Thursday 28th May - Rethinking heaven & hell – It’s not just ‘up there’ and it’s not just ‘for later’

DAILY BYTE

The final and very common misconception regarding heaven that we shall deal with can be summarised in the phrase – it’s not just ‘up there’ and it’s not just ‘for later’. If you have become used to envisioning heaven as a place separate from earth, somewhere far away, way beyond the blue, well that’s not how the Bible sees it, not at all.

As the celebrated New Testament scholar, Bishop N.T. Wright reminds us:
“The early Christians, and their fellow first-century Jews, were not, as many moderns suppose, locked into thinking of a three-decker universe with heaven up in the sky and hell down beneath their feet.”

The Hebrew view was that heaven was all around us and that heaven and earth are two different dimensions that interlocked and interweaved in some mysterious but magnificent way. Significantly, the final picture given us in Revelation 21 is of a marriage between a new heaven and a new earth. Just as the spiritual and material are wonderfully married in all human beings already, so one day heaven and earth will find their ultimate completion in each other.

The cosmology of the Ancient Near East believed that the structure of the universe was such that above the earth there were no fewer than seven heavens. The first heaven referred to the atmosphere around our heads, and quite literally the air that we breathe. This is a really important distinction because if we operate on the understanding that heaven is separate and far away, then when Jesus tells us to pray to ‘Our Father in heaven’ it actually means, ‘Our Father who is far away.’ However, because Jesus saw heaven as all around us (including both immediate space and all the vastness of our universe), then he is actually teaching us to pray something like, ‘Our Father who not only fills the entire universe but is also right here with us, close at hand.’

So because heaven is not just ‘up there,’ it dramatically effects how we should be acting right now. We learn that God’s Kingdom, the sheer heaven of it, is not just for tomorrow – some future date to come - but can be known, lived, breathed, experienced in the right here and right now. (As our Sacraments remind us – we can experience ‘foretastes’ of the heavenly banquets to come).

For you see, everything that we do (or don’t do) really, really matters because we either bring something more of heaven or more of hell into the here and now by how we live: Either more of the wealth of love, grace and joyful God-given relationship, or more of the hell of selfishness, pride and regretful loneliness. Again, it was C.S. Lewis who warned us that even in our very smallest choices, we daily transform ourselves either into a little more of a heavenly creature or a hellish one.

Our mission is to bring something of the hope and goodness of heaven into the right here and right now!

PRAY AS YOU GO

Gracious God, open the eyes of my soul to see and recognise that heaven surrounds me! Your loving presence, your goodness and grace are as near to me as every breath I take. May your Kingdom come and may your will be done in me just as it is in heaven. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Revelation 21: 1-5

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth has passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”