Tiers of Time

Heaven Over Earth, by Dimashego

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, AD 2023 A

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.

When I was an undergraduate, my Religious Studies professors would sometimes speak of Christianity as a beast with two legs: one Jewish, and one Greco-Roman; one Hebrew, one Hellenist; one Ancient Near Eastern, and one Classical; one Mesopotamian, the other Mediterranean.

We can see this supposed division at work in the languages of Scripture. The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings are all written in Hebrew with a bit of Aramaic thrown in, while the Apocrypha and New Testament are both solidly Greek. The trick for a lot of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars was to try to tease out the true, authentic, Jewish worldview of the Bible and thus disentangle it from the knotty Hellenism of later Christianity; to save, in other words, pure Jewish religion from pagan Greek philosophy.

But that’s all nonsense. There is no clear-cut distinction, no well-guarded border, between the ancient and the classical, the Mesopotamian and Mediterranean, the Jew and the Greek. All these people lived together, overlapped, interacted. By the time of Jesus Christ, Judaism as a whole was thoroughly Hellenized and had been so for centuries. Alexander the Great remade the world in his image—everything east of Rome and west of China. That’s why the New Testament is in Greek.

Alexander had been tutored by Aristotle. Aristotle had been taught by Plato. And Plato is all of us. Plato is the foundation of Western thought and civilization. The whole of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, and Aristotle wrote most of those footnotes. We all think like him, even if we’ve never heard of him.

Now, I tell you all this because John’s Gospel is very Greek, not just in language but in worldview, in philosophy. This doesn’t make John any less Jewish. He is thoroughly Jewish, as are all of his writings. And that is very important for us to know when we read John’s Gospel, let alone his Book of Revelation. John’s is not the same perspective on Jesus as Matthew’s apocalyptic expectations. John reads Jesus through a Jewish Platonist lens.

For John there are tiers of reality, tiers in fact of time. They are layered upon one another. For him, Heaven is not just “above us.” It is an entirely different type of reality, a truer fullness of reality, beyond what we can experience here below. We live in “the world”: a realm of darkness, death, and decay. Here there is ignorance and disease. Here there is entropy and evil. We are all of us changing, and not for the better. Everything in the world is ephemeral, everything’s passing away.

Heaven is an entirely different story. Heaven is the realm of goodness, truth, and beauty; of shadowless, endless light, free from ignorance, free from weakness. It is the abode of God, and it is eternal, beyond change, beyond loss, beyond death. Evil in the world is emptiness, a void, a lack. Heaven is fullness, completion, perfection. There is no room for evil there. It evaporates like shadows before the sun.

St Paul, another Hellenized, well-educated Jewish Christian, shares this worldview with John, with its tiers of reality. Paul uses the term ψυχή or psyche, which means mind or soul, in order to describe the half-life which we live out in this world: fleeting and fragile, like smoke on the breeze. But heavenly life is of an altogether different order. This Paul calls πνεύμα, or spirit, a fullness of life which transcends weakness, time, change, sin, disorder and decay.

God is calling us, you see, out from this half-finished world, this fallen realm of change and chance, into His eternal halls of glory, fulfillment, life and joy. God wants more for us, infinitely more, than we could possibly imagine in this world. And to these ancient authors, to Jews like John and Paul, spirit is not something less than flesh, translucent as light, but harder, like diamond. We think of angels as having no substance, yet they pass through us as though we were not even there.

This is what makes John’s Gospel so remarkable. Remember how he starts it off: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Now that “Word” is Greek, λόγος, and it means more than just a word. The λόγος is the reason, the purpose, the mind of God, the logic behind it all. It is the λόγος that connects the infinite Creator to this finite Creation. Reason makes the world go ‘round. This is very philosophical, very Platonic.

And John is saying that the λόγος, the Word of God, is not some angel or emanation or lesser being or demigod, but is in fact God Himself, God come down, descending from the realms of glory into this mess of mud and blood. And that’s a big deal. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it; not just any light, mind you, but the Light, heavenly light, the Word of God Himself is here.

Now in this third chapter of his Gospel, John lays it all on the line, spreads out his entire theology, his entire Christology, before us and all the world. Jesus meets with Nicodemus, a leader and teacher among the Jews, a respected Pharisee, the brightest and best of those souls here below. And we should respect him too. Nicodemus is a Greek name. The dialogue that he shares with Jesus only works in Greek, not in Hebrew or Aramaic. Nicodemus, in other words, is very much like John.

And they have this little back-and-forth. “No-one can see the Kingdom of God,” Jesus tells Nicodemus, “without being born from above.” And born from above, in Greek, sounds very much the same as being “born again.” “How does that work?” Nicodemus replies. Can one return to the womb and climb back out anew? He’s thinking logically, scientifically. But he’s thinking of flesh.

Jesus says, “I’m not talking about flesh; I’m talking about spirit.” Spirit is a different kind of world, a different level of life, one that is not less but more. To have eternal spiritual life is to know God through the one whom He has sent: His Word, His Son. No-one has seen God the Father in Heaven, remember, but God the Son—who is Himself God—has made the Father known to us.

And how can all this be? Here Jesus breaks out the big guns: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the whole world might be saved through Him.” That’s the one, isn’t it, everyone’s favorite verse, the one you see held up on placards at football games? It exists in eternity above broken time.

For God so loved the world! How utterly, terribly scandalous. So many of the prophets preached that God by rights should hate the world, so brazenly does it defy His will. Even Aristotle thought that God’s attitude toward our world was one of benign ignorance, not deigning to notice so fallen a fleck as the one we live upon. Yet John insists that God so loves the world that He comes down Himself, the only Son of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.

“He who believes in Him,” Jesus says, “is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

Did you catch that? For John, the judgment is not some distant future event but an eternal reality which now has broken into time. The judgment is Jesus Himself, Christ crucified. To believe in Him is already to be saved, to live now as a colony of Heaven while yet in this world. And not to believe is condemnation enough. It is to slog through this cosmos of decrepitude and decay without the Light to guide us, without the hope that calls us home, without the life that outlives death.

Which is not to say that they have no hope. For God so loved the world, remember, that all the world might be saved through Him. Someday this world will end; that’s its whole deal. Everything here is temporary. Everything’s falling apart. Someday this world will die, and then there will only be Spirit, only be God. But Christ is not content that we should wallow in sin in this age. He comes to us as we are, here in time, here in this fallen broken shell of a world, enamored of nothingness.

The Way of Christ, and the community of His Church, is meant to be a colony of Heaven on this earth, a beachhead of eternity in time. We are to be Light in the darkness, not to deny this life on earth but to raise it to fruition, to fill it with the Spirit. Christ has called us by grace through faith to bring life, liberation, and joy to this world which God so dearly loves. That, I daresay, is truly a life worth the living.

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