NO GREATER LOVE: HEAVEN AND EARTH

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In our life on earth we experience many shadows such as temptation, sin, weakness, illness, and may other things we regard as “bad”. As Christian believers, we know that there is a place where all these evils are absent. This place is called heaven. For believers, heaven is the continuous presence of God while to the unbeliever heaven is “pie in the sky by and by”. There certainly is a tension between heaven and earth since they are clearly not identical. Theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar tells us more about this tension in his book Prayer. Creation evinces a mysterious tension which is identified in the very first words of scripture: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." As the subsequent course of salvation history shows, this opposition is not simply cosmological but also theological, contrasting God's being and place (in the world) with man's being and place. What is absolutely clear is that earth is not heaven, even before man puts a spiritual distance between himself and heaven as a result of the Fall. Even before the Fall there are times in Paradise when God makes himself present, walking "in the cool of the day". And afterward we often read of Yahweh's "coming down" (Gen 11:5,7; 18:21, etc.), we read of Jacob's ladder linking earth and heaven, of God's "looking down" on the earth, and conversely of mortal man being transported up to heaven (Elijah and, “in the spirit”, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel). Even people in Biblical times knew that God did not reside in a physical place such as a planet or a distant star. Thus, heaven is a higher state of being.

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The question still remains: What is heaven? Von Balthasar tells us that we need to look to Jesus Christ for an answer to that question. The Son "comes down", and in him heaven becomes tangible on earth. "He who sees me sees the Father." "You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man." Mankind's yearning to look into God's dwelling place is satisfied, beyond all imagining, through God's arrival in the house of man to "come and eat with him" (Rev 3:20). This first descent is veiled; nothing else is to be made known in it but the humble love of God, ineffable by nature, which the late medieval mystics used to call God's "poverty", destined to be so important to man that for the time being it would make him forget all his inquisitive attempts to spy out the glories of the world beyond. In Jesus, heaven is no longer an image but a Person. He is the love of God and can be loved in human form, as a Thou, like you and I. And this Thou dies for you and me; when he dies, heaven is dead to us all. To contemplate Holy Saturday is to contemplate the collapse of heaven into the horrors of the nether world. But the Son rises from the dead, and the forty days he spends with us establish the fundamental sense of Christian existence: our beloved God, who became man, who became "heaven on earth", who thus wooed our love on earth, and whose love we only reciprocated when he had died for our sake-he is now "earth in heaven". For forty days he shows us this earth transformed into heaven, as if to fan our love for him into an even stronger blaze so that suddenly, when he ultimately goes up to heaven to sit at the Father's right hand, he draws up our love with him.

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Since Jesus Christ came from heaven in His incarnation and returned to heaven with His Ascension, we must contemplate Him in order to contemplate heaven. As theologian Von Balthasar points out, there is a fundamental difference between Jesus before His Resurrection and Jesus after His Resurrection. Before His Resurrection Jesus showed us His Father who is in heaven. By showing us the Father as a God of Love, He opened up a window for us to see into heaven. As earthly creatures we can see how heaven operates. As Von Balthasar says, Jesus was “heaven on earth”. While Jesus came from heaven, in order to be fully human he had to endure the shadows of earth, the greatest being His Crucifixion. For forty days after His Resurrection, He came and went without the limitations of this earth. It was the same Jesus, but in His glorified Body. For those forty days on earth He was actually in heaven. Thus, Jesus was “earth in heaven” as Von Balthasar puts it. This tension between heaven and earth is very evident during the Lenten and Easter seasons. During Lent penance helps us to experience the limitations of earth with Jesus through our fasting and penances. This culminates in Good Friday. On Holy Saturday we contemplate the Lord’s descent into the abode of the dead. On Easter we are in a sense with Jesus in heaven as He appears to His disciples, and this goes on for the forty days of the Easter season. On Ascension Day, Jesus goes to the Father but leaves with us the longing for heaven.

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We are, of course, still here on earth. Yet, Hans Urs Von Balthasar tells us the we not only can look into heaven, but we can in a sense be in heaven with the Lord. The believer has experienced heaven on earth in company with the Beloved; indeed he meets him anew every day in prayer, the sacraments, the eucharist, in his whole life of love. All this is life in and through the Lord; it is his presence among us who are gathered in his name to celebrate the memorial of his death, but also of his spirit, which, in his name, we endeavor to reproduce in ourselves. But there is more: after his resurrection, which translated him into his Father's realm, he opened heaven to us in such a way as to allow us, earthly men, to share in it with him. When the disciples were with him, they were in heaven. Who can fail, in reading and contemplating the resurrection accounts, to sense the atmosphere of eternal life, the atmosphere of heaven, far more intimately than in the most impressive prophetic visions? We have been given access to heaven; not in an external way, by ecstasies or visions, but primarily in a totally interior way which reinterprets our whole existence, through the Redeemer's gracious act whereby he transplants us from earth into the soil of heaven. We have become "strangers and pilgrims on earth" because he has made us "citizens of heaven". Paul and the other apostles are full of this fact, as the Church's saints will always be. …… So it is that not only Christ, but also our love for him is already in heaven; it is in heaven that we receive him at holy Mass, in heaven we seek and find him in prayer and contemplation. Indeed, in loving our neighbor in the most ordinary earthly matters, we are encountering Christ in heaven. All this is hidden, of course, from our earthly senses at present, but when the Lord returns it will become manifest, along with him, as something that was always there. Paul puts it explicitly: "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory" ( Col 3:1-4). We can see that heaven is not just some vague hope, “pie in the sky by and by”. Christ shows us that the hope of heaven is a hope, but it is a real hope for He has attained it, and He wants us to attain it also.

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The tension between heaven and earth is part of the struggle we all experience as Christians. It is so easy for us to think that only that which we can sense here and now is real. We choose the fleeting and very imperfect joys of sin over what God can give us. We can even be tempted to try to bring heaven to earth by our own plans and effort. This has been tried many times, but it only makes clear that this earth is not heaven and we cannot change this fact. Theologian Von Balthasar shows us clearly this distinction between heaven and earth. If the experience of having "our heart in heaven" were not the foretaste of eternal bliss with God, our existence, bafflingly torn and battered between heaven and earth, would never be "at home" anywhere; we should have to see it as pure tragedy, as nothing but torture. And this is how it does seem from outside. It can look like this even from inside, once faith's love has lost its glowing vigor. Christian existence calls for two things at once: we must maintain the distinction between heaven and earth which is grounded in creation and will not be overcome until the eschaton; and we must affirm the fact that this distinction has been superseded in principle (though not yet made manifest) by the ascension to heaven of the Man Christ, who has taken our humanity to heaven with him, authentically, although hiddenly. This irreducible tension is part of our whole Christian life, and thus it belongs particularly to Christian contemplation. – Jim Nugent, CFP