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Often, we can think of little else.
Every oil spill,
every report of another woman sexually assaulted,
every news report that another political leader has silenced the opposition through torture, imprisonment, and execution,
every time we see someone stepped on by an institution or corporation more interested in profit than people,
every time we stumble upon one more instance of the human heart gone wrong,
we shake our fist and cry out,
“Will somebody please do something about this?”
We crave judgment,
we long for it,
we thirst for it.
Bring it,
unleash it,
as the prophet Amos says,
“Let justice roll on like a river” (chap. 5).
Same with the word “anger.” When we hear people saying they can’t believe in a God who gets angry—yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply? What kind of God wouldn’t get angry at a financial scheme that robs thousands of people of their life savings?
And that is the promise of the prophets in the age to come:
God acts.
Decisively.
On behalf of everybody
who’s ever been stepped on by the machine,
exploited,
abused,
forgotten,
or mistreated.
God puts an end to it.
God says, “Enough.”
Of course, to celebrate this, anticipate this, and find ourselves thrilled by this promise of the world made right brings with it the haunting thought that we each know what lurks in our own heart—
our role in corrupting this world,
the litany of ways in which our own sins have contributed to the heartbreak we’re surrounded by,
all those times we hardened our heart and kept right on walking,
ignoring the cry of someone in need.
And so in the midst of prophets’ announcements about God’s judgment we also find promises about mercy and grace.
Isaiah quotes God, saying, “Come, . . . though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (chap. 1).
Justice and mercy hold hands,
they kiss,
they belong together in the age to come,
an age that is complex, earthy, participatory, and free from all death, destruction, and despair.
When we talk about heaven, then, or eternal life, or the afterlife—any of that—it’s important that we begin with the categories and claims that people were familiar with in Jesus’s first-century Jewish world. They did not talk about a future life somewhere else, because they anticipated a coming day when the world would be restored, renewed, and redeemed and there would be peace on earth.
So when the man asks Jesus how he can get eternal life, Jesus is not surprised or caught off guard by the man’s question, because this was one of the most important things people were talking about in Jesus’s day.
How do you make sure you’ll be a part of the new thing God is going to do? How do you best become the kind of person whom God could entrust with significant responsibility in the age to come?
The standard answer was: live the commandments. God has shown you how to live. Live that way. The more you become a person of peace and justice and worship and generosity, the more actively you participate now in ordering and working to bring about God’s kind of world, the more ready you will be to assume an even greater role in the age to come.
But Jesus is aware that something is wrong with the man. Rich people were rare at that time, so there is good reason to believe that Jesus knew something about him and his reputation. Jesus mentions five, not six, of the commandments about relationship with others. He leaves out the last command, which prohibited coveting. To covet is to crave what someone else has. Coveting is the disease of always wanting more, and it’s rooted in a profound dissatisfaction with the life God has given you. Coveting is what happens when you aren’t at peace.
The man says he’s kept all of the commandments that Jesus mentions, but Jesus hasn’t mentioned the one about coveting. Jesus then tells him to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, which Jesus doesn’t tell other people, because it’s not an issue for them. It is, for this man. The man is greedy—and greed has no place in the world to come. He hasn’t learned yet that he has a sacred calling to use his wealth to move creation forward. How can God give him more responsibility and resources in the age to come, when he hasn’t handled well what he’s been given in this age?
Jesus promises him that if he can do it, if he can trust God to liberate him from his greed, he’ll have “treasure in heaven.”
The man can’t do it, and so he walks away.
Jesus takes the man’s question about his life then and makes it about the kind of life he’s living now. Jesus drags the future into the present, promising the man that there will be treasure in heaven for him if he can do it. All of which raises the question: What does Jesus mean when he uses that word “heaven”?
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First, there was tremendous respect in the culture that Jesus lived in for the name of God—so much so that many wouldn’t even say it. That is true to this day. I occasionally receive e-mails and letters from people who spell the name “G-d.” In Jesus’s day, one of the ways that people got around actually saying the name of God was to substitute the word “heaven” for the word “God.” Jesus often referred to the “kingdom of heaven,” and he tells stories about people “sinning against heaven.” “Heaven” in these cases is simply another way of saying “God.”
Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God’s creation, where God’s will and only God’s will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.
On earth, lots of wills are done.
Yours, mine, and many others.
And so, at present, heaven and earth are not one.
What Jesus taught,
what the prophets taught,
what all of Jewish tradition pointed to
and what Jesus lived in anticipation of,
was the day when earth and heaven would be one.
The day when God’s will would be done on earth
as it is now done in heaven.
The day when earth and heaven will be the same place.
This is the story of the Bible.
This is the story Jesus lived and told.
As it’s written at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21: “God’s dwelling place is now among the people.”
Life in the age to come.
This is why Jesus tells the man that if he sells his possessions, he’ll have rewards in heaven. Rewards are a dynamic rather than a static reality. Many people think of heaven, and they picture mansions (a word nowhere in the Bible’s descriptions of heaven) and Ferraris and literal streets of gold, as if the best God can come up with is Beverly Hills in the sky. Tax-free, of course, and without the smog.
But those are static images—fixed, flat, unchanging. A car is a car is a car; same with a mansion. They are the same, day after day after day, give or take a bit of wear and tear.
There’s even a phrase about doing a good deed. People will say that it earns you “another star in your crown.”
(By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)
But a crown, much like a mansion or a car, is a possession. There’s nothing wrong with possessions; it’s just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They’re nouns that mean something only in conjunction with verbs.
That’s why wealth is so dangerous: if you’re not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.
In the Genesis poem that begins the Bible, life is a pulsing, progressing, evolving, dynamic reality in which tomorrow will not be a repeat of today, because things are, at the most fundamental level of existence, going somewhere.
When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he’s promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.
How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age. Jesus teaches us how to live now in such a way that what we create, who we give our efforts to, and how we spend our time will all endure in the new world.
Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere.
Around a billion people in the world today do not have access to clean water. People will have access to clean water in the age to come, and so working for clean-water access for all is participating now in the life of the age to come.
That’s what happens when the future is dragged into the present.
It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.
Jesus teaches us to pursue the life of heaven now and also then, anticipating the day when earth and heaven are one.
Honest business,
redemptive art,
honorable law,
sustainable living,
medicine,
education,
making a home,
tending a garden—
they’re all sacred tasks to be done in partnership with God now, because they will all go on in the age to come.
In heaven,
on earth.
Our eschatology shapes our ethics.
Eschatology is about last things.
Ethics are about how you live.
What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.
If you believe that you’re going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.
When Jesus tells the man he will have treasure in heaven, he’s promising the man that taking steps to be free of his greed—in this case, selling his possessions—will open him up to more and more participation in God’s new world, the one that was breaking into human history with Jesus himself.
In Matthew 20 the mother of two of Jesus’s disciples says to Jesus, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and other at your left in your kingdom.” She doesn’t want bigger mansions or larger piles of gold for them, because static images of wealth and prosperity were not what filled people’s heads when they thought of heaven in her day. She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty, and design.
So when people ask, “What will we do in heaven?” one possible answer is to simply ask: “What do you love to do now that will go on in the world to come?”
What is it that when you do it, you lose track of time because you get lost in it? What do you do that makes you think, “I could do this forever”? What is it that makes you think, “I was made for this”?
If you ask these kinds of questions long enough you will find some impulse related to creation. Some way to be, something to do. Heaven is both the peace, stillness, serenity, and calm that come from having everything in its right place—that state in which nothing is required, needed, or missing—and the endless joy that comes from participating in the ongoing creation of the world.
