In 1945, C.S. Lewis published the novel, The Great Divorce, and explored thoughts on heaven and hell. In the story a bus of people from “grey town,” a joyless, monotonous, isolating place, – meant to be hell – take an excursion to the outskirts of heaven. As the bus breaks through the grim rain clouds of hell, the people from grey town find their bodies change and become transparent, almost vapor-like. They’re ghosts. When they get to heaven, although it’s the most amazing, dazzling country they’ve ever seen, every part of the landscape, even the blades of grass are so unbreakably solid that it causes pain to walk; the grass pierces their ghostly feet. The grey town guests can’t pull a flower, or pick up a leaf, they’re so unbelievably heavy.
Heavenly citizens that the grey town folk knew on earth come to greet the visitors and urge them to journey into the heart of heaven. They promise that as the ghosts journey, they’ll become more solid, and they’ll feel less pain. But almost all the ghosts choose to return to grey town instead, offering their own excuses, and highlighting their own self-deception.
A cynic convinces himself that heaven is a trick. A bully is too disgusted that people “beneath him,” on earth were let into heaven. A nagging wife won’t stay because she won’t be able to manipulate her husband in heaven.
The citizens of hell find everything in heaven to be “much solider than things in our country,” to quote Lewis. And in heaven they find themselves the complete opposite; transparent and ghostly. They have thought of their world as the ‘real one,’ and thought of heaven as the spirit world with no substance, but they come to learn that they had it backwards. Heaven is the land of substance. Every blade of grass, every drop of water is more solid than their own bodies. Hell is full of shadows and deceptions, but heaven is the reality.
How often do I get that backwards! How often do I live like the physical world is all there is? How often does today’s to-do list crowd out any thought of heaven from my mind? And even when I can clear a space to consider heaven, I’m deceived to think it’s some gauzy, ethereal, inconsequential thing, just because the Kingdom of God is invisible to my physical eyes.
Thank God for this week’s lesson. Thank God for the gospel of Matthew, and the other eyewitness accounts in the New Testament. We can read of how Jesus lived among others, and spoke to the marginalized, and performed miracles, and healed the sick. He displayed the Kingdom of God; he took the substantial, weighty, beautiful treasures of the Kingdom, and put them in stark contrast with our earthly reality. Jesus’ miracles don’t fit into our earthly boxes. They’re supernatural! They’re not meant to! Jesus’ miracles speak to the reality of God’s Kingdom – the Kingdom that will remain when everything else passes away, a Kingdom not distorted by sin and death.
The wind and waves obey the voice of God. The sick are healed with a touch, the dead are raised. This is reality. This is the enduring reality of the Kingdom, and the rest is a vapor.
Elise
