The Patriarch

continued

In the sanctuary an hour later, the assistant rector, Bill Rhodes, who hadn't been present in the Bible class, mounted the pulpit to give the sermon.

"Let's not make the common mistake," he cautioned, "of spiritualizing the concept of the resurrection." When the Bible promises that the body will be raised, he said, it means just what it says. We will have bodies - "transformed, glorified, made perfect" - but bodies nonetheless.

Two seminary-trained men in the same church on the same Sunday. Two views of heavenly existence. To me it said not that one was right, the other wrong, but only that the heaven they both believed in is very big. Larger, more multidimensional than we can perceive from "the wrong side."

What form will our heavenly bodies take? Even St. Paul who was "caught up," still living, into heaven, was not sure in what manner he'd had the experience. "Whether in the body or out of the body I do not know - God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).

Jesus' own resurrected body, during the forty days before his ascension, was apparently both solid - he walked with his grieving followers on the road to Emmaus, broke bread at supper - and immaterial: at the moment of recognition he "vanished from their sight." He seemed to partake during this time of two kinds of being at once.

He passed through a locked door into the room where his fearful disciples were huddled, yet to satisfy literal-minded Thomas, invited him to touch the physical reality of his hands and side.

The where of heaven, too, which so preoccupied our ancestors, is no more answerable from our present vantage point than what our bodies will be like. In a smaller, earth-centered universe, people liked to assign heaven a location. The Egyptians placed the afterworld beyond the western horizon. The Greek "Isles of the Blessed" were across the sea, though the poet Hesiod, writing in 700 B.C., believed that heaven was in the sky, so high "it would take a blacksmith's anvil nine days to fall to earth." In Dante's Paradiso, the nine levels of heaven correspond to the spheres of the nine planets thought to orbit the earth; the better the soul, the higher the sphere.

Today, when we know ourselves to inhabit only one of billions of galaxies, in a universe where distinctions between "up" and "down" no longer hold, such speculations seem merely quaint. Heavenly logistics are probably nothing we can visualize. The Bible’s own images of heaven are so wildly diverse as to suggest a reality we have no real parallels for. A city built of gemstones. A banquet. A sea of glass. A mustard seed.