Heaven - God's Vision Or Man's Pipe-dream?

“Then Jesus told them, “You will indeed drink from my bitter cup and be baptized with my baptism of suffering.  But I have no right to say who will sit on my right or my left. God has prepared those places for the ones he has chosen.” Mark 10:39-‬40 NLT

Heaven is not nowhere but now here. Living in heaven here and now is not a pipe dream but God’s vision for our lives. In the Lord’s prayer, we pray, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Heaven is not a destination but a state of being in the eternal relationship with our Heavenly Father.

In the gospel of Mark, the stories of Jesus preparing the disciples for his crucifixion and of James and John asking to be seated on the right and left of Jesus’ glorious throne, are to help us to understand what heaven is all about. But like the disciples, we are all spiritually blind to the reality of God’s Kingdom. We need to cry out like blind Bartimaeus, “Rabbi, I want to see!” (Mark 10:52).

The cry of Bartimaeus to Jesus, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” brings to mind the “Jesus Prayer” of the Anonymous Russian pilgrim in the 1800s who prayed, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He found that it was a way to pray unceasingly and to practice the presence of God. It is also known as the prayer of the heart in the Eastern Orthodox Church and is the basis for the discipline of breath prayers in Christian meditation. 

To follow Christ is to seek the Kingdom of God above all else and the practice of contemplative prayer or meditation helps us to do so. As I was writing this reflection,  a nephew shared how he had experienced God’s presence when he was about 29 years old. He was struggling to find meaning in life with a past that was full of pride and hurts and a future filled with worries. He felt led to try meditation with the breath prayer and experienced an awareness of his true self - a consciousness that is beyond his own mind.

In this “super consciousness” realm, he experienced the sensation of the energy or consciousness of the trees in the ground floor carpark.  He found breathing the air of life more pleasurable than that of smoking cigarettes, a habit he was addicted to at that time. Most important of all, he was in a state of divine bliss which was unspeakable joy. It was a foretaste of “heaven” which lingered with him for the next 2 to 3 days. He felt that his mind had been cleared out and reset and his body renewed with joy. He felt refreshed and healed.  God became very real to him after that night and he began to hunger and thirst for more spiritual food.

Before the crucifixion, the disciples were unable to comprehend what Jesus was talking about and they saw greatness from their egos rather than from the perspective of a child and servant of God. They were blind to the cost of following Christ and totally oblivious to the suffering that lies ahead of them:

“But Jesus said to them, “You don’t know what you are asking! Are you able to drink from the bitter cup of suffering I am about to drink? Are you able to be baptized with the baptism of suffering I must be baptized with?” Mark 10:38 NLT

The world is suffering from the horror of the COVID 19 pandemic. We are reminded of how fragile and unpredictable the future and life can be. COVID 19 forces us to face the stark reality that we are in fact living in hell on earth when we do not have God in our lives.  We are addicted to the pleasures of life which drown God’s gentle whispers of love calling us to return to His loving embrace. Spiritual experiences like those of my nephew helped me to understand the message of the cross:

“And as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.” John 3:14‭-‬15 NLT

Moses was told to make the bronze snake on a pole for the Jews to look at for healing when they were afflicted by poisonous snakes for their rebellious complaints against God (Numbers 21:4-9). Jesus drew attention to this story to help us understand the power of the cross. 

Heaven is not the absence of suffering but the state of consciousness that embrace and transcends suffering. The secret of living in heaven here and now is to keep our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith:

“We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne.” Hebrews 12:2 NLT

Let us not be tempted to dream or speculate about heaven.  We have a mission to bring God’s Kingdom into the world.  People need to see the resurrection power of Christ through the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives in the face of suffering and death. Let us seek greatness in the kingdom of heaven -  not by lording over others or to be served - but to serve others and to give our lives as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). Let us be Christ’s ambassadors of hope as we journey through life on earth:

“For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)” Romans 8:22‭-‬25 NLT

As the children of God, let us encourage one another to live in the kingdom of heaven in the here and now.  Let us be beacons of light to lead the world out of the darkness of the COVID 19 pandemic.