Heaven is a Yeshiva

Revelation 11.15-19

In numbed America, the doom loop is so inexorable, you know how these stories almost always go.

Almost always go.

On August 20, 2013, as gun legislation languished in Congress, Michael Hill, a twenty-year old man who was off his psychiatric medications because his Medicaid had expired, walked into McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Georgia armed with an assault rifle, five hundred rounds of ammunition, and, as he put it in a social media post, “nothing to live for.”

There were 870 children in in McNair Discovery Learning Academy that summer morning, all of them between the ages of five and eleven. Entering the school, Michael Hill immediately took a hostage— not a student or a teacher but the school’s bookkeeper, Antoinette Tuff.

Though she rightly feared for her life, Tuff offered an odd, miraculous act. Boldly, the school bookkeeper calmly poke to the aspiring mass shooter as one neighbor speaks to a fellow neighbor. For nearly a half hour, Tuff spoke to Hill with empathy and love. The emergency dispatcher recorded every word of their conversation. Her words to him during that abyss of time managed to save not only the lives of everyone else in the school but the gunman’s own life.

“We’re not going to hate you,” Tuff said, referring to Hill first as “sir” and later as “sweetie” and “baby.” The bookkeeper shared with the gunman stories of struggle from her own life to calm him– a recent divorce, a son with multiple disabilities.

At one point in the 911 call, Tuff told Hill:

“It’s going to be all right, sweetie. I just want you to know I love you, though, OK? And I’m proud of you. That’s a good thing that you’re just giving up and don’t worry about it. We all go through something in life. No, you don’t want that. You going to be OK. I thought the same thing, you know, I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me. But look at me now. I’m still working and everything is OK.”

Michael Hill was armed with an AK47 rifle.

Antoinette Tuff was armed with a faith formed by the commandments.

Recalling the incident to a journalist for the Guardian, Tuff said, “My pastor, he just started this teaching on anchoring, and how you anchor yourself in the Lord and his law,” recalled Tuff, who said she was terrified. “I was screaming and terrified on the inside. I didn't even know I was calm until everybody kept saying that. I just sat there and started praying that I could love my neighbor as myself…I prayed that everything that I had heard God say to me, was what I came out of my mouth with.”

Eventually, while keeping police at a distance, she persuaded him to give up his weapons, lie on the floor, and give himself up.

Anchor yourself in the Lord and his law.

Here in the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse, we are still in the midst of the woes announced by the eagle two chapters earlier, “Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!” In between those woes, we also remain in the middle of the interlude that began chapter ten. Just after the John eats the mighty angel’s scroll and hears the Lord’s command to preach to the principalities and powers, at the top of chapter eleven the Seer is given to see the world’s foreseeable backlash to the word of the cross.

The Spirit of Jesus shows John the dead bodies of the Lord’s faithful witnesses, their corpses paraded through the city for three and a half days. John sees how the violence done to the Lord’s witnesses actually deepens human solidarity; it brings people together. All the inhabitants of the earth come together, John sees, celebrating a kind of anti-liturgy, gloating over bodies of the martyred, exchanging gifts and offering thanks and praise.

The two dead and tortured witnesses represent the church. It’s a grim portrait of the world’s veracious and stubborn resistance to God. And it’s a sobering picture of the destiny that what awaits those who attempt to endure, faithfully witnessing to the word laid upon us. It’s an image that will inoculate you against all forms of prosperity gospel and against every sentimental reduction of the faith. It’s so frightening because this just is what full, unmeasured faithfulness looks like in a fallen world, John is given to see.

Nevertheless!

Exactly as Sodom’s inhabitants parade around the bodies of the martyrs with impunity, the story takes a turn. It ends different than as you might expect. Suddenly, the seventh archangel blows his trumpet and heaven erupts with the chorus made famous by Handel’s Messiah, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.”

Has become.

Has already become.

Even before the third and final woe unleashes overwhelms the world, John sees heaven sing of God’s victory as a past act. For instance, notice how the tense changes in the middle of the chapter, starting in verse eleven, from the future tense to the aorist tense. No longer is the Kingdom a future possibility; it is a present reality. So much so, the twenty four elders— the patriarchs of Israel and the apostles of the church— they fall down on their faces and sing, but the end of their song is different than you might expect.

In verse seventeen, the elders omit the familiar formula, singing not “The Lord God Almighty who is and who was and who is to come.” Instead they now sing, “The Lord God Almighty, who are and who were.” Their song no longer includes the final clause, “…and who is to come.” Just as an aside— notice that they speak of God in the plural, the way you would sing if God were triune. The elders edit heaven’s song so that it ends not in the future, as you expect, but the present tense, “for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.”

In other words, no matter what befalls God’s witnesses in the world, with Christ’s cry on upon the cross, “It is finished” the future Kingdom is already as good as arrived. As Desmond Tutu preached in the face of apartheid, “You have already lost!”

And then, at the culmination of this vision of reality— of the real world where God’s future Kingdom is so guaranteed you can speak as if it is already so—  John sees God’s temple in heaven opened up. Like the revelation to Moses, the opening of the temple occasions flashes of lightening and peals of thunder, earth quakes and heavy hail. Finally, what does the Seer see at the center of the temple at the center of heaven?

The Spirit of Jesus shows John the ark, the vessel for the commandments the Risen Jesus once spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai.

John sees what the prophet Ezekiel before him was given to see.

There is torah in heaven.

Anchor yourself in the Lord and his law.

A number of years ago the New York Times did a story about a black pastor named William James in East Harlem. The pastor, the article noted, was famous in his community for his work on behalf of the destitute and the downtrodden. The author of the article writes:

“The streets of the neighborhood are lined with storefront churches, as many as five on a block, and some of the ministers said it was difficult to get across the Christmas message of hope, joy, and celebration to those who have so little. But Reverend James disagrees. “The Christmas message,” he said, “the good news to the poor, is that you’re not going to be poor anymore.” “That message is a lot easier,” the pastor said, “than trying to get across the Christmas message to the rich that they’re not going to be selfish anymore.”

Notice what the pastor didn’t say to the Times reporter.

He didn’t say the Christmas message to the rich is, “You shouldn’t be selfish anymore.” He didn’t say, “Empty your pockets, or else. Make yourself low lest you who are first be lost forever.” He didn’t even say, “Sinner, repent of your selfishness.”

He just said, “You’re not going to be selfish anymore.”

You’re not going to covet anymore. You won’t store up treasures for yourself anymore. You won’t bury your talent in the ground anymore. You’re not going to be like that anymore.

As though, it’s not up to us who we will become.

As though, you are at best a bystander to what will be done upon you.

You will be made righteous.

Just as the commandments were made for you, one day you will be remade for the commandments.

The End is different than you might expect. But it’s not all that mysterious or mystical. It’s an optical promise. John and Ezekiel simply see the Lord’s promise at the beating heart of heaven, “I will be God and you will be my people.”

The Book of Esdras professes plainly, “It was us that you created the world.” The order is important.

Creation serves the covenant; the covenant does not serve creation.

Thus, even though the commandments come later at Mount Sinai they are a priori in the creative aim of God. When God speaks winged creatures into existence, when his word hangs the stars in the sky and alights upon the dark waters and brings forth life, God already has in mind his people, Israel and the church.

God creates precisely in order to have unto himself a peculiar people ordered according to a particular polity— torah, law. Indeed the initial act of creation is itself an instance of law. God said and there was; that is, God commands the world to be and the command is obeyed, and the event of obedience is the existence of the world. God creates the world by utterance of moral intention for beings other than himself— we learned this in Revelation 4.11. “Thus God’s creating of the world is agency of the same sort as the torah by which he creates Israel.” In his Large Catechism, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther teaches that “anyone who knows the Ten Commandments perfectly knows the entire scriptures.” Surely this is a ridiculous assertion unless God’s act from creation to Kingdom is one of moral intention.

God created in order to have a people order to a polity.

And by definition, God gets what God wants— if not in this world, then in the age to come.

“I will be God and you will be my people.”

On the one hand, therefore, it is not at all shocking that the Spirit of Jesus shows Ezekiel and the prophet John that when you go to receive your heavenly reward what you be handed is neither a harp nor a Mai Thai but the law.

On the other hand, this could not be more surprising to us whose images of the life everlasting have been shaped by the western tradition. Starting with St. Augustine in the fourth century, western theology has conceived of the Fulfillment in individualistic terms, individual perfection (In heaven you will be the best version of yourself) and individual fulfillment (Heaven will be your ideal Labor Day weekend raised to the nth degree). But, straightforwardly, this is not the vision revealed by the scriptures. Because notice how easily heaven construed in such individualistic terms becomes a vague, numinous afterlife, an End even atheists and pagans can adopt.

What the eastern tradition of the church understood and has always preserved— what John Wesley recovered from Orthodoxy— is that “the life everlasting” named by the creed’s third article refers to God’s own life, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore, heaven is no mere place for individual perfection and fulfillment. Heaven is the event of theosis, deification, incorporation into God’s own life, Father, Holy Spirit, and the Son with his Spouse.

Quite simply, a vision of heaven that can be secularized or made ahistorical is not true.

Heaven is the final twist, Robert Jenson writes, of Israel’s and the church’s career under God’s rule.

There may be beer in heaven. I’m reasonably certain your enemies will be in heaven. But I know, because the Bible tells me so, there will be torah there. The End is different than you might expect.

A friend of mine, Chaim Saiman, is an Orthodox Jew who teaches at Villanova’s school of law. Not long ago, we were talking and he told me how one of the most intense political issues in Israel is how to apply minute or peculiar parts of the commandments that the Israelites, because of the exile to Babylon and subsequent occupations by Greece and Rome, never enjoyed the circumstances in which they could countenance obeying. “Some of torah, it’s like it got frozen in amber,” he said, “but now that Jews have their own nation, we’re cracking it open for the first time and arguing about it means to follow it.”

“Such as?” I asked him.

“Such as dogs!” he exclaimed, “there’s a halacha against owning any pet that  your neighbor could perceive as threatening. In the diaspora, we never had the option even to consider obeying the command. We weren’t in charge. Now that we’ve got a place of our own, we’ve got to consider what obedience means. So there’s cities all over Israel where you cannot own a dog now.”

“Why the need to take the torah so seriously?” I asked him.

“Because,” he said, “We want to learn to live together now how we will live in the Resurrection.”

And then Chaim told me about a passage in the Talmud, in which the ancient rabbis elaborate on the vision of the temple given to Ezekiel.

“The rabbis call it the “Academy of Heaven,”” he said, “Sit with those words for a moment. If there’s a temple in heaven, an academy, then heaven is not a place of angels, halos, lyres, pearly gates, or fluffy clouds, or of chariots, smoke, lightning, or thunder. Heaven is a place of torah study.”

“So you’re saying heaven is a yeshiva?” I asked him.

“Exactly,” he said and snapped his fingers, “What do you think about that?”

“I think a whole of Christians are in for a surprise,” I said.

He laughed.

“So,” I asked him, “Are you saying there are no dogs in heaven?”

“Sure,” he chuckled, “just not in my neighborhood.”

Anchor yourself in the Lord and his law.

Last fall I delivered a series of lectures on preaching for the clergy of the Anglican Church of Canada. During the cocktail hour one evening, a young female Inuit priest came up and asked me how she might take what I had said to them about sticking to the message of grace while also preaching from the last book of the Bible. Her parish is on a reservation in Ontario near a tribal school where the government had recently discovered the unmarked graves of children who had been sent there by force.

“What’s your advice to a new priest” she asked me, “for preaching on the Book of Revelation?”

“Don’t,” I said, chuckling to myself.

My laugh disappeared as quick as it had come when I saw the righteous offense flash across her face.

“I take it Revelation is important to you,” I said.

“It is to all of us indigenous,” she said.

“Why so?”

“Because Revelation is the one place in the New Testament,” she replied, “where we see the promise that one day the Christians who look like you— many of whom have done horrible things to Christians who look like me— will be beyond the possibility of breaking God’s commandments.”

You’re not going to be selfish anymore.

The young priests’s answer so surprised me that, after a few moments, I realized I’d been standing there with my mouth agape.

“What’s your advice?” she asked me again.

“Look,” I said, “It doesn’t sound to me like you need my help at all. I mean, just now, like right here, you’ve helped me to see that the End will be different than  I expected.”

Do not covet.

Do not lust in your heart.

Sell all you own and follow me.

Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Exactly because we do covet and lust in our hearts, don’t even tithe and are far from perfect, the Protestant tradition, going back to Augustine, has said that in this age the commandments convict us. We hear them as threats, Do this or else.

Lex semper accusat.

The law always accuses.

Actually, the accusatory nature of the torah is not unique to Protestantism nor even to the New Testament. The Old Testament repeatedly confesses the very same function of the law. After all, it was Israel’s failures to keep torah that led to the Lord destroying her and dismissing her into Babylon.

But what Ezekiel and the prophet John both see is that the law will not always accuse.

Lex Autem Non Accusatis.

If the law is here in the heaven promised to us in Christ Jesus, then it necessarily follows that in the life everlasting we will have passed beyond the possibility of disobedience.

Which is to say, even in the End God will not cease to be holy and we will not cease to be creatures. In the Kingdom, there is no possibility of not honoring the Lord’s holiness through obedience. You won’t be able to covet. You won’t be able to lust. You won’t be able to be ungenerous. Which is to say, you will be free.

You will finally be free.

“True virtue,” Jonathan Edwards wrote, “has no evidence in this world because it is defining characteristic of the new one.”

We want to learn to live together now how we will live in the Resurrection.

Antoinette Tuff, the bookkeeper whose obedience to the law subdued a mass shooter, was asked by an NPR reporter on why, in her myriad interviews, she never once mentioned that Michael Hall, the would-be gunman is white and that she is black. Tuff responded to the NPR reporter by saying:

“Well you know, one thing [in the commandments] God says, God doesn't say anything about color. He says “love thy neighbor.” He doesn't say love thy neighbor because you white. He doesn't say love thy neighbor because you black. He doesn't say love thy neighbor because you purple, green or orange. ... And so for me, I seen [sic] someone that was hurting, and did not need me to judge or pass judgment on them, show anger or be frustrated or mad at him. But I seen a young man in an unstable condition mind needing me to show him love.

If the law is a matter of attempting now how we shall live then, Ms. Tuff has a head start on…well, at least me.

The End is different than we expect, thank God.

“Keep all my commandments,” the Risen Jesus implores his church, “and, lo, I am with you always.”

One day, on the first day of the last future, it will be so.