GUEST POST: #ReimagineHEAVEN...when the curtain is drawn back
September 2024
I have worked my way through the Gospel of Matthew over the last six weeks. Now I am doing the same with the Gospel of Mark. Several things have encouraged this daily Gospel reading and prayer. First, I have a profound sense that I did not pay enough attention to the four Gospels over the course of my long life. (In my background we didn't even know what a lectionary was so we rarely read a Gospel text each Lord’s Day. (However, for the last eighteen years I have experienced this discipline by being part of a good Lutheran church.) I truly wish someone had told me that reading and contemplating the person and events in the life of the Messiah was central to a robust life of faith and prayer. It was through my journey to ecumenical practice and theology that I saw how central this practice really was to the whole story of the church itself.
My companion is this present reading has been N.T. Wright. In his seventeen-volume series, The Bible for Everyone, Wright unpacks the material of the New Testament in ways that reveal the depth of the text but always in a manner that is for “everyone.” He believes, as I do, that this material is for every Christian, not just scholars. While these readings are quite simple they often reveal the obvious more clearly.
Over the Labor Day weekend I read the first chapter of Mark. In Mark 1:9-13 the Gospel writer tells the reader of the baptism of Jesus. When Jesus is baptized by John a voice from heaven says “You are my wonderful son; you make me very glad” (Wright’s translation). Then Wright makes a simple but startling point: “The whole Christian gospel can be summed up in this point: that the living God looks at us, every baptized and believing Christian, he says to us what he said to Jesus on that day. He sees us, not as we are in ourselves, but as we are in Jesus Christ. It sometimes seems impossible, especially to people who have never had that kind of support from their earthly parents, but it’s true: God looks at us, and says, ‘You are my dear, dear child; I’m delighted with you.’”
Mark says Jesus “saw the heavens open, and the Spirit coming down like a dove.” We often miss this because we have so many wrong notions about the word heaven. “Heaven, in the Bible often means God’s dimension beyond the ordinary reality.” Heaven here is more like a curtain being drawn back so that instead of seeing trees and flowers, or in Jesus’ case the river . . we are standing in the presence of a different reality altogether.”
Many Christians, perhaps most, have a wrong idea about this word heaven. In the Bible heaven is God’s dimension of the created order, whereas earth is the world of space, time and matter. Sometimes heaven stands for God ( as in “the kingdom of heaven,” in Matthew). This means heaven in the New Testament is not where we go when we die. “Entering the kingdom of heaven does not mean ‘going to heaven after death,’ but rather belonging in the present to the people who presently steer their life’s course by the standards of God. (Consider Mathew 6:10, “on earth as in heaven” which means we steer our earthly life by the standards and purposes of heaven itself, or God’s reign. We live in this heaven right now when we experience the Spirit working in us.
If you ask me what happens at death I answer, “We go to be with Jesus in paradise.” Heaven finally comes when the new heavens and new earth come ofter the return of Jesus. Try thinking this way and then speak this way regularly. I promise this will powerfully impact your life.
In the love of Jesus Christ alone,
John
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