we know, sex without bounds would be highly problematic.
The Resurrection of the Body
Jesus’s resurrected, fully-functioning, glorified body delivers the final blow to the idea that sex in the resurrection is a no-go.
Post-resurrection, Jesus makes great efforts to demonstrate his corporal reality to the disciples. He eats with them on multiple occasions (Luke 24: 41-43; John 21: 10-13), imploring them not to doubt his physicality: “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” (Luke 24: 39)
Are we to believe that we shall enjoy food in the resurrection but not sex?
How does that make sense?
Our bodies were designed for sex the way our stomachs were designed for food. Denying the existence of sex in the resurrection is tantamount to denying the reality of the resurrected body.
Eric Breaux wonderfully summarizes the above points in this comment:
Jesus [in Matthew] was referring only to levirate marriage, not the union of a man and woman in an intimate sexual relationship. The Greek words used for marrying and being given in marriage refer to the legal institution of marriage. This was not needed with the first couple Adam and Eve, so says nothing about the actual married state. Bible scholars, N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington have insightful information to the truth of the context. God only seeks to get rid of sin, which marriage is not, so there is no need to get rid of it. We are made with a much greater desire for an intimate relationship with someone of the opposite gender, that most people would hate to live without, than the desire to eat, and yet people say God will get rid of sex and marriage but not food. That makes no sense. Just because some people manage to not care if they can continue having a sinless sexually intimate relationship with someone for eternity, doesn’t make it fair to teach that those who do care should just get over it somehow. Food is just as unnecessary to live as an immortal as sex and marriage, but that didn’t stop God from making the marriage union in a deathless perfect world, which is the state the new heaven and earth are being restored to.
Sex in the Resurrection
As I wrote in “On Sex, Evangelicals Need to Get Real” – the world knows how important sex is. We Christians need to take back that principle, not by ignoring God’s word, but by returning to it. When we do, I think it becomes clear that sex is important to God, it’s here to stay, and better sex is on the way.
One of my favorite episodes of the sci-fi TV series Black Mirror, entitled “USS Callister,” tells the story of a deranged genius who works in a future-state “virtual reality” software company. To get revenge on co-workers who slighted him, he creates clones of them and traps them in one of his adventure games. They are essentially doomed to live forever there. Reflecting on their predicament, one of the victims laments somewhat humorously that their rogue colleague didn’t even give them sex organs; they’re like human versions of Barbie and Ken dolls. This key omission, he seems to say, is the worst part of the hell they’re in.
I think having perfectly functioning sexual bodies in the resurrection, with eternal abstinence, could possibly be more hellish than having a blank space where my sex organs should be.
Thankfully the resurrection will entail neither of these distortions. An all-encompassing paradise awaits us: a worship paradise, a botanical paradise, a musical paradise, a culinary paradise, and yes, a sexual paradise.
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