Editor’s Note: This essay concludes our series celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.
My 10-year-old son recently had a classic book lover’s conundrum on his hands. He was halfway through the final Harry Potter book, and he had two strong desires that were pulling him in different directions. He really wanted to know what happened in the end and how the story was resolved. Who would survive? Who would triumph? Who would end up together? On the other hand, he did not want the story to be over.
After spending hours reading about their adventures, he didn’t want his time with beloved characters Harry, Ron, and Hermione to end. His solution to his ambivalence was to read a few pages at a time and then abruptly stop. A little while later, he’d pick up the book again, read a few more pages, and then put it down again. Eventually, of course, he ran out of pages. He came to the end, which was both satisfying and bittersweet, because the story was now over.
This dual desire is a God-given longing within each one of us. We want to know how a story concludes, because its ending has significant influence on its overall shape and message. The end tells us what kind of story it is. Is it a tragedy that ends in chaos and destruction of the lives of characters we’ve come to care about? Or is it a comedy that ends with wrongs being made right, enemies being vanquished, and its main characters living happily ever after? Even when the answer is a satisfying yes, we are likely to be left yearning for more. We want to know the ending of a good story, but we want it to keep going forever and ever, and one of the limitations of this fallen world is that we can’t fulfill both desires at the same time.
This dynamic about endings applies not only to the stories that we encounter on the printed page, but also to the stories in which we humans find ourselves, corporately and individually. On a wider scale, we wonder what will become of us as a human race and the world we inhabit. We know that after all the twists and turns of our personal stories, we cannot avoid the end that death will bring to them, but we harbor a deep and ingrained desire for our lives and relationships and adventures to keep going forever.
The story of the Bible traces the movements of God’s creation, its fall into sin, death, and decay, and God’s redemptive work through the people of Israel and his Son, Jesus. It also sheds light on how God intends to conclude those stories. During the season of Easter, we celebrate the hope we have in Christ’s resurrection, and this shows us how our stories will end. In the words of N.T. Wright, “The resurrection gives you a sense of what God wants to do for the whole world.”
Christ’s rising to new, unending life is a preview of how God will bring healing, redemption, and new life to his creation at the end of the story. He is, in Pauls’ words, the first fruits of them that slept (1 Cor. 15:20), the first of many brothers and sisters (Rom. 8:29). The Nicene Creed, which we affirm in the liturgy each Sunday, puts it this way: our story as we experience it now and the story of the world as we experience it now will end with the “life of the world to come.”
I find this phrase from the Creed to be both beautiful and tantalizingly brief. Our lectionary readings during the Easter season from Revelation 21 and 22 do much to fill out this short phrase and give it more color in our imaginations. In these final chapters of Revelation, John shares his vision from God of how the grand story of creation and re-creation concludes. His vision is packed with images so rich and multidimensional, they could easily form the basis of a yearlong sermon series or Bible study. Revelation 21:10 and 22-22:5 offer three phrases for us to keep at the forefront of our imaginations when we imagine the “life of the world to come.”
First, John describes seeing “the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.” The lectionary adds verse 10 to this passage, to put John’s vision of this city in context. When John sees our eternal destination, he doesn’t see a disembodied existence in the clouds. These chapters of Revelation show God’s kingdom coming down to an earth that he has redeemed, renewed, and transformed, where he now intends to dwell among his people, with the city of Jerusalem at the center of it all. What John sees echoes the Lord’s Prayer, when we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” John’s vision reassures us that God will fulfill this prayer in the end.
For most Christians today, however, this vision of God’s kingdom come to earth in the end raises a problematic question. If this place John sees in Revelation 21 and 22 is our destination, how does this fit with the common perception that when we die we go to heaven?
There is a disconnect here that can be confusing or troubling. N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope has helped many see how the New Testament’s teaching about life after death challenges many of our commonly held views about heaven. To borrow from Wright, the Bible’s interest is less in “life after death” (the immediate postmortem state) and more on “life after life after death.” See the recent and helpful essays by Calvin Lane and Matthew S.C. Olver.
In brief, the New Testament is clear in passages such as Philippians 1 that when we die, we are with the Lord. When our loved ones die, we can trust that they are in God’s presence; and when we face our deaths, we can do so with hope and reassurance of God’s care for us beyond this life. Yes, in a possibly imprecise yet no less comforting way, we can be assured we go to heaven.
But the real bombshell is that this status of disembodied rest is not permanent; this state is only a waiting period. As Wright puts it, we have been exclusively focused on life after death, but the New Testament depicts our destination as “life after life after death.” After death, we are with the Lord awaiting the day when God will do for us what he did for Jesus on Easter Sunday. He will resurrect, renew, and recreate our bodies and souls.
Like Jesus, we will be alive again, bodily, transformed, incorruptible, unable to die a second time. God’s heavenly city coming down to earth shows us that he will not scrap the physicality and materiality of our bodies or of his created world. The next life will not involve spending eternity sitting on clouds while we strum harps, but living as a renewed, embodied people in the new creation.
Second, John says, “I did not see a temple in the city, for the city’s temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” One astute observation Wright makes about our thinking on the afterlife is that our conception of life after death has been far too dominated by the question of where and not enough by the question of who. The heavenly city John sees centers entirely on God, the Who. God and the Lamb, representing Jesus, will replace the temple, which will no longer be needed to mediate the presence of God among his people.
In the world to come, God will be fully present to his creation, with the Lamb, the Word made flesh, alongside him. Likewise, the Sun will no longer be necessary, for the God who is the original and ultimate source of light will be there to shed light on this renewed world. God is the center of this new world, fully present without posing any danger to a redeemed humanity.
It’s good to remember here, briefly, that God’s immediate and searing presence was regularly described as dangerous for fallen humanity in the Old Testament (among other places, Ex. 33 and 2 Sam. 6). In Christ, that danger is alleviated. When God’s kingdom comes to earth, John says, no barrier will stand in the way of our access to God. Our being sealed to the risen Christ means that our peace with God has been achieved.. The burdens of shame and guilt that have kept us from turning to God ever since Adam and Eve hid from him in the garden will be gone forever more, washed in the blood of the Lamb.
The third phrase is from Revelation 22:3 and is translated by the NRSV as “Nothing accursed will be found there anymore.” This translation obscures the simplicity of the Greek. A more direct and clear way of stating this sentence would be, “There will no longer be any curse” (and many other English translations support this phrasing). Here John refers all the way back to the start of the Bible’s story and the curses that befell creation and humanity in Genesis. The consequence of humanity’s disobedience was a rupture in our relationship with God, which affected our relationship to each other and to the wider, created order.
Dominance, competition, and distrust began to corrode humans’ relationships with one another. They could only carry out their work of tilling the ground and bringing forth children through great toil and suffering. In God’s renewed world, however, he will reverse and remove those curses. The leaves of the tree of life, John says, will bring the healing of the nations, meaning that our relationships, marked by violence and discord since the Fall, in the end will be restored to a state of peace. Quoting from Isaiah 25, John says that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 21:4), removing human pain in a personal and tender way.
John’s vision shows us three important qualities of the life of the world to come: God’s kingdom will come fully to earth; God will be fully present with us; and the curse on God’s creation will come to an end. But perhaps the most astonishing news is that while the curse will end, all the good things God created his world to do will carry on. For now, in this fallen and limited world, as my son experienced, finding out the conclusion of the story also means the end of the adventure. But God’s story is different; it will stop the conflict caused by suffering, evil, and death—without cutting off the story of eternal life, which will go on forever.
It is hard for us to imagine a story being any fun after evil, danger, or death have been vanquished. We often picture the afterlife as a nice but somewhat monotonous existence. But at the very end of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis manages to capture the unique, ever-unfolding nature of God’s story, which will carry on after it is freed from the curse. At the end of The Last Battle, when that final battle has been won, the main characters are reunited with Aslan, who promises that they will now get to stay with him forever. Then Lewis writes:
The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
God has a story planned for us that will go on forever, unfolding in ways far beyond what our minds can conceive. Each Easter, may we live in the hope of Christ’s resurrection, as we look forward to all that God has in store for us in the life of the world to come.
The Rev. Sarah Puryear lives in Nashville with her family and serves as priest associate at St. George’s Episcopal Church.
