Sex in (the Last) City

In response to my post earlier this week about the redemption of our ethnicity and culture, my friend and former student Ashleigh asked this great question:

Do you have any on how this might jive with what we're always taught that there won't be marriage (and implicitly sex, another very embodied thing) after the resurrection?

Do you think this is a misinterpretation of Jesus's comments to the Sadducees? If not a misinterpretation, what do we do, then, with what appears to be an instance of God "decimating recreationally" a good and important part of the embodied human experience?

My attempt at a response:

My arm-chair musings on this might be rambling, let's see if i can make any headway...

First, the redemption of all things is the fulfillment of those things, the perfection of all things. that includes our ethnicity and culture as well as our gender.

Some of the purposes of those things, like culture, have served us well here but will not be necessary in the end. Take the example of curing diseases during the Enlightenment. a great function of white culture in the here and now, not necessary in the world to come.

But there are many authors (Dallas Willard among them) who argue that our participation in the world to come will be an active one. The challenges and opportunities will not arise out of problems (like diseases) but out of God's holy creativity who delights to create and make and who delights to invite us to be a part of his creating nature.

So there might still be art, for example, or perhaps we would participate in creation of planets or other things. This would keep some of the essence of culture--in fact, might be the fulfillment of it entirely.

Bottom line: what seems here and now to be "culture at its best" we might find to be just a lame precursor to the fulfillment we'll find on the other side of making all things new.

So back to the original question. right now, we can't imagine the fulfillment of our gender and sexuality apart from marriage and sex...which makes sense on a number of levels!

But our trust is that the redemption of all things is the true fulfillment of them, not the negation of them. So what if we discover that gender and sexuality is fulfilled not in the sex act itself but in other ways that we can't even begin to imagine?

C.S. Lewis talks about this. He draws a parallel with a boy who asks if you eat chocolate while having sex. Upon hearing "no," he can't imagine why anyone would want to have sex, not imagining how there might be fulfillment that is greater than chocolate-eating.

Again, these are mostly guesses. I think that you're interpreting Jesus' answer correctly, which presses me to think that there's a much greater fulfillment of our sexuality that is not a negation of it, but rather a fulfillment of it that we can't quite yet imagine.