Chapter 13: The Church is the Answer

After Ryan and Anthony body-surfed with the boys for about an hour, it was time to pack up and head home. Ryan, as an associate pastor who worked 3 services on Sunday morning and then met with members of the congregation after that, was accustomed to taking a long nap on Saturday to prepare himself for the next day. But today was different. He continued to live off the adrenaline of spending time with his long lost best friend and these theological conversations were rare and invigorating. When they got home, they snacked a little bit and Ryan came up with the brilliant idea to hit the local 24 Hour Fitness for a little workout…again, just like old times. Anthony, anyone could tell, is the type of guy who would never pass up a workout. And he found that a little bit of physical activity gave him more energy for his body and his mind.

When they got to the gym, they headed straight for the bench press, of course, the ultimate test of aging manhood. Just as Ryan laid back on the bench to do his first set has lobbed another question toward Anthony:

RW: So, do you believe in heaven and hell?
AT: Wow, we are getting a workout!
RW: Well, I mean, we’ve got limited time here. If we can’t talk about these things during a workout, when can we ever talk about them?
AT: These heaven and hell questions are a part of what guys like you and I call eschatology, you know, using big words to pretend like we really know what we’re talking about. Eschatology is about what comes last and, traditionally, evangelicals have had firm convictions about the end: either we go to heaven or hell when we die. But when eschatology is boiled down to ‘where we go when we die’ it loses the force and focus of the New Testament. When Jesus comes on the scene in Mark’s Gospel, he’s fully grown and he’s on a mission, ‘Repent for the kingdom of God has come near.’ In the world of 1st century Palestinian Judaism, this was an announcement that the end was very close indeed. At the time, Judaism was more like Judaisms, splitting into different religio-political camps like the Saduccees, the Herodians, the Pharisees, the Zealots and the Essenes, all with different nuances on what it meant to be the people of God. They all believed that there would be a day when their God, YHWH, would come and establish his reign on earth and the other nations, the heathen gentiles, would come flocking to Jerusalem to worship the true God of the world. Many, but not all, believed in a general resurrection, where Jews would rise from their graves and physically participate in God’s eternal reign on earth. The crucial difference between these groups was how this kingdom of God would come about—in other words, how the people of God should be living as they awaited that day. The Sadducees and Herodians were ‘realists.’ They believed that Jews should accommodate Roman imperialism. Jews should faithfully toe the party line and wait for YHWH to show up. Today, these would be like ‘chaplains’ who sanctify society with the hope of being able to progressively improve it. The Pharisees, on the other hand, wanted to separate themselves by keeping rules of segregation, to keep themselves from being tainted by society. This is like the tendency for some evangelicals to draw a clear line between what is ‘spiritual’ and what is ‘political.’ It’s along the same lines as the idea that we Christians should passionately maintain a personal piety and not be concerned with politics. The Essenes represented the monastery existence of withdrawal from society in order to become perfectly faithful. It’s like the Amish or rural communities or even the suburbs which promise a safe distance from the crime and sin of the inner-city. Lastly, there were the Zealots, the righteous revolutionaries who wanted to use military force against the enemies to usher in God’s reign. This was the greatest temptation for Jesus, from the trials in the wilderness with Satan at the beginning of his ministry to the Garden of Gethsemane at the very end—Jesus, in order to establish God’s new order, could never draw the sword because God, instead, had chosen servanthood as ‘his tool to remake the world.’
RW: I get the feeling that your history lesson is evading the question. Let me guess, these different groups of Jews didn’t believe in heaven and hell, but Jesus did, right?
AT: Not exactly. The common interpretation is that all of these groups were looking for a kingdom of this world, but Jesus’ kingdom was spiritual or it was a heaven-after-you-die kingdom that was ‘not of this world.’
RW: Yeah, I mean, that is what Jesus tells Pilate in John’s Gospel.
AT: Right, but this is a matter of interpretation. Yoder and many others read this passage as Jesus saying that the way he rules is different than the way rulers in this world go about their business. As Yoder writes in Politics of Jesus, ‘The alternative to how the kings of the earth rule is not ‘spirituality’ but ‘servanthood.’ Jesus’ kingdom is every bit as socio-political as Caesar’s or Pilate’s or George W. Bush’s. As we talked about yesterday, the church is a political body. But it is a new kind of society that has a new way of dealing with offenders [by forgiving], a new way of dealing with money [by sharing], a new way of dealing with leadership [by serving], a new way of dealing with violence [by suffering], a new attitude toward the state and the ‘enemy nation’ and a whole new pattern of relationships between men and women, parents and children and employers and employees.
RW: You seem to bring up church as the answer to every question. I actually asked about heaven and hell.
AT: Yes! You see that I have a really high view of the church. No wonder I’m so critical of what I see all around me in North America. The church is the center of God’s ‘heavenly’ activity. In Jesus, God inaugurated the new age that Jews of all stripes were longing for. The way God ushered in his kingdom was quite shocking, though. He did it through the scandalous Roman instrument of torture: the cross. God, in essence, was saying through Jesus’ story from conception to death through risen life, ‘This is how I do things in the world—through the lowly, humble, suffering servant way of Jesus.’ Today, there are all sorts of brands of Christianity that emphasize all sorts of things that we should be doing and thinking on our way to heaven [when we die]. But what God did in Christ was to implement eternity in the midst of our sin-dominated world. No doubt, we await the ‘reappearing’ of Christ when we will see things as they truly are and the New Heavens and New Earth are fully restored. But our vocation now is to live out this new age as a foretaste, a sign of what will one day come.