Court of Heaven

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A predominant image for Heaven in the Hebrew Bible is that of a law court. For indeed, this is what kings do in the ancient world: they sit in judgment over their people, upholding justice and good order, sorting out right from wrong. The king is the final arbiter of truth—the one who sets things right and thus brings peace.

Of course, every court has a prosecutor, one who charges the defendant with a crime. And the word for this is “satan,” the adversary, the enemy; the accuser. If God is viewed as Judge in the Bible, then the devil is the prosecuting attorney. We see this most clearly in the book of Job, when Satan returns from going to and fro upon the earth and up and down within it, and he brings charges before God, charges against human beings.

“They’re not good enough,” he says. “They don’t love you,” he says. “They don’t deserve your blessing,” he says. “Let me have them. Let me punish them. Let me show You what they truly are.” He thinks he understands us, Satan does, thinks he knows us better than God ever could. And one must admit he has a point. Satan understands wickedness and evil and cruelty and sin. He understands selfishness, rebellion, and overweening pride. In this sense, yes, we are far more like the demons than we have ever been like God.

“I’m here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began,” boasts the devil in a Hollywood favorite of mine—in which Satan, mind you, runs a law firm. “I’m a fan of man! I’m a humanist,” he tells us. “Maybe the last humanist.” This, at heart, is what the devil does, what makes him the Satan, the Accuser: he tells the truth of our sin. But that’s only half the truth, which is really the very worst sort of lie.

In John’s Gospel, from which we read this morning, Jesus tells us that He is going away, that He must return to the Father, ascending again to the Godhead in Heaven. But He will not leave us orphaned, He promises. We shall not be abandoned. Rather, He will send to us from Heaven the Holy Spirit of God as “another Paraclete,” which implies, of course, that our first Paraclete is Christ Himself. All well and good, but what’s a Paraclete?

Παράκλητος means a “call-beside,” often translated helper, counselor, or most literally advocate. And this again is a legal term. As the Accuser, the Satan, is the prosecutor, so the Paraclete is the defense attorney. The Paraclete is the one who stands before the Judge in our place and speaks for the accused; who wields the might of the law so that justice now finds fulfillment in mercy, and the verdict before this Court is declared: “In the Name of God, not guilty!”

Christ ascends into Heaven to prepare for us a place in His Father’s House. And this is no small thing, for up until this point in the Bible, Heaven is no place for human beings. It is the dwelling place of God, and for those immortal spirits adamant enough and pure enough to withstand the unfettered fires of His glory. Yet when Christ ascends in human flesh, the whole of humanity ascends with Him, that Man may dwell again with God, as once did Adam and Eve in Eden.

And indeed, He has brought Adam and Eve with Him, for Christ has conquered death by death, descending into Hades, and rising again victorious with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. Even those disobedient from the days of Noah—the dead and drowned of whom Scripture says their every thought was only evil all the time—even these explicitly are raised from out of Hell and into Heaven; the complete routing of Satan’s entire domain; every case he’d ever argued overthrown by Christ!

This absolute and utter victory we call the Harrowing of Hell, and we confess it every Sunday in the great Creeds when we proclaim that Christ descended to the dead. But this is neither the sum nor the end of His victory. For after descending to the dead, Christ ascends again to Heaven. And just as He has harrowed Hell, so now He hallows Heaven.

He hallows it by kicking out the Satan—by banishing forever the devil from before the Court of Heaven—casting him down to earth, down to Hell, so that now before the Lord our God there stands no Accuser at all. Rather, Christ Himself, our Advocate, stands before the Heavenly Court in our stead and argues our case before the Almighty Judge of all; while the Holy Spirit, the Breath and Life and Love of God, dwells now within us, speaking for us, taking our tongues as His own, claiming our bodies as temples of His deathless flame.

And just to be clear: the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God; not three gods but One. So that in the Court of Heaven, the Judge is God, the Attorney is God, and the Defendant is God, the Spirit within us. And there is no prosecutor at all, for he has been thrown out from the Court in contempt! Thus the image of Heaven as a courthouse, and of God as our Judge, is transformed from a cautionary tale—from a finger-wagging parable of “thou shalt not”—into a vision of God’s ridiculous superabundance of mercy and love poured out for us, because everyone in that Court is on our side.

Someday, my brothers and sisters, each of us shall stand before the Throne of God and make an accounting of our life: all the good, all the bad, all the things we hid in shadows now brought forth into light. And we shall see the depths of our sin. We shall see all the terrible repercussions of our wickedness, spreading out like ripples in a pond. And we shall despair that such brokenness could ever be set right.

But then God will pass judgment. And that judgment will be true in ways we cannot even imagine. It will make sense of things we could never otherwise have hoped to comprehend. And whatever He proclaims, whatever judgment God may pass, it will be full to bursting with love for us. Because God is our Father, and our Spirit, and our Savior. He is our judge, our jury, and our defense. The entire Court of Heaven exists to bring us home in Him.

Thus judgment will be for us Goodness and Beauty and Truth; it will raise us up from death unto life. For God is always for us! Even when He must be against us, He is for us. And He will never do or allow or proclaim anything that is not for our greater and final good.

No matter what happens, no matter what comes, you will never be able to escape the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. This is our promise, our hope, our judgment and salvation. This is the will of God for us all.

And so we rest our case.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.