The recent emergence from Sydney’s long lockdown led to a communal buoyancy. People were thrilled to talk in the street to those they vaguely knew. For me, going back to church was particularly joyful.
Am I actually talking to a real person? People have seemed more planted and more alive than usual.
After the many months on video calls, phone calls, and fleeting encounters in the local shops, a few times lately I’ve had to double take. Am I actually talking to a real person? People have seemed more planted and more alive than usual.
It made me think of The Great Divorce—CS Lewis’ account of a bus trip from hell to heaven. As those on the tour observe the landscape in heaven, they find they are translucent.
Of the passengers Lewis writes:
The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison.
The narrator tries to pluck a flower but finds he can’t budge it. He finds a single leaf and manages to lift it for a split second—“but I had to let it go at once; it was heavier than a sack of coal.”
While those on the tour bus could not make a dent on the new creation, the new humanity they see in heaven are a sight to behold:
… I saw people coming to meet us. Because they were bright, I saw them while they were still very distant, and at first I did not know that they were people at all. Mile after mile they drew nearer. The earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew.
What is Lewis getting at?
In his imagined picture of the new creation, he finds that it is the benchmark for true reality. For fallen people to go to heaven, in his description, may be like moving from Zoom to face-to-face.
Joy to Come
A huge source of joy in Christianity is that the best is yet to come. As the apostle Paul writes: “this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” However gymified, or proteinised, or designed we might make ourselves, we are bound for the grave. Glory in this world will not compare to the glory of the world to come.
Comparing our future reality to the planting of a seed which sprouts into a glorious plant, Paul writes:
What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.
It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory.
It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.
It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.
(1 Corinthians 15:42–44)
The key to all of this is the resurrection of Christ. By it, Jesus opens up a solid hope for those who would trust him. He is the first fruits; we are the coming crop. As one prayer in the Anglican funeral service states:
God of all consolation, in your unending love and mercy you turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life. Your Son, by dying for us, conquered death and, by rising again, restored to us eternal life.
Jesus opens up a solid hope for those who would trust him. He is the first fruits; we are the coming crop.
The new world will of course be more real. Those who trust Christ will be with him. We will be like God. Not by our merits, but by God’s gift. It is a gift which will keep on giving as we see the full richness of God’s generosity to us more and more in the new age of eternity.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:4–7)
Right now the best a secular world can hope for is an end to the virus, or to lockdowns, or to Zoom meetings. And there is a certain joy if these hopes are fulfilled. They are God’s gifts.
But Christ offers us something far greater. He offers us the real world to come, with real bodies, with the real Jesus. It is the only real life which will exist into eternity because it relies on him, the Source of all Life, for its existence and future.
Christmas lunch after lockdown will be good. The heavenly banquet will be better. Seeing friends over the New Year holiday is a joy. Experiencing the heavenly bodies will be rapturous. God’s visible church on earth is an outpost of heaven. And if lockdown hasn’t taught us to appreciate meeting together, the hope of heaven should. But even as we gather as the church now, we await a still more glorious future — a raised church in the presence of the risen Pioneer of our salvation.
As we enjoy the freedoms of life in the present world, it is a privilege to be pointed beyond it. We enjoy little victories now. But the real victory is coming.
First published at medium.com
