On this day a few thousand years ago Jesus was resurrected into everlasting life. Except that he already presumably had everlasting life because he was already a part of the Holy Trinity.
Anyway, where did he go and what is it like there?
The Quran gives a very clear vision of what heaven is like. There are lots of gardens and flowing rivers lots of and lounging around on couches and bracelets of gold and silky stuff. For example:
“Those will have gardens of perpetual residence; beneath them rivers will flow. They will be adorned therein with bracelets of gold and will wear green garments of fine silk and brocade, reclining therein on adorned couches. Excellent is the reward, and good is the resting place.” (Q. 18:31)
Also, delicious fruit and drink which you partake of without getting drunk:
“…the chosen servants of Allah. Those will have a provision determined—fruits; and they will be honored in gardens of pleasure on thrones facing one another. There will be circulated among them a cup from a flowing spring, white and delicious to the drinkers; no bad effect is there in it, nor from it will they be intoxicated.” (Q. 37:40-47)
But descriptions of heaven in the Bible are very scant. Here is a collection of descriptions of heaven from the Bible. Apart from the narrow gate that leads to heaven, the absence of tears, hunger and thirst and the rather unappealing notion that there will be no night (isn’t constant light a form of torture?)- there are no descriptions of the physical characteristics of heaven. This might be because heaven is not regarded as a physical place but as somewhere more amorphous.
Yet Catholic teaching insists that the body is resurrected:
“the Catechism of the Catholic Church reiterated this long-defined teaching, stating, “‘We believe in the true resurrection of this flesh that we now possess’ (Council of Lyons II). We sow a corruptible body in the tomb, but he raises up an incorruptible body, a ‘spiritual body’ (cf. 1 Cor 15:42–44)” (CCC 1017)
Plenty of non-Catholics also believe in the resurrection of a physical body.
So if the body is resurrected it must have a physical to reside. While we don’t know much of what the Christian heaven looks like, it seems pretty clear that, unlike the Muslim paradise, the resurrected Christian body does not get to have sex in heaven. In what must understandably be his least quoted saying, when asked with which of her various deceased husbands a widow would married to in heaven Jesus said: