Living Within the Age to Come
Good morning!
We are in a “liminal” space in the church calendar, that is, a space of transition. Today is the seventh Sunday of Eastertide—next week we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost which [almost] begins Ordinary Time. It’s also Ascension Sunday, which marks the first half of a two-part movement: first Jesus ascends; then the Spirit descends.
We find ourselves in a liminal space outside the calendar of the church as well. Some are arguing for, and acting out, an aggressive “re-opening” of business, social events, and community gatherings, while others are pushing back in the name of health and safety concerns over concerns that too-rapid reopening will result in many more deaths.
These decisions and actions are made not only with medical, scientific, and economic factors in mind, but also involve our emotions, peer influence, and even, consciously or not, theologies that shape our values and priorities.
Last week I read a column in The Washington Post arguing that underlying the strong pro-opening sentiment of the white evangelical Christian subculture in America is a core theological belief that is derived from certain interpretations of Scripture passages like our Gospel According to John reading today. Exploring this may help us in understanding how seemingly abstract teachings can have dramatic real world consequences, and I hope we’ll find some alternatives along the way.
Jesus’ speech here is complex and repetitive at the same time. While recording, Deacon Al remarked, “this is a hard passage to read,” and he’s right—I was happy for him to do the honors! The language is deceptively simple, but their context and use is rooted in a cultural and religious context from which we are far distant.
The way John tells the story throughout this gospel is more dualistic—emphasizing contrast between two extremes—than the other gospel writers. We see this from the beginning with light vs. dark imagery, and here the contrast is between the phrases “eternal life” in the first paragraph and “the world” in the second (NRSV).
From this passage, it’s easy to see how one of the cornerstones of evangelical theology has been formed and reinforced. Both inside and outside groups have identified four statements which define modern “evangelicalism,” and the fourth is: “Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.”
The Post columnist argues (with seeming approval) that “this literal belief in eternal salvation— eternal life—helps explain the different reactions to life-threatening events like a coronavirus outbreak.” Evangelical theology, as much conventional western Christianity has long agreed at least to some degree, is crafted around the assumption that very little here on earth matters—it’s all about what happens after you die. And so there is a fatalistic and physical-world-denying strand of thought here buried in much conservative Christian theology, which is born out in tendencies for missionary work to focus on conversion for heaven over relieving poverty, hunger, or sickness on earth.
One influential preacher in the evangelical tradition employs an analogy in which he holds up the end of a long white rope. He asks the audience members to picture this as their lifespan, and he emphasizes the length stretching out to one side as the Christian’s everlasting existance in heaven after death. But then he points to a single inch of the end in his hand that has been painted red, and says, “Now this is your life on earth—how should you value it in comparison to the rest of the rope?” For this system, what matters most is spending the “red” part of your life on earth in such a way as to obtain the “white” portion in heaven, regardless of how long, fulfilling, or other-serving your time on earth is.
I think it’s clear how a theology emphasizing the afterlife in such exclusion to this life now can have a tendency to underpin an ideology and actions which may deliberately devalue suffering and precautions in our communities, even with the best of intentions. It doesn’t always happen that way, and there are many evangelical Christians who do great work while holding this view, but the underlying force here does directly drive some deeply problematic actions and teach- ings by others.
When we read Jesus’ words here in John chapter 17, it seems like he’s making that very same contrast; “eternal life” is opposed to, set against, “the world;” and God is identified with the former and against the latter.
Now, associating this contrast with that of the evangelical system that I just outlined is a very traditional reading of this passage, and if this is working for you then I’m not going to try to change your mind. What I would like to do is suggest consideration of an alternative way to read the passage, one that I personally have found of value and which was central to the rebirthing of my faith which led me to the mainline theological tradition.
I want to suggest that our translators, in an effort to keep our readings familiar and approachable, have possibly done us a disservice by hiding some of the nuance and context in the Greek. And so, once again, I want to dig a little deeper.
Fortunately, the original language here is surprising familiar. For “eternal life,” the Greek reads aionios zoe. Here zoe means “life” and aionios is the adjective form of “age”—the English equivalent is eon (aeon) or aeonic. For “the world,” we find in Greek kosmos with a “K”—our English cosmos with a “C.”
So more literally, we have a contrast between something called “the age of life” and “the ordered universe”. But to understand these in their time, we need to also know how the ancient Jewish world thought about reality.
Judaism has long made a distinction between “this age” (h‘olam h’zeh) and “the age to come” (h’olam h’bah). Unlike the dualistic worldview of influential western thinkers such as the Greek philosopher Plato, who used aeon to describe an eternal world of ideals behind the temporal perceived world of the cosmos, the two ages in Judaism are both firmly of this same reality while separated by the lack of vs. the presence of the realized intention of God in justice, peace, and healing.
Modern Judaism talks about this in the sense of tikkun olam, the “repairing, healing, establishing of the world”. This sense is not used exclusive of afterlife teachings, but its focus is entirely on the incoming of God to make all things right here, on this earth. In this way, John’s “eternal life” is equivalent with the other Gospel writers talking of the “kingdom of God” that Jesus taught us to pray that God would bring from heaven to earth, not us in reverse.
Looking again at our passage, we find that Jesus has helpfully provided a definition that is easy to miss. In verse three we find:
“And this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
What we see here is that Jesus’ definition of aionos zoe is not about place, but about relationship. It’s about quality, not quantity; about depth not solely continuance. More specifically, it’s about knowing, in that deep and intimate sense of belonging to, God and God’s Messiah. A public theologian I know [Brian McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus] has describe the contrast as “life of the ages” vs. “life as people are living it these days;” that Jesus is talking about “an extraordinary life to the full centered in a relationship with God.” One of our own conservative Anglican bishops [NT Wright, How God Became King] has described the contrast be- tween aionos zoe and kosmos as not “rescu[ing] people out of the world” but “rescu[ing] the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay.”
As for the kosmos, in the ancient world the word included not just that described by physics, but also sociology and politics: of the systems we live, the social contracts we’ve made, the negotiations between scarcity and abundance, cooperation and competition (1). Another theologian [Walter Wink, in the Powers series of books] has suggested we can understand this term used negatively in the sense of “domination system,” as Paul refers in other places to “not flesh and blood but principalities and powers” that we strug gle against (Ephesians 6:12).
In this Interpretatione, Jesus seems to be saying that his followers, who always lag a step behind in seeing the truth in John’s gospel, are still of the system of the kosmos in a way that he no longer is. And he is praying that the Father will bring them into unity as he and the Father are in unity, in aionos zoe.
Now, it would be easy to dismiss this whole thing as too complicated, too esoteric, too academic to really matter in the real world. In fact, I struggled greatly with trying to keep this sermon from becoming an academic lecture—you’ll have to tell me if you think I succeeded or not.
But I hope you can see how this discussion has a direct connection to our values and priorities in our lives and communities. What if we understood Jesus as not offering escape, but integration? What if the Christian’s primary values remained as earthy as Judaism’s rather than as oth- erworldly as Plato’s?
I’d like to suggest that the Christ-ian path might be most clearly understood as a narrow route between an exuberantly self-centered consumerism that sees this kosmos’s values as ultimate, and a fatalistic self-centered hyper-spiritualism that denies the value of the world and people around us. Either extreme are constant temptations for groups within any and all religions, or even those outside traditional religion—it doesn’t apply only to the example of American evangelicalism I’ve referenced.
This narrow path does not give us room to risk the lives of others because “they’ll just go to heaven when they die.” It calls us to question the mantra that “the economy” requires lives to be sacrificed to it. This path reverses the order—the people are not made for the benefit of the system (kosmos); the system is to be remade (aeon) for the benefit of the people.
In this way, we might also look again at the story of the Ascension in Acts, and see the rebuke of the disciples in a different light; that the path of the Christian is not to stand fixated on the heavens, but to set out into the kosmos for healing and renewing in confidence that to the very extent they do so, Jesus is present and working among us.
And so may we pray, as Jesus taught us, “Our Father, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
AMEN.
Notes:
“Kosmos”: not the planet, but “the entire system of structures, values, attitudes and institutions that exist apart from the realm of God. The “world” here is an illegitimate kingdom ruled by a counterfeit evil god.” Satan as the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31, 16:11) and “god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4). “Be not conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2), wisdom not of this age (1 Cor 2:6-8), faith as victory overcoming the world (1 John 5:4, 19), world lying in power of the Evil One.
Not simply that which is apart from spirituality, but which is opposed to it. “[Hard] secularism constitutes an allegiance— witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling—to the invisible rulers of this present age of the world, those powers of darkness under the leadership of Satan.”
From https://www.goarch.org/-/beyond-secularism
