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.
We’re trying to have a detailed conversation about complex emotions, but we’re underwater.
We’re trying to taste the thirty-two different spices in the curry, but our mouth is filled with gravel.
Yes, there is plenty in the scriptures about life in the age to come, about our resurrected, heaven-and-earth-finally-come-together-as-one body, a body that’s been “clothed in the immortal” that will make this body, the one we inhabit at