Woolly backs of cumulonimbus arched from grass to sky and filled the air between green and blue with titanium white. From behind the cloud, the sun airbrushed silver linings and glissaded to the earth in oblique angles of gold. Similar piles of celestial livestock herded slowly across the plains grazing on the happy prairie, shepherded by a gentle westerly wind. If there was any sign of life within the clouds, it was the slow muscling of water vapors jockeying for the top, which was nearly imperceptible unless you held still long enough to watch them grow.
There they stood, a flock of future tenements for the saints. Somewhere beyond the billows was hidden a city, the expectation of the redeemed who will one day fly up and perch in the crown of that New Jerusalem, and pluck hymns on harps until forever.
Bob Ross would have approved of such happy clouds.
Wyatt did not. Heaven held no hope for fourth graders.
Not that he had a sound systematic theology of the eschaton; days squandered in furry leafed forrest, damming creeks, abducting crawdads and constructing palaces from punky logs left little time for eternity. He was an earthly minded boy: both beslimed feet planted firmly on the ground with a fist of toes stubbed raw on knuckley tree roots. He was a boy of the earth.
He liked the sour smell of spring; it reminded him of a rascally, wet dog that hopped out of the tub mid bath, unsoaped, joyously shaking its stink about. There was a vigor and carelessness about it he could nod at. They were equally unwashed, the earth and he. Sounds of young birds in low nests and mud sucking his heels made him happy. Vivid greens of new growth leaves wilting in their new soft bodies he would rub on his cheek and lips and around his ears. The world was as playful and impatient as he was, always doing something interesting, inventing new sounds and smells and sights to eat. He considered it a friend.
Which is why he had no interest in heaven and no intention of going there. He glowered at the clouds like they were the first day of school. From his standpoint, heaven represented all the worst parts of this planet, those things which he was sure the earth always felt apologetic for – desks, right angles, sitting still, and white shirts you had to keep clean. He never felt more kinship with Tom and Huck.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have a hearty respect for God’s creativity; anyone who could come up with the Grand Canyon and the platypus in the same six days demanded the respect of any honest 9 year old boy. Which is why it made no sense – no sense at all – why God planned to louse it all up when it came to heaven. God works in mysterious ways, he had been told, but this seemed like an obvious departure from his artistic line.
But there it was, stretched out before him: the future hospital piled high into the sky, shimmering with gold and white, where the sick would convalesce for eternity in an antiseptic environment. No dirt. No trees. No thanks.
He’d take earth any old day, even if Hell came with it.
*****************
My son does not want to go to heaven. He told me as much. My daughter feels the same way. I consider it a failure on my part to scoot their imaginations along. But I do think that many people have a similar queasy feeling in their minds when they consider heaven, a doleful expectation of prolonged church services with an eternal moratorium on laughter. Even apart from the cartoon version I have described, the prospect of heaven is still altogether other, alien and unfamiliar. “Going to heaven”, though ending earthly sorrow, still feels like having to go live with an estranged relative in Nebraska where nothing is familiar. And you don’t even get to take your dog.
Now, I don’t know of any thinking Christian who actually thinks heaven is a cloud city. Revelation describes heaven as a garden city, uniting the creation of God with the enterprising creations of man, both the product of happy toil. But I think there can exist a subtle assumption that this earth and our bodies are destined for the crematorium of God’s wrath, at which point he will spin a whole other spangly universe into existence and plop our souls into an alien form for the rest of eternity.
Perhaps our view of death and life is in need of some tweeks. I would like to offer a few thoughts on the devastation of death, the solidarity of life, and the expectations of resurrection.
Death
The first mentioning of death comes in the second chapter of Genesis.
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
Genesis 2:16-17 (ESV)
We usually take this to mean a physical death and envision a Snow White scenario with Eve perishing from a single bite, a ruby apple tumbling from her milky hand. But this is not what happened. God had said in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. After they both ate they continued living for several hundred years. Did God lie?
Or perhaps in that moment they did die. And perhaps this death was far more insidious than a swift execution. If we were able to ask Adam and Eve the morning after they ate of the tree if they died, what would they say? How would they describe the death they experienced?
Most acutely would be the experience of separation.
Death introduced fractures in all relationships across creation. Adam and Eve realized they were naked and ashamed to be seen by the other. They scurried away from God and hid. The ground bore thorns and no longer sharing its fruit, signifying a break on fellowship with the earth. Animals became skittish and wide eyed when approached. Even within himself, Adam experienced the disintegration between his soul, spirit and body. The prime experience of Adam and Eve when they disobeyed was one of separation, the divorce of death. It was not until many years later, until time had grown strong enough to tear asunder their body and soul did they experience physical death.
It was at the time of the Fall that the heavens and the earth were separated too. A divorce rent the cosmos and estranged the two, wrenching the heaven out of earth. They exist still in this state of divorce.
Milton’s Paradise Lost describes Death as the hideous child of the incestuous rape of Sin by her father Satan. Kind of puts death in a different light. But doesn’t our experience of death bear out the cunning of Milton? We carry death around in our bodies in pebbles of cancer and the crumbling of an aged mind into senility. We dole it out in selfishness and greed. It cuts off life in mid sentence. Hearts become infected by it and invent ways to do evil. It rends relationships and ignites envy’s unquenchable green flame. Death is so much a part of our personal reality, to be a sinner means to be a death spreader. With it we kill others and by it we are killed. So Milton’s imagery of Death as the bastard child of Satan’s incestuous rape of Sin? I’ll buy it.
I remember my first meeting with a dead body. Her death was imminent – cancer or something. She was lying there, mouth gaping, tongue dry as a toad and rib cage rattling. But she was there, a soul still tethered to a fading silver cord; the spidery touch of loneliness had not yet in the room. Then, as the last red leaf of her life trembled and fell, she stopped breathing, and I was the only person in the room.
Death is separation, a breaking of unity into two or more parts. Physical death is the separation of body and soul, divorce is the death of a marriage, shame is the separation of a person from the rest of humanity, spiritual death is the separation of man and God. All of us experience the disintegration of our minds, bodies and spirits thrusting diametrically, striving toward separate selfishness. Death is what happens when the unification of Life is removed.
Life
Death is only a perversion of life. If death is fracturing, life is unification; it is oneness. Scripture perseverates this truth. God is always gearing up to gather everything together under himself.
I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
John 17:20
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
Ephesians 4:4-6
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
John 1:1-4
Experientially, we know this connection between life and oneness. Even if we are not conscious of this fact, we act instinctively as though it is true. We solicit doctors to restore the oneness of function to the body; we long for reconciliation in broken relationships; counselors help us integrate our experiences and glue shattered psyches together. Moral actions are an effort to feel integrated with the transcendent. Husbands and wives become one flesh in marriage. All of our lives are a longing for and seeking after the healing of oneness to our death addled lives.
Death of Life
In Greek, two words are translated as life: bios and zoe. Bios refers to biological life – the living, breathing, shuffling about kind of animal life. This life requires tremendous housekeeping. Apart from constant subsidies of oxygen, water and food, sustaining the body in a narrow range of homeostasis, the body begins to dismantle at the cellular level. Forty breaths is all that stands in the way of a human and decomposition; constant vigilance is required if we want to avoid being teased apart by death.
Zoe is a different kind of life altogether, an eternal kind. This is the quality of life which only comes from God. Its relationship to bios is the relationship of a statue to a real person, or a painting to a landscape.
When man sinned, zoe was severed from bios. Life died. The created order was divorced from the heavenly realm. The sharp snap of the fracture dislocated the body and soul, slew the spirit, and left the descendants of Adam at war with themselves and dispossessed of God. The spirit of the earth too was sucked out and nature became subject to futility.
Now, I’m no pantheist. When I say the spirit of the earth was removed I’m not saying I believe in Gaia. I do not think that using plastic straws make sea turtles cry and their tears raise the ocean levels. But we also cannot make the mistake of thinking this bios is like a gangrenous leg that needs to be amputated and tossed in the biohazard bin of eternity. Many think it is the fate of the created universe to roast in the fires of God’s wrath and all will be unmade. But Paul tells us that the creation itself is longing for the revelation of who these sons of God are, at which time it will be set free from the bondage of futility. Revelation 21:5 God says “Behold, I make all things new,” not “I make all new things.” Creation longs for the return to oneness.
Mythologically, this unification of bios and zoe is visualized in the personification of nature. CS Lewis used this technique a fair amount in his writings in such creatures as dryads. A dryad is a spirit of a tree taking on the form of a young, beautiful woman. The bark and leaf of the tree would be the bios of the tree; zoe would represented by the dryad – the real tree. When walking around a springtime forest with their tender shoots and slender trunks, the idea that a spirit inhabited a tree made the tree seem more, not less real. Much of mythology is the personification of nature and explaining physical phenomena in a way that somehow makes the tree or season or mountain more real, more connected to its true nature. Dryads symbolize the unification of nature and spirit in a way that is more satisfying.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the first place in history where the glorious revelation of resurrection life is revealed, the grand plan God wrought to bring oneness out of separation. Through his propitiation, he reconciled us back to God, restored oneness of relationship so that through Him, our separation can be healed.
Resurrection Life
The experience of heaven will be one of resurrection life, of the remarriage of the divorced. What this means practically for us, for my son, and millions of other 4th grade converts anticipating disappointment, is the good news that our eternal home will be creation re-spirited. The dryads will come home to roost. What we know as trees will not end up in the dustbin standing next to God’s drafting table. They will be reinvigorated with what was lost at the fall and their groaning will cease. Our body, soul and spirit will no longer be tugging in different directions all wanting different things, but back in their right mind, acting in one accord. The experience of heaven will be one of total integration and oneness with the Trinity, creation, others and ourselves.
Lewis tells this truth in The Last Battle, when Lucy and Edmund find themselves in a wonderful land through the stable door, as Narnia is being destroyed. There is a familiarity to the landscape of this new world.
“I don’t think those ones are so very like any thing in Narnia,” said Lucy. “But look there.” She pointed southward to their left and everyone stopped and turned to look. “Those hills,” said Lucy, “the nice woody ones and the blue ones behind – aren’t they very like the southern border of Narnia?”
“Like!” cried Edmund after a moment’s silence. “Why the’re exactly like. Look there’s Mount Pire with his forked head, and there’s the pass into Archenland and everything!”
“And yet they’re not like,” said Lucy. “They’re different. They have more colours on them and they look further away than I remembered and they’re more…more…oh, I don’t know…”
“More like the real thing,” said Lord Digory softly.
CS Lewis, The Last Battle
We have one example of this in the New Testament. Jesus in his newly resurrected body, gives us an sample of what we can expect. He kicks rocks walking along a dusty road, eats lake trout, talks with his friends – all the normal stuff you do with your buddies. He also slips through solid walls and flies. We tend to think of this latter part as ghostly. Ghosts waft through walls like a fart through britches. But Jesus walked through walls because they were so spectral, and he vastly more solid, as a man might stroll unhindered through morning mist.
Jewish numerology uses the number 3 all throughout the Bible to refer to heavenly things and 4 for things of the earth. The number of perfection is 7. You do the math.
What heaven will be, no one fully knows. But we can glean a few things from hints God has dropped in the teaser trailer of Jesus’s resurrection. That the Christian’s eternal home will be a new heaven and earth is a wonderful and sweet expectation. But it is not only waiting in the wings. The resurrection life starts here on earth. The goal of the gospel is not merely to scoop up souls for later glory, but to bring oneness here on earth in all areas of life. Zoe begins here.
Through faith in Jesus Christ we who were once far away have been brought near (Ephesians 2:13) and have been reconciled back to God. From this place of peace and victory, while we walk in this plane the Holy Spirit is busy in and through us bringing life. Our identity is no more a death-spreaders but life-seeders. We are not of that stock who wait in the wings for God to roast the physical plane, but those who are working to make things new, prepping for the time when all things are made new.
Thought Butter 