Heaven Can't Wait

There is a lot being written about spirituality and religion at the moment – even if most of it is negative or dismissive. This weekend, the Weekend Australian Magazine published an article called “Heaven Can Wait” by Johann Hari. With the tag line, “It’s time to get over the myth of the hereafter” (or something like that) it’s not too difficult to work out the direction the article takes.

It’s a mixed article. It suffers from the foibles of a lot of atheistic writing – it has a lot of “straw man” set ups; weak arguments with large holes; a convenient and creative historical account of the development of ideas; language designed to make anyone who is even considering there might be an afterlife feel like a mindless zombie; and most of all, it suffers from that classic rationalistic, atheistic assumption that anything you can’t see, tag and classify, isn’t worth considering and reflecting on... The good thing about the article however, is that it provides us with a challenge to reflect upon our beliefs about heaven and how these beliefs impact upon our lived out lives.

When most people think about heaven, they think about a future, disembodied, other worldly existence in the presence of God and all the other “saints” that goes on forever (and many also see clouds, wings and harps somewhere in the picture). But the interesting thing is, when we look at what the Bible says when it talks about the “age to come”, it talks about God coming and making his dwelling place on earth among his people (Revelation 21: 1-7). It seems that heaven might not be the end of the world after all, and that God is committed to renewing this world and this life, and making sure that all that has been lost to God and the cosmos through sin is won back once and for all. This view of heaven is amazingly affirming of this world and this life, and we see the first evidence of this in the very physical resurrection of Jesus, celebrated at Easter.

The other thing that is worth noting is the way Jesus talked about heaven. He spoke a lot about the “Kingdom of Heaven” and said things like “it is near” and that “it is among us”. He taught about this, told heaps of stories about this and lived out the vision of this in the community of people he set up around him. This is where Hari’s main argument really falls down. “Heaven can’t wait”!!! When heaven is seen as a future, disembodied, other worldly experience, then there is a real danger that the concept can at best, be of no use to us, and at worst cause harm to us and others. But when we conceptualise heaven as Jesus did, as a future hope that can be lived out in the present, then it becomes a potentially transformative vision worth living out – especially one that can be “good news to the poor” (because the last will be first “in heaven”)...

When Jesus taught us to pray, he put it to God, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth like it is in heaven.” Jesus was committed to and working toward God’s vision of Shalom – God’s cosmic groovy-ness where everything is at is should be - and that is a vision just might be worth living for in this life, and carrying forward into the next.

Shalom...