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Vol. 24, No. 1, 2025
 
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WHERE IS HEAVEN?


by
ROBERT LYON

______________________________________________________

Robert Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest book, Don't Throw Out Your Bible, is now in print.

 

What about nearness?
How can we come to know its nature?
Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly.
We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near.
Martin Heidegger

When you ask a question, in order to have any chance of getting the right answer, you need first of all to be sure you’re asking the right question. In the case of today’s topic, I may not be asking the right question. That’s because, if God is “outside” our bourne of time and space, the word “where” may not even be relevant. But for want of a better word, let’s let the question stand for now, and admit that what we’re doing in this instance is somewhat speculative.

In the ancient world, people spoke of heaven as “up”, and the other option as “down”. Clearly they had not considered what navigational hazards that might cause for Australians! At least one Biblical writer, more sensible than I, was not willing to speculate at all about such things. He asks rhetorically, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?”

I have wondered about today’s question for a long time, but it wasn’t until some disparate (not desperate!) ideas began to reveal a pattern that I thought I might profitably write about it. The first idea that came into play is found in John 20, Luke 23, and Acts 1. John describes what he and Peter saw when they looked into the empty tomb. What they saw was the grave clothes, collapsed, and the head wrapping, still intact, as if Jesus’ resurrection body had “evaporated” through them.

(Thanks to the late Professor Birger Gerhardsson for that insight from his book Memory and Manuscript.) A similar phenomenon occurs later in the same chapter in Luke, where on two occasions Jesus suddenly “appears” in a room that Luke insists was “locked”. Then on Ascension Day, he vanishes in a cloud, much as he had done in Luke’s account of the Emmaus Road meeting, except that at the Emmaus event there was no cloud. This idea of Jesus walking through walls, etc, etc, has never bothered me intellectually since I learned of Ernest Rutherford’s 1906 experiment, in which he fired alpha particles at a sheet of gold leaf, and most of them passed right through without affecting the gold leaf – demonstrating that even the densest of matter is really mostly empty space. (Teachers and profs: No chuckling allowed!)

The second idea that came into play is an expression that would have been familiar to my Irish ancestors. Celtic religion passed on to Celtic Christians the idea of “thin places”, which could be either natural or architectural locations where one felt “close” to “the other side”, and which therefore acquired the status of sacred space. Those Celts used to say that this world and the other world are only three feet apart, but in the thin places they seemed to overlap. A thin place could be any place, like a quiet grove, an outcrop overlooking the sea, or an ancient monastic sanctuary. Sometimes, though some would dispute the appropriateness of this, they also spoke of “thin events”. Jacob had a thin event when, sleeping outdoors with a stone for a pillow, he had a vision of a stairway to – and from! – heaven. When he awoke, he exclaimed, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I knew it not!” (Genesis 28:10-17). Surely, God is in a lot of places where we fail to recognize him.

Maybe it’s not that the places aren‘t thin enough, but that we’re too thick. But I expect that some of you have experienced such events, if not also such places.

The third idea that came into play is the Transfiguration. Of all “thin” events, this may be the most helpful to our understanding. Some skeptical New Testament critics have speculated that the Transfiguration is a misplaced Resurrection story. I think they’ve drawn the wrong conclusion, but they did so because they noticed something significant: the transfigured Jesus looks other-worldly, like the glorified Jesus whom John sees in Revelation 3. And Moses and Elijah are there with him.

Remember how Jesus said, “He is not the God of the dead but of the living”? So what if the Transfiguration is the definitive Biblical thin event? Does this not lend some credibility to the Celtic idea that the “other world” may be in some sense just over the horizon?

Does it not also make more understandable Paul’s quotation from Epimenides that “In him we live and move and have our being”? And likewise, Jesus’ statements that “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” and “I am with you always, to the end of the age”? And might we not read as something more than mere metaphor, the affirmation that “We are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses”?

Of course, any discussion of heaven is fraught with difficulties — first, because we don’t know what the word “where” could mean apart from our present space-time universe, and second, because what the Bible says God created was not “heaven” but “the heavens and the earth”, this earth and all that stuff that we see “up” there in the sky. The caricature of insubstantial beings floating around on clouds comes nowhere close to the Biblical picture of an afterlife. In fact, the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright points out that nowhere in the Bible is the word “heaven” used to mean the location of the afterlife. What the Bible really offers is this: “According to his promise, we are looking forward to a new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Did you notice the semantic shift there? Because of how we use the word “heaven” we have just reframed our starting question to mean not just “Where is God?” But also “Where will the after-life be?” That’s the sort of thing that can happen when you’re using metaphoric language. In John’s vision, what he sees by way of an answer to that reframed question is not our ascent upwards, but a new heavens and a new earth, the everlasting city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from God. That is, of course, metaphoric imagery, an accommodation to our space-time sense of things, so we must avoid the temptation to speculate too much about it. For Paul has told us that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love him. And John confirms that “we are even now children of God, though what we shall be has not yet been made known. But Paul also assures us that “When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then you also shall appear with him in glory. And again John confirms, “We know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

 

 

 

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