What is Heaven Like?

            Have you ever wondered what heaven is like?  It comes up sometimes when people are in trouble; have serious illnesses or some kind of great trauma, or when someone whom we love has died.  We think about heaven and wonder about it.  It isn’t a question that has much of an answer.  We can only really speculate.

            The disciples didn’t know much about it either.  In the 14^th chapter of John’s gospel is the passage that is frequently read at funerals.  Jesus begins it with set your troubled hearts at rest, then he says believe in God, believe also in me. He goes on to tell them that he goes to prepare a place for them so that where he is, they will be also and the way there is known to them.  Thomas, the disciple who was always ready to question, says we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way? Thomas was like all of us.  He had no idea of what heaven was all about.

            C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent book called The Great Divorce, in which he tried to contrast heaven and hell so that we could all understand it  Hell, for Lewis was a large city in which it rained constantly; people walked around not really noticing each other and where no one ever even smiled.  There was a bus that loaded frequently and took everyone on it to heaven; which was a place, lighted brilliantly and full of people who worked together, cared for each other and seemed to have a good time. 

            These bus trips to heaven were described beautifully and were full of stories about the people on board the bus and how they reacted.  There were frequently people who got off the bus, saw someone whom they thought ought not to be in heaven and got back on the bus to go back to the rainy city.  Judgement was the issue of the day for a lot of the bus riders.

            I don’t know if Lewis knew a lot about how our afterlife is constructed.  He certainly wrote with wisdom and knew how to describe what most people on this planet think about what we will experience when we meet our God after our lives are over.  I loved what he said about it all, and I hope that he was somewhat accurate in his description.

            I think that Jesus was trying to help us all to understand what he meant when he was talking about the Kingdom of Heaven.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is describing heaven for his listeners in a series of parables.  Most of these describe a great treasure that surprises the finder and lets us all know the value of being in the place where God resides.  He talks about heaven being like a mustard seed that is the smallest of seeds, but after it is planted, it grows into a magnificent bush; large enough for the birds to come and find a place to nest in its branches.  He also talks of heaven as if it is leaven that is mixed in with three measures of flour until it is all leavened.  Those are rather subtle descriptions of heaven.  It is described as something that more or less sneaks up on you.  That certainly fits with the way that most of us experience heaven while we are still living.  We only speculate at what it must be like.

            His other parables are a bit different.  They speak of people who find treasures; one a treasure hidden in a field and another a pearl of great price, both of which cause the finder to sell all that he has to make certain that he can hold on to this treasure.  I think that is a beautiful way to describe the kingdom of heaven.  I once was with a woman in the last moments of her life in a hospital bed, who almost with her last breath said all of a sudden: it is so beautiful! just before she died. That told me a lot about heaven.  It is a place of infinite beauty that we can all look forward to experiencing.

             Jesus final parable describing the kingdom of heaven is to say that it is like a net thrown into the sea that caught fish of every kind.  The net was dragged out of the sea and the fish were separated into the good and the bad.  They put the good into baskets and threw out the bad.  He said that this is how it would be at the end of time; that angels would come and separate the evil from the good and that there would be considerable gnashing of teeth.

            That doesn’t make me feel particularly good.  I know that there are things inside myself that I am not really very proud of. things that I wouldn’t want to show to God ever. But what I hear in this parable is an echo of what scripture means when it speaks of the refiner’s fire that cleanses all of us in the presence of God, so that we appear finally before our God in the perfect state in which he created us.  I remember that great passage from Isaiah that describes the prophet being caught up and thrust into the presence of God.  He thinks of himself as not being worthy.  An angel comes and touches his lips with a burning coal that seems to make him worthy.  He then responds to God’s instructions to him to go and to prophesy and to tell the world what he has seen.  That is what the angels do in this final reckoning.  They receive us all and cast out those things that shame us and help us to go forward as people who know the goodness that we were at our creation.  That, for me is what heaven is all about.