On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken. (25:6–8)
You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the LORD’s renown,
for an everlasting sign,
that will endure forever. (55:12–13)
1 Rob remembers his grandmother’s painting of heaven as a floating, glimmering city. What is your vision of heaven? What factors have shaped this vision?
2 How does the perception of our lives and our church change when we think of heaven as a restored earth rather than as a faraway place?
3 If Jesus consistently focused on heaven for today, why do we so emphasize heaven after we die?
4 Rob describes the Christian life as our preparation to become the kind of people who can dwell in heaven. How does this reorient how we shape our lives?
5 What is the connection between our understanding of heaven and how we live our lives?
6 In Matthew 19 when the rich man asks Jesus about “eternal life,” what do you think the man had in mind? What might Jesus mean by the term? What does “eternal life” mean to you?
7 If to “reign” with God means to “participate” with him in his creation, how might this inform our understanding of our calling in this life?
8 What does it mean that “eternal life” is available to us right here, right now?
Reading Going to Heaven? by N. T. Wright
Rob argues that we misunderstand what Jesus meant by “eternal life”; it is not, he says, simply code for going to heaven after we die. In his forthcoming book, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (HarperOne), leading New Testament scholar N. T. Wright maintains that we have missed the central theme of the Gospels, because we have projected our own themes onto the text to explain what Jesus’s main teaching was. One of the misinterpretations he writes about is the idea that Jesus was primarily concerned with who goes to heaven and how (and who does not).
What have the churches normally done with “the middle bits” [of Jesus’s life, the time between his birth and his death]? I have on occasion challenged groups of clergy and laity to tell me what they, or their congregations, might say if asked what “all that stuff in the middle” was about. What was the point, I have asked, of the healings and feastings, the Sermon on the Mount and the controversies with the Pharisees, the stilling of the storm and Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, and so on and so on—all the mass of rich material that the gospels offer us between Jesus’s birth, or at least his baptism, and his trial and death? Pastors and preachers reading this book might like to ask themselves: If you asked your congregations about this, what do you think they would say? What, indeed, would your congregation expect you to say the gospels were all about?
The answers I have received have been revealing. The church’s tradition has offered four forms of answer. None of them, I think, corresponds very closely to what the four gospels actually talk about. The first inadequate answer is that Jesus came to teach people how to go to heaven. This is, I believe, a major and serious misunderstanding.
Don’t get me wrong. The whole New Testament assumes that God has a wonderful future prepared for his people after bodily death, climaxing in the new world of the resurrection, of new heavens and new earth. I have written about all that in detail elsewhere (especially in Surprised by Hope). But this is not—demonstrably not—what the four gospels are about.
The problem has arisen principally because for many centuries Christians in the Western churches at least have assumed that the whole point of Christian faith is to “go to heaven,” so they have read everything in that light. To a man with a hammer, they say, all problems appear as nails. To a reader interested in post-mortem bliss, all scriptures seem to be telling you how to “go to heaven.” But, as we shall see, they aren’t.
This wrong reading has gained a good deal of apparent credibility from two expressions which occur regularly in the gospels, and which the western church at least has taken to refer to “heaven” in the traditional sense. The first expression is found frequently in Matthew’s gospel. Because Matthew is the first gospel in the Canon, and has been from very early in the church’s history, it exercises considerable influence on ordinary readers in how they understand the others as well. In Matthew, Jesus regularly speaks of “heaven’s kingdom,” whereas normally in the other gospels he speaks of “God’s kingdom.” Millions of readers, when they hear Matthew’s Jesus talking about doing this or that “so that you may enter the kingdom of heaven” assume, without giving it a moment’s thought, that this means “so that you may go to heaven when you die.”
But that is not at all what Matthew, or Jesus for that matter, had in mind. Matthew makes it quite clear, and I think Jesus made it quite clear, what that phrase meant. Think of the Lord’s Prayer, which comes at the center of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5–7. At the center of the prayer itself we find Jesus teaching his followers to pray that God’s kingdom might come and his will be done “on earth as in heaven.” The “kingdom of heaven” is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth. When Matthew has Jesus talking about heaven’s kingdom, he means that heaven—in other words, the God of heaven—is establishing his sovereign rule not just in heaven, but on earth as well.
It is true that this phrase, “kingdom of heaven,” seems to have been understood from quite early on in the church not in that first-century sense (“God’s rule becoming a reality on this earth”), but in the quite different sense of “heaven” as a distant place where God ruled and to which he welcomed all those who followed Jesus. That seems to be already the case in the well-known hymn we call the “Te Deum Laudamus” (“We Praise Thee, O God”), which dates from at least as early as the fourth century. There we find the phrase (in the translation adopted by the Book of Common Prayer), “When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” Read Matthew’s gospel with that line in mind, and you are almost bound to see the “kingdom of heaven” as a place to which believers might have been barred because of sin, but to which now, through the death of Jesus, they have
