The Embodied Hope of Resurrection
Why Marriage in Heaven Isn’t What You Think
Let me address something that bothers a lot of people when they read the Gospels: Jesus says that in the age to come, those who are part of the resurrection are “neither married nor given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30).
It’s a jarring statement. Because here’s the thing: I like being married. I really would like to continue being married in the age to come. That seems like a good thing that should continue, right?
Passages like this rub me the wrong way, similar to when Jesus talks about hating your father, mother, sister, brother if you want to follow him. I happen to like my mom quite a bit. I liked my dad—I still like my dad, but he’s already in the age to come. I don’t like this seeming obsession Jesus has with messing around with my relationships, trying to break things up.
So what’s going on here?
The answer requires understanding something fundamental about marriage in the ancient world—and it completely changes how we read what God is actually promising us.
Marriage as Economic Transaction
First, we need some cultural context. Jesus is having a debate with the Sadducees, a sect of Judaism that didn’t believe in the physical resurrection of the dead. This opposed the Pharisees, who Jesus spent more time with because he was probably in that tradition—he obviously believed in the resurrection.
The Sadducees bring up this hypothetical about the unluckiest woman in the history of the world. Seven husbands married, seven husbands dead. You know what we’d call that? A black widow. She’s going through this family like the plague. And it’s ridiculous on purpose—the Sadducees are trying to break the logic of physical resurrection with an impossible scenario.
But here’s what we need to understand: marriage in the ancient Near East was fundamentally different from what we experience today.
In our culture today, most people select their partners based on emotional reality, on romantic love. That’s not what marriage was in Jesus’ context. Marriage was fundamentally a transaction, a contractual agreement. It was a way to provide economic stability within society.
That’s also the primary function of family in Jesus’ day. When Jesus says to hate father, mother, sister, brother—first, the word “hate” really means “prefer.” You can’t prefer your own family to Jesus if you’re going to faithfully follow him. And family in this context wasn’t primarily an emotional unit like we think of it, but an economic unit.
Marriage was an economic reality in the ancient Near East. That’s why the law of Moses has this provision about a woman whose husband dies leaving no children, especially no sons. For a woman to be provided for required one of three things: a father, a husband, or a son.
When someone got married, responsibility for that woman shifted from father to husband. Should the husband die without leaving heirs who can provide for the widow, it was the legal obligation of his brother to marry that woman and ideally provide her with heirs.
This is called levirate marriage—a prescribed contractual arrangement where a brother is obligated to marry his brother’s widow if there have been no heirs.
This is actually something beautiful about Mosaic Law. It’s a social safety net, a way of providing for people in society—namely women—who would fall through the cracks in these situations.
What Jesus Really Meant
So when Jesus addresses this situation with the Sadducees, he’s not talking about emotional, loving relationships. He’s not talking about marriage as we understand it. He’s talking about economic contractual arrangements.
Notice the language: “married and given in marriage.” “Given in marriage” means giving away a daughter from father to husband, usually with an exchange of goods—a dowry or bride price.
Jesus is saying that in the resurrection age to come, there’s no need for these contractual relationships because the kingdom of God is not a place where there’s danger of anyone going without. There’s no need for these social safety nets in the kingdom of God because there’s never any need in the kingdom of God.
There is only abundant flourishing. The age to come is an age of overflowing plenty where all creation thrives, completely infused with the love of God.
God isn’t taking things away from us in the age to come. The age to come is not about God taking away things we enjoy like our spouses and children and families. It’s about living in an embodied reality no longer shackled by the necessities of economic safety nets.
Our relationships will be defined neither by emotional connection nor the state of our bank accounts. They’ll be defined by the overwhelming, ever-existing, ever-present, ever-flowing love of God that permeates the entirety of renewed creation.
Why Bodies Matter
This brings me to the second thing I want to emphasize: how embodied the Christian hope is.
Most of the time when we talk about the afterlife in our modern American Christian context, we say, “Your soul goes to heaven when you die.” But the Christian hope is so much more than that.
Bishop N.T. Wright, Anglican scholar and theologian, refers to the hope of our faith as “life after life after death.” What does he mean?
When we say the words of the Apostles’ Creed, the final line is: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”
The final statement: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”
Our Christian hope is not merely a disembodied eternity—harps and halos, if you will. Our Christian hope is nothing less than the complete restoration of our body into a creation that has been renewed and restored to its Edenic perfection, just as if the fall, just as if sin and death, had never happened.
That is our Christian hope—a return to the perfection of Eden as if all the brokenness of the world never happened.
If you’re wondering what the book of Revelation is about, that’s it. Behold, I saw a new heaven and a new earth and the city of God coming down out of heaven to sit in the middle of this restored, this renewed creation. The city of God being a place where there is no sorrow, no pain, no suffering, no tears, where death itself has been abolished and where God wipes every tear from every eye.
This is an embodied reality. Not merely spiritual, but embodied.
Job’s Testimony
This is what Job is talking about in one of the most beautiful passages in Scripture. Job, in the middle of being “comforted” by his friends (and I put that in quotes because his friends are very bad at comforting—they’re more like adding insult to injury), says:
I know my Redeemer lives, and I will see Him. After my body has wasted away, after my skin has been destroyed by these sores, after my body has disintegrated into nothing, even after I’ve become one with this ash heap that I’ve made my home, I know that my Redeemer lives and I will see Him with my eyes. Not someone else’s eyes, not through the lens of a disembodied eternal reality, but with my eyes.
Just as surely as our Savior lives, we also will live.
We are promised not only spiritual eternal life, but a resurrection life that is embodied and physical. A place in God’s kingdom with continued work to do and continued opportunity to serve as part of God’s continually blossoming and flourishing kingdom.
What This Actually Means
We can expect to have a renewed body not broken by the effects of age or disease. We can expect a body where cancer is eradicated. We can expect a body where seizures don’t happen. We can expect a body no longer subject to the physical wear and tear we all experience throughout life.
We can expect to no longer have backs that hurt so much we can barely get out of bed and feet that won’t carry us around. We can expect a body no longer plagued by low immunity. We can expect a body renewed to a state as if the fall and sin and death and the brokenness that infects the world—as if none of that ever happened.
That is the Christian promise.
Our hope is not merely some disembodied future where we’re floating around doing nothing. And honestly, that sounds boring. I really don’t want to float around. I want something to do. Let me play guitar at least. And by the way, I don’t want a harp. I want a guitar. I know how to play guitar. I’ve never touched a harp.
The point is that this disembodied spiritual afterlife is not the promise we’re given. The fullness of the promise is not merely a spiritual afterlife. The fullness of the promise is a full life after this life that includes our bodies, our minds, our intelligence. It includes work for us to do. It includes a meaningful existence.
The Future God Promises
The age to come isn’t subtraction, it’s transformation. It’s about living in an embodied reality no longer shackled by necessities like economic safety nets, where our relationships will be defined by divine love.
This is the future we’re promised in the Bible. This is the future we’re promised in the words of the Creed, the tradition of the Church. The future we are promised is full of life, and more abundantly—something beyond our wildest imagination.
And we can be sure of at least one thing: it will include our body. It will include a real life with real responsibilities, permeated with the real love of Jesus.
Our afterlife as Christians, our idea of the age to come, is not theoretical. It’s not a hopeful, mythical, metaphorical understanding of life continuing after death. Rather, our hope as Christians is that the kingdom of God will break through completely and overwhelm all the darkness in this world, and we in our renewed state will have a place in that kingdom alongside our friends, our family, our spouses, our children.
We will have a place in this kingdom that God has promised.
Thanks be to God.