Either/Or
No soul ascends to Heaven,
Absent of its flesh and blood,
For body and soul we sense are one.
We die and rise as Christ has done
Or naked descend to formless mud.
The choice it seems is obvious:
Either oblivion becomes our earthly doom
Or God remembers who we are,
Filled with His flesh and blood,
And raises us from the deathly tomb
Like Noah coming from the flood.
I thought about including these verses with the last “published” page, or starting a new page. The reason I started the new page is that I have been reading N.T. Wright’s books, his biography of the apostle Paul and “On Earth as In Heaven.” As I told my friend Fred the other day his theology has created in me what I would call a final conversion in the sense that I have come to understand, know and believe something that has troubled me for some time. In other words the closer I get to the grave the less I could see my soul flying off to Heaven when I died. The primary reason was that over the years, especially lately, it has become clear that what makes me me, so to speak, is the flesh and blood basis of my self. My flesh and blood brain enables me to think; the brain is the basis of my consciousness. And dead is dead!
The image that stood over against the knowledge of the death of myself and of death as the end of “things” is, unsurprisingly, the knowledge of Jesus’s resurrection. As the texts make clear he came out of the tomb different but the same. At first his friends failed to recognize him, but then they did: different but the same. And the resurrection was a flesh and blood resurrection: he ate fish with them, he walked and talked with them, he offered Thomas the opportunity to touch his wounds. Instead, as I seem to remember, Thomas dropped to his knees and proclaimed, “My Lord, my God.” That proclamation or acknowledgement is at the heart of the Christian faith. See the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians, chapter 2.
What impressed me about Wright’s theology and his reading of the texts is that he rejected the idea that the early Christians talked about “going to Heaven” as a consequence of Christ’s resurrection. Instead they understood that Heaven is coming here and that coming began with Jesus’ resurrection, as well as his proclamation that the kingdom of God was at hand as well as to come. Two points here will clarify that idea, I hope. In “the Lord’s Prayer” Jesus teaches us to pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” The second convincing point for me is the image in the book of Revelation where we see Heaven coming down to earth. Earth is to be transformed, the graves are to be opened, and the dead shall rise. Interestingly, I just heard heard a short homily by Bishop Barron where he was explaining the passage from Ezekiel, I think, where the graves are opened and God clothes the dry bones in the dry desert graves once again in flesh and blood. In any case, I think, the notion of “going to Heaven” when we die makes a mockery of what Jesus endured on the cross and the truth of the resurrection, which ought to be at the center of our faith. A passage or two from Wright should help clarify this theology.
The first quote is from page 19 of my kindle version of Wright’s book “On Earth…” and it comes as well from the biography of Paul I have been reading.
“With the resurrection, we uncover the roots of Paul’s entire public career. 1 Corinthians 15 is not simply the underlying reasoning behind the whole letter. It is basic to everything Paul believed. It is the reason he became an apostle in the first place. The Messiah’s resurrection has constituted him as the world’s true Lord, as already the world’s rightful ruler, and “He has to go on ruling, you see, until “he has put all his enemies under his feet.’” Victory has already been won over the dark powers of sin and death that have crippled the world and, with it, the humans who were supposed to be God’s image-bearers in the world. This victory will at last be completed when death itself is destroyed. For Paul, learning to be a Messiah person—learning to live within the great biblical story now culminating in Jesus and the spirit—was all about having the mind and heart, the imagination and understanding transformed, so that it made sense to live in this already/not-yet world. This was not the easiest place to live, but it was certainly one of the most exhilarating. The Messiah has already been raised; all the Messiah’s people will be raised at his “royal arrival.” Christian living, loving, praying, celebrating, suffering, and not least the apostolic ministries that have nothing to do with social prestige or clever rhetoric—all this makes the sense it makes within this eschatological framework. That is the main thing Paul wants to tell the Corinthians. Sitting there in Ephesus, watching the gospel go to work in homes and shops, confronting the powers of the world and seeing magicians burn their books, Paul can sound confident. This is the future, and it works. What they do in the present, within God’s new world, is not in vain.
—Paul: A Biography 256–57”
The second quote comes several kindle pages later (21); both should give the reader a good idea of the perspective at work here:
“A good many Easter hymns start by assuming that the point of Easter is that it proves the existence of life after death and encourages us to hope for it. This is then regularly, but ironically, combined with a view of that life after death in which the specific element of resurrection has been quietly removed. “May we go where he is gone,” we sing at the end of one well-known hymn, “rest and reign with him in heaven!” But that is precisely not the point that the New Testament draws from Jesus’s resurrection. Yes, there is a promised rest after the labors of this life, and the word heaven may be an appropriate, though vague, way of denoting where this rest takes place. But this time of rest is the prelude to something very different, which will emphatically involve earth as well. Earth—the re-newed earth—is where the reign will take place, which is why the New Testament regularly speaks not of our going to be where Jesus is but of his coming to where we are, as we saw in the previous part of the book.
—Surprised by Hope 190”
[Reprinted in On Earth as in Heaven]
Image: I chose the image of the Garden of Eden and that original sin of disobedience wherein death enters into our lives since the presence of Christ and his resurrection are what stand over against it in Christian theology. Christ defeats death which makes a new Heaven and new Earth possible. For a clarification of what I have been trying to explain, read Wright!
