Love Wins and The Love Wins Companion

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.

The pastor John writes in Revelation 20 that people will reign with God. The word “reign” means “to actively participate in the ordering of creation.” We were made to explore and discover and learn and create and shape and form and engage this world.

This helps us understand the exchange between the rich man and Jesus. Jesus wants to free him to more actively participate in God’s good world, but the man isn’t up for it.

And his unwillingness, we learn, leads us to another insight about heaven.

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

The prophets promised a new world free from tears and pain and harm and disgrace and disease. That’s comforting. And people have clung to those promises for years, because they’re inspiring and can help sustain us through all kinds of difficulties.

But heaven also confronts. Heaven, we learn, has teeth, flames, edges, and sharp points. What Jesus is insisting with the rich man is that certain things simply will not survive in the age to come. Like coveting. And greed. The one thing people won’t be wanting in the perfect peace and presence of God is someone else’s life. The man is clearly attached to his wealth and possessions, so much so that when Jesus invites him to leave them behind, he can’t do it.

Jesus brings the man hope, but that hope bears within it judgment.

The man’s heart is revealed through his response to Jesus’s invitation to sell his things, and his heart is hard. His attachment to his possessions is revealed, and he clings all the more tightly.

The apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3 that “the Day” the prophets spoke of, the one that inaugurates life in the age to come, will “bring everything to light” and “reveal it with fire,” the kind of fire that will “test the quality of each person’s work.” Some in this process will find that they spent their energies and efforts on things that won’t be in heaven-on-earth. “If it is burned up,” Paul writes, “the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved, even though only as one escaping through the flames.”

Flames in heaven.

Imagine being a racist in heaven-on-earth, sitting down at the great feast and realizing that you’re sitting next to them. Those people. The ones you’ve despised for years. Your racist attitude would simply not survive. Those flames in heaven would be hot.

Jesus makes no promise that in the blink of an eye we will suddenly become totally different people who have vastly different tastes, attitudes, and perspectives. Paul makes it very clear that we will have our true selves revealed and that once the sins and habits and bigotry and pride and petty jealousies are prohibited and removed, for some there simply won’t be much left. “As one escaping through the flames” is how he put it.

It’s very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who “gets in” or how to “get in.” What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he’s interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven. To portray heaven as bliss, peace, and endless joy is a beautiful picture, but it raises the question: How many of us could handle it, as we are today? How would we each do in a reality that had no capacity for cynicism or slander or worry or pride?

It’s important, then, to keep in mind that heaven has the potential to be a kind of starting over. Learning how to be human all over again. Imagine living with no fear. Ever. That would take some getting used to. So would a world where loving your neighbor was the only option. So would a world where every choice was good for the earth. That would be a strange world at first. That could take some getting used to.

Jesus called disciples—students of life—to learn from him how to live in God’s world God’s way. Constantly learning and growing and evolving and absorbing. Tomorrow is never simply a repeat of today.

Much of the speculation about heaven—and, more important, the confusion—comes from the idea that in the blink of an eye we will automatically become totally different people who “know” everything. But our heart, our character, our desires, our longings—those things take time.

Jesus calls disciples in order to teach us how to be and what to be; his intention is for us to be growing progressively in generosity, forgiveness, honesty, courage, truth telling, and responsibility, so that as these take over our lives we are taking part more and more and more in life in the age to come, now.

The flames of heaven, it turns out, lead us to the surprise of heaven. Jesus tells a story in Matthew 25 about people invited into “the kingdom prepared for [them] since the creation of the world,” and their first reaction is . . . surprise.

They start asking questions, trying to figure it out. Interesting, that. It’s not a story of people boldly walking in through the pearly gates, confident that, because of their faith, beliefs, or even actions, they’ll be welcomed in. It’s a story about people saying,

“What?”

“Us?”

“When did we ever see you?”

“What did we ever do to deserve it?”

In other stories he tells, very religious people who presume that they’re “in” hear from him: “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” (Matt. 7).

Heaven, it turns out, is full of the unexpected.

In a story Jesus tells in Luke 18 about two men going up to the temple to pray, it’s the “sinner,” the “unrighteous man,” who goes home justified, while the faithful, observant religious man is harshly judged.

Again, surprise.

Jesus tells another story about a great banquet a man gave (Luke 14). The people who were invited, those who would normally attend such a feast, had better things to do. So, in their absence, the host invites all of the people from the streets and alleyways who would never attend a party like this.

Unexpected, surprising—not what you’d think. These aren’t isolated impulses in Jesus’s outlook; they’re the themes he comes back to again and again. He tells entire villages full of extremely devoted religious people that they’re in danger, while seriously questionable “sinners” will be better off than them “in that day.”

Think about the single mom, trying to raise kids, work multiple jobs, and wrangle child support out of the kids’ father, who used to beat her. She’s faithful, true, and utterly devoted to her children. In spite of the circumstances, she never loses hope that they can be raised in love and go on to break the cycle of dysfunction and abuse. She never goes out, never takes a vacation, never has enough money to buy anything for herself. She gets a few hours of sleep and then repeats the cycle of cooking, work, laundry, bills, more work, until she falls into bed late at night, exhausted.

With what she has been given she has been faithful. She is a woman of character and substance. She never gives up. She is kind and loving even when she’s exhausted.

She can be trusted.

Is she the last who Jesus says will be first?

Does God say to her, “You’re the kind of person I can run the world with”?

Think about her, and then think about the magazines that line the checkout aisles at most grocery stores. The faces on the covers are often of beautiful, rich, famous, talented people embroiled in endless variations of scandal and controversy.

Where did they spend those millions of dollars?

What did they do with those talents?

How did they use their influence?

Did they use any of it to help create the new world God is making?

Or are we seeing the first who will be last that Jesus spoke of?

When it comes to people, then—the who of heaven—what Jesus does again and again is warn us against rash judgments about who’s in and who’s out.

But the surprise isn’t just regarding the who;

it’s also about the when of heaven.

Jesus is hanging on the cross between two insurgents when one of them says to him, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Notice that the man doesn’t ask to go to heaven. He doesn’t ask for his sins to be forgiven. He doesn’t invite Jesus into his heart. He doesn’t announce that he now believes.

He simply asks to be remembered by Jesus in the age to come.

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He wants to be a part of it. Of course.

Jesus assures him that he’ll be with him in paradise . . . that day. The man hadn’t asked about today; he had asked about that day. He believes that God is doing something new through Jesus and he wants to be a part of it, whenever it is.

And that’s all Jesus needs to hear to promise him “paradise” later that day. Just around the corner. In a few hours.

According to Jesus, then, heaven is as far away as that day when heaven and earth become one again and as close as a few hours.

The apostle Paul writes to the Philippians that either he would go on living, or he would be killed and immediately be with Christ (chap. 1).

Paul believed that there is a dimension of creation,

a place, a space, a realm beyond the one we currently inhabit

and yet near and connected with it.

He writes of getting glimpses of it,

being a citizen of it,

and being there the moment he dies.

Paul writes to the Corinthians about two kinds of bodies. The first is the kind we each inhabit now, the kind that gets old and weary and eventually gives out on us. The second kind is one he calls “imperishable” (1 Cor. 15), one immune to the ravages of time, one we’ll receive when heaven and earth are one. Prior to that, then, after death we are without a body. In heaven, but without a body. A body is of the earth. Made of dust. Part of this creation, not that one. Those currently “in heaven” are not, obviously, here. And so they’re with God, but without a body.

These truths, about the present incompleteness of both earth and heaven, lead us to another truth about heaven:

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn’t less real, but more real.

The dominant cultural assumptions and misunderstandings about heaven have been at work for so long, it’s almost automatic for many to think of heaven as ethereal, intangible, esoteric, and immaterial.

Floaty, dreamy, hazy.

Somewhere else.

People in white robes with perfect hair floating by on clouds, singing in perfect pitch.

But for Jesus, heaven is more real than what we experience now. This is true for the future, when earth and heaven become one, but also for today.

To understand this, let’s return to that Greek word aion, the one that we translate as “age” in English. We saw earlier how aion refers to a period of time with a beginning and an end. Another meaning of aion is a bit more complex and nuanced, because it refers to a particular intensity of experience that transcends time.

Remember sitting in class, and it was so excruciatingly boring that you found yourself staring at the clock? Tick. Tick. Tick. What happened to time in those moments? It slowed down. We even say, “It felt like it was taking forever.” Now when we use the word “forever” in this way, we are not talking about a 365-day year followed by a 365-day year followed by another 365-day year, and so on. What we are referring to is the intensity of feeling in that moment. That agonized boredom caused time to appear to bend and twist and warp.

Another example, this one less about agony and more about ecstasy. When you fall in love, those first conversations can take hours and yet they feel like minutes. You’re so caught up in being with that person that you lose track of time. In that case, the clock doesn’t slow down; instead, time “flies.”

Whether an experience is pleasurable or painful, in the extreme moments of life what we encounter is time dragging and flying, slowing down and speeding up. That’s what aion refers to—a particularly intense experience. Aion is often translated as “eternal” in English, which is an altogether different word from “forever.”

Let me be clear: heaven is not forever in the way that we think of forever, as a uniform measurement of time, like days and years, marching endlessly into the future. That’s not a category or concept we find in the Bible. This is why a lot of translators choose to translate aion as “eternal.” By this they don’t mean the literal passing of time; they mean transcending time, belonging to another realm altogether.

To summarize, then, sometimes when Jesus used the word “heaven,” he was simply referring to God, using the word as a substitute for the name of God.

Second, sometimes when Jesus spoke of heaven, he was referring to the future coming together of heaven and earth in what he and his contemporaries called life in the age to come.

And then third—and this is where things get really, really interesting—when Jesus talked about heaven, he was talking about our present eternal, intense, real experiences of joy, peace, and love in this life, this side of death and the age to come. Heaven for Jesus wasn’t just “someday”; it was a present reality. Jesus blurs the lines, inviting the rich man, and us, into the merging of heaven and earth, the future and present, here and now.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection to God.

Eternal life doesn’t start when we die;

it starts now.

It’s not about a life that begins at death;

it’s about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death.

We live in several dimensions.

Up and down.

Left and right.

Forward and backward.

Three to be exact.

And yet we’ve all had experiences when those three dimensions weren’t adequate. Moments when we were acutely, overwhelmingly aware of other realities just beyond this one.

At the front edge of science string theorists are now telling us that they can show the existence of at least eleven dimensions. If we count time as the fourth dimension, that’s seven dimensions beyond what we now know.

So there’s left and right, and up and down, and front and back.

Got that.

But is there also

in . . . ?

and out . . . ?

or around . . . ?

and through . . . ?

or between . . . ?

or beside . . . ?

or beyond . . . ?

Jesus talked about a reality he called the kingdom of God. He described an all-pervasive dimension of being, a bit like oxygen for us or water for a fish, that he insisted was here, at hand, now, among us, and upon us. He spoke with God as if God was right here, he healed with power that he claimed was readily accessible all the time, and he taught his disciples that they would do even greater things than what they saw him doing. He spoke of oneness with God, the God who is so intimately connected with life in this world that every hair on your head is known. Jesus lived and spoke as if the whole world was a thin place for him, with endless dimensions of the divine infinitesimally close, with every moment and every location simply another experience of the divine reality that is all around us, through us, under and above us all the time.

It’s as if we’re currently trying to play the piano while wearing oven mitts.

We can make a noise, sometimes even hit the notes well enough to bang out a melody, but it doesn’t sound like it could, or should.

The elements are all there—fingers, keys, strings, ears—but there’s something in the way, something inhibiting our ability to fully experience all the possibilities. The apostle Paul writes that now we see “as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor. 13).

Right now, we’re trying to embrace our lover, but we’re wearing a hazmat suit.