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.