A Homily for Easter 3C
April 14, 2013
From the words of the Gospel for today:
"So they cast their net, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish."
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Four of the questions received for this homily blog are a cluster of "heaven" questions. They all seem to be asking the same thing, more or less, about heaven. They are:
- Does someone still go to Heaven even if they break one of the Ten Commandments?
- How can we make sure there’s a heaven?
- How to knock on the door so you’ll open it?
- What must I do to be accepted into your eternal kingdom?
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What if we hold on to our “Heaven Questions” for a few minutes, listen to the Scripture for today, and then come back to them?
The Scripture Readings today are about:
- Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in Acts.
- The saving of the writer of the Psalm from Sheol (the place of the dead).
- A vision of praise to the Lamb by all creatures in heaven and on earth in the Revelation to John.
- And two encounters with the resurrected Jesus, combined in the Reading from the Gospel of John. (One about the resurrected Jesus meeting his followers while they were fishing, and one about his challenge to Peter to feed his sheep.)
Note that the Psalmist refers specifically to sheol ("hell"), or the place of the dead; and the Revelation to John refers specifically to voices in heaven. We might read into these scriptures our own images of heaven and hell, but neither of them in their time imagined the same thing we do in our time.
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We imagine heaven as a place of reward, and hell as a place of punishment.
The Psalmist, however, uses the word Sheol, which is often translated “Hell”, to mean simply the place, whatever it is and wherever it is, of the dead. The good, the bad, and the ugly - we all go to the place of the dead when we leave this world. That’s the image of the Psalmist. And the writer of the Revelation uses the word “heaven” in the old fashioned sense of “the place where God or the heavenly beings reside.”
The most original meaning of the word “heaven” is simply “the firmament” or “the sky” or “atmosphere.” Later it came to mean, “the place where God, or the gods, and other heavenly beings dwell.” It even came to mean a place where earthly saints and heroes went to live when they left this world.
And finally, through the influence of Persian religion in the century before Jesus, the word “heaven” was used to describe a place where all good, deserving people go when they die, along with the great saints and heroes, while the word “hell” became a place of punishment and torment for the wicked.
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In the Gospel of John, Jesus existed before all time and all space - before the heavens and the earth. (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and through Him all things were made.”) And in John's portrait of Jesus, he was dipped in time and space to accomplish a mission here. "I came," he says, "so that you might have life, and might have it more abundantly."
Not some future reward in some remote place called heaven, but “life,” "abundant" life, eternal life, divine life, “Kingdom of God life,” an alternate reality that is already at hand, already within us.
In the Reading for today, this abundant life is just on the other side of the boat, just over there on the shore where Jesus already has a fire going and soul food ready to cook, and where he is teaching his teachers to feed others, to share the abundant life as generously and compassionately as they have received it.
John’s stories about literal literal water are really about “living water”. His stories about literal blindness are really about spiritual blindness. His stories about literal breath are really about Holy Spirit. His stories about being born again are about spiritual transformation. His stories about abundant fish are really about abundant life. His stories about the Jesus of history are really about the Christ of faith.
For John, to believe in Jesus as the manifestation of Divine Life is to drink from the well of living water, to gain our “sight”, to be spiritually transformed, to receive abundant life - now. To be in the world, but not of the world.
For John, we aren’t waiting for eternity, we’re in it.
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So now that we’ve spent a little time with the Readings for today, let’s review one more development that affects the way we imagine “heaven” - the shift from the Gospel of Jesus
to the Gospel about Jesus, including the Gospel about Jesus according to St Paul.
But first, let’s just remember our questions:
- Does someone still go to Heaven even if they break one of the Ten Commandments?
- How can we make sure there’s a heaven?
- How to knock on the door so you’ll open it?
- What must I do to be accepted into your eternal kingdom?
Those are the questions. And here is a final consideration.
The Jesus of history didn’t point to himself. His teachings always pointed to one thing - the Kingdom (the Commonwealth) of God. He didn’t teach about some future place where the good people would be rewarded. He taught about the Kingdom (the Reality) of God, which is “at hand.” It is, in fact, “within you.” Whether you are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, rich or poor, male or female, the Kingdom of God is “within you.” This Gospel of Jesus was especially aimed at empowering the poor.
That was the Gospel of Jesus. The Gospels that developed over the next few decades were gospels about Jesus.
One of the gospels about Jesus was the gospel of how his death and resurrection saves those who believe in him and/or follow his teachings. And one variation on this gospel is that Jesus is coming back someday in the future to take all the good people with him to heaven.
Another gospel about Jesus is the gospel that the Christhood he revealed is our own destiny. The mystery of the ages, says Paul as he reflects on his conversion experience, is “Christ in you.” As we die to ourselves, the Christ life takes over. “I have been crucified with Christ," he says, "nevertheless I live, yet it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me.”
Not in some future heaven, but now, through a process of transformation, whether it is sudden and dramatic like his, or subtle and gradual like most of us.
Or as John told it, when we believe in Jesus as the true Messiah, the only begotten Son, then we receive the divine spirit of Jesus, we too become “children of God” born not of the flesh, but of God himself.
These gospels of Paul and John and others range from the good news of how individuals can enter the Kingdom, or go to heaven, when they die, or when Jesus returns, to how the whole human race, indeed the whole creation, can be transformed into our Christ selves.
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So there it is, the questions, the Scriptures, the development of the Gospel. And the way we answer the questions makes a difference - a huge difference - in how we understand and live the Christian life, in how much we follow the Jesus way in fear, or in love, in how much we follow the Jesus way to save our own skin, or to participate in the transformation and reconciliation of all creation.
Perhaps there are no right or wrong answers, but there ways to live with the questions that are more life giving than other ways.
So what do you think?
- Does someone still go to Heaven even if they break one of the Ten Commandments?
- How can we make sure there’s a heaven?
- How to knock on the door so you’ll open it?
- What must I do to be accepted into your eternal kingdom?
Unto God be worship and praise, dominion and splendor, forever and ever. Amen.
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