For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever." (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
It is the season of Easter. We celebrate Jesus' resurrection. What Good News! The resurrection of Jesus gives us incredible hope. In Jesus' resurrection he has overcome death, we are given new life already in the present, and we have the hope and guarantee of our resurrection in the future. Good News indeed!
The hope that we have for our future resurrection is on one hand the greatest comfort that we have when all the chips are on the table. But on the other hand it is the most mysterious and unknown reality. What does eternal life look like? What will we be resurrected for? What does resurrection mean?
Over the last 100 years there began to be this assumption that when we die we will go to heaven and live in the presence of God forever. The verses from 1 Thessalonians quoted earlier give this kind of picture. But perhaps we have read meaning into the text that the Apostle Paul did not intend. We see this picture of meeting Jesus in the clouds and being with him forever. But we make the assumption that we will be with Jesus forever in the clouds.
But what if Paul meant to give a different picture?
In the Greek text of the New Testament, the word for "meet" when meeting Jesus in the air is the word "apantasis." Apantasis is a political term that describes how the people of a town would go outside of the city gates to meet a dignitary... and then escort them back into the city and celebrate their coming.
Imagine you have a friend flying to Prince George to visit you. Do you go to the airport to meet them and then spend your whole visit there? No. You welcome them into your home.
When Jesus returns we will meet him, but not stay in the clouds in a never-ending Philadelphia cream cheese commercial. But heaven and earth will be united as one. We will celebrate the return of the King.
Our greatest foretaste of what things will look like in the resurrection is not a palace in the skies, but it will be much closer to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1 and 2.
So what does this mean about going to heaven?
Well, as the biblical scholar Tom Wright says, "Heaven is important, but it's not the end of the world." Heaven is our place where we have life after death. But heaven is not our ultimate hope. Christians believe, as stated in the Apostles' Creed, in the "resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." If heaven is 'life after death,' then resurrection is 'life after life after death' on earth as it was previously in heaven.
Resurrection. It's primarily a matter of living. Hallelujah!
And that makes all the difference. Think about what we pray in the Lord's Prayer (Matt 6:9-13). We do not pray "Father, take me from earth into heaven one day." But we pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
We get to live out our hope for the future in the present. Could there be a greater hope for the world?
