Heaven.

John 3:22-35.

I.

            We come now to the final reference to John in this gospel.  John is still baptizing; now he is in a place called Aenon.  And an otherwise un-named, unaffiliated Jew seems to want to spark some dissension between John and Jesus over the Jewish cleansing rituals.  But John doesn’t take the bait.  He just says, “No one can receive anything unless it is given from heaven.”

            Now, that taken literally means that we can’t receive anything unless it comes from the sky.  Which doesn’t make much sense.  So we have to start wondering what John does mean.  What does heaven, the sky, symbolize or represent?  What does it mean to receive something from there?

            Beyond the literal meaning, “heaven” as “sky,” the word has meant several things.  It is the realm of God; it is where good people go when they die; it is the source of all goodness and blessing.  Usually when we talk about heaven we are making a contrast with the world or the earth or the life we know in our daily existence.  Heaven is transcendent and beyond what we are able to experience here on earth, except in rare and special circumstances… like Choc-full-o-nuts, “the heavenly coffee.”

            But I want to suggest that “heaven” has an inner meaning relative to the human soul that makes it a bit more accessible and meaningful.  For the Israelites, heaven was represented on the earth in the Temple or, before that, the Tabernacle: the holy place where God was particularly and uniquely present.  The Holy of Holies symbolized the whole creation, including the sky, or heaven; it was the intersecting point, the interface, between earth and heaven.  There was a direct connection between the Temple on the ground, and the Temple in heaven.

            Jesus, of course, has a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the Temple and its custodians.  One of his first public acts is to cause a disturbance in the Temple, and to predict its destruction. 

And as we saw, he also identifies himself with the Temple.  Now he, the Human One, not the stone and wood building in Jerusalem, will be the connection between earth and heaven.  In chapter 1, John declares Jesus to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, thus supplanting the role of the Temple and its sacrifices.  In chapter 4 Jesus will say that we don’t have to go to a particular place to worship; rather, worship happens wherever the Spirit is, and the Spirit is wild and uncontrollable.  The apostle Paul will talk about the body of each disciple, and the body of gathered disciples, as a temple, a place where God dwells.

So the place where heaven and earth meet is being radically de-centralized and de-geographicized.  It is becoming increasingly clear that, if God created the whole place by the Word and Spirit, that the Word and Spirit, and therefore God, is also somehow present in the whole place.  Jesus famously says that “the Kingdom of God is within you,” meaning that we get in touch with heaven when we find within us, in our souls, the presence of the God who is within everything.

II.

            So now when John says, “No one can receive anything unless it is given from heaven,” perhaps we could understand him to mean that we only receive from God what is given within us.  In our souls, that is, in our hearts and minds, in our interior life, that is where we get our authority, our wisdom, our blessings, our very life.  Heaven is within us.  God speaks to us and appears mainly within us.

            Now this is nearly incomprehensible to sophisticated, Modern people like us.  We have been indoctrinated to believe that what is important is what is out there and measurable, repeatable, tangible, and sensible.  Our interior life is dismissed as mere subjectivity; it is not a source of reliable knowledge.

            But in thinking this way we have cut ourselves off from the truth.  In fact, the deeper we go into our own hearts, the more connected we are to everything.  We only appear to be disconnected from each other and from God when we limit our gaze to the surface, the visible, the physical manifestations of things.  But even physicists will now tell us that in reality we are mutually interpenetrating with everything else.  We are constantly sharing and exchanging particles and energy and atoms and molecules with everything else.  Our independence, separation, autonomy, and individuality are only on the very surface of things, if not illusions altogether.

            Which is why when John says we only receive what God gives from heaven, it does not mean each individual thinking and doing whatever they please.  He is emphatically not saying that Jesus dreamed up his own unique approach and he should be allowed to do his own thing.  The key is the word “receive,” which is rather different from the word “invent.”

The spiritual point here is not inventiveness or creativity in the ways we usually use those words.  It is about being inwardly open to and then humbly and self-critically and gratefully receiving, what God gives.  We accept and cherish and implement what is given.  And this means developing disciplines of discernment so we can tell the different between God’s voice in our souls, and the various other voices which mostly express our own fear, desire, anger, shame, greed, and so forth.  We have to be able to tell God’s voice from the voice of our own ego.  (And the quick and easy rule here is that if the voice is telling you what you want to hear, it’s not God’s.)

True faith is never about finding or doing something new.  It is always about receiving something very old and expressing it in a different and changing time.  The Word of God is not essentially new; he was there in the beginning with God at creation.  It only seems new because the institutions that were once inspired by the Word have become corrupted.  In the faith, all revolutions get back to the roots, the original vision, the primal spark of revelation.

III.

            The gospel continues to talk about Jesus as the One who comes from above, from heaven, and is “above all.”  Elsewhere Jesus says the Kingdom of God is “within,” which could also be translated “among;” here it is “above.”  It is the same word used back when Jesus tells Nicodemus he has to be born “anew,” or “again,” or “from above.”  So we might ask, What is it?  Are we supposed to be born again, born anew, born from above, or born from within?  Is the Kingdom within us, among us, or above us?  Is it already here, or still to come? 

And the answer is yes!  Use whatever metaphor and imagery works for you, the Bible has them all.  We are running up against the inability of human language to completely comprehend God.  The point being that we have to receive from God what we already are because what we think we are isn’t true and is killing us.  Jesus is the One connected to God, who brings us God’s truth, Word, Spirit, life, light; he is the Lamb who takes away sin, that is, he restores us to our created goodness and unites us to God and all things God spoke into being.

This is in contrast with someone who only knows sensory, measurable, temporal experience, which here is expressed as belonging to the earth.  This is the realm of blindness, darkness, and servitude, enslaved to our fears and limited perceptions.  We are caught in the world of measurement, where things are quantified and then inevitably commodified, where truth is thought to be determined by math.

But the Spirit of God is not measurable; God gives the Spirit generously, literally “without measure.”  We can’t measure a dream.  We can’t measure love, or justice, or beauty, or truth.  We can’t measure the Spirit.  We can only receive the Spirit; the Spirit is a gift.  The Spirit comes to us, speaking and communicating in and through Jesus, who is himself the Word of God incarnate.

Jesus Christ comes into the world as the Way of life.  He is the means by which we discern when and how we are experiencing God, and telling the difference between hearing God’s voice, and hearing those other voices in our consciousness that draw us away from God to follow after our own desires or fears.  He is the only measurement; we have to put our own thoughts, words, and actions up next to him and see how they stack up… or not.  “Would Jesus do it?” becomes the main question in terms of our own behavior.

And even that requires interpretation by the Spirit in the gathering of disciples.  Because nothing is more depressing than the kinds of things people convince themselves that Jesus would do… which have no basis in the gospels and which Jesus explicitly rejects.

IV.                  

Finally, we are told that, “the Father loves the Son and gives everything into his hands.”  The Son is Jesus, who is both the Son of God and the Son of Humanity; he is both the divine and holy One, God, and the Human One.  “Fully human, fully God,” is the way we sometimes express it confessionally.  Jesus Christ is the way God gives everything to us.  In him we realize that everything we have is a gift, it is grace, it is undeserved, unwarranted, and unearned.  Where God is concerned, we neither make nor take; we receive from and through him what we have.  The things we make are worthless; and our taking of anything not given is a crime.

Unfortunately, we live in an age of our own making, and we suffer the consequences of our own taking.  Invariably, our making and taking leave a catastrophic mess behind, because we are acting in blindness.  We are acting in fear.  We have separated ourselves from the truth.  And we are doing untold damage, everywhere, from soul to sky.

            That’s why following Jesus is so important.  That’s where our urgency comes from.  I know that for many Christians the impetus for evangelism is saving people from going to hell when they die.  But for me, the urgency of evangelism is keeping us from spawning hell in people’s lives here and now.  For, to use the metaphors from earlier, if we are not opening our hearts to the One who comes from “above,” we are opening them and our world to the one who comes from “below.”  If we are not trusting in the Word, life, light, and Lamb of God, we are enslaved to the darkness, blindness, falsehood, selfishness, violence, and terror of the powers of death.

            I am not talking about “making people Christians,” as in aligning themselves with an institution or doctrine.  I am talking about learning to live together in Christ’s life of generosity, healing, peace, justice, beauty, and love.  Especially love.  That is discpleship, actually following Jesus.

            “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.”  This is not about having an opinion with our minds; it is about how we live our lives; it’s about what we do in our bodies.  Do we trust in the Lord Jesus?  Do we trust in the wild Holy Spirit?  Do we obey Jesus’ words and follow his example?  Do we strive to imitate in him everything?   

“Whoever doesn't believe in the Son won't see life, but the angry judgment of God remains on them.”  If we don’t trust in him and do as he does, we are out of synch with creation itself.  And that is like driving the wrong way on the Parkway.  It leads only to the wreckage and misery we call the wrath or angry judgment of God.++

            If we don’t receive the gift of heaven, God’s saving presence, within us, I suspect we won’t receive it at all.  But if we do receive it within us, I know we will also start receiving it everywhere.  The whole world will become for us a gift, a present, a manifestation of God’s love.  We will start to see God at work all around us. +++++++