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1 John 3:1-3

We Shall See God

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1 John 3:1-3

We Shall See God

     The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel

GRACE TO YOU AND PEACE FROM GOD OUR FATHER
AND THE LORD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, AMEN.

Yuri Gargarin, a Russian cosmonaut, was the first man in space. Circling above the earth, he remarked with sarcasm that he didn’t see God out there.

Time was when people envisioned themselves at the center of a three-layered universe: heaven, above; earth in the middle; hell, down below. For many people, heaven, the eternal habitation of both God and the blessed, was a physical place above the clouds. Hell, the eternal habitation of the devil and the damned, was a physical place below the earth.

Hans Küng, the German Catholic theologian, writes that after the space program, “The naïve anthropomorphic notion of a heaven above the clouds is now impossible for us. God does not dwell… in a local or spatial sense above the world or in a world above.” In fact, Küng says, we have been beyond the clouds and for us, “the heaven of faith is not the heaven of the astronauts. The infinite, invisible and incomprehensible God cannot be located in space or limited by time.”

Yes, there was a time when Jews and Christians and Muslims all expected God to be “up there.” People thought of the earth as flat, that above the earth stretched a canopy called the firmament where the sun, moon and stars were affixed, where angels moved the stars around the night sky producing the music of the spheres.

But even Martin Luther, five hundred years ago, rejected the idea that heaven was somewhere “up there” and hell “down below.” Luther said that Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of God was not spatial but rather than Jesus had come into his heavenly power. John Calvin did not deny the relevance of the spatial categories when he contended that Christ’s body remained in heaven but he still mocked the idea that Christ dwells among the spheres of the planets, claiming that the ascension was altogether beyond the world.

The space program may have disturbed some Christians but most did not lose our faith by Gargarin’s words that he did not find God in space. We are convinced of simply this: God has a place for us after death that is more wonderful than anything we can imagine. It is not a weird sort existence like the Greek Hades where ghosts drift around in bits of fog or the Hebrew idea of Sheol where the dead live in a dark, damp, realm.

The American playwright, Thornton Wilder, in his classic Our Town, pictured the dead lined up on folding chairs on the stage in the same order that they were buried in the New England cemetery. As Christians this is not our view of the future but life with God, seeing God face-to-face, having our Savior come and wipe away every tear from eyes. We will have bodies that will never suffer pain or wear out. There will be no suffering or want or sadness or sorrow. The images of the Scriptures of music and singing, even playing of harps, images of a banquet feast, a gathering of people of every land and tribe and station—kings and commoners—entering glory.

In our second lesson for this All Saints’ Sunday, in three short sentences from St. John’s First Epistle, the apostle proclaiming our hope. Because of God’s love for us, we are children of God now. Even if the world does recognize that, John explains, the world did not recognize Jesus as the Son of God either. We are like the Lord, children of a loving heavenly Father. We are children of God and heirs of God’s kingdom. In our baptism we were transferred from the realm of sin and suffering and death to God’s rule which is life and eternal life. We have been forgiven our sins through Jesus Christ, have put on Christ, and live in the promises of Christ now and forever.

In graduate school, I met a young Hindu man from the Brahma Samaj in India. He was attending a Unitarian seminary, Meadville-Lombard, and we took some classes together. In class one day he explained that the Christian hope was the beatific vision. Now I had graduated from one of our church colleges and seminary, I had been a pastor for a number of years, and was nearly through my graduate program, and I had never heard it put quite this. But in many ways, that is truly the Christian hope—to see what we now can only trust and believe, to see God and know God.

As John put it, “We will be like God, for we will see God as he is.” St. Paul described our life now as seeing through a glass darkly, through a mirror dimly, but we look forward to seeing “face-to-face: and “knowing fully even as we have been fully known.” Moses could only see the backside of God from behind Sinai’s rocks, but we have the promise of Jesus in the Beatitudes that the pure in heart will see God. St. Thomas Aquinas called this the Beatific Vision—that’s where my friend got the term—which is the goal of the Christian life and its fulfillment. We will see God and know God. All things will be made clear to us—all knowledge and wisdom and understanding. Nothing will remain hidden from us.

It has been the hope of all the ages that we will again know God just as God knows us. Ever since Adam and Eve were driven from the garden, we have been estranged from our world, our neighbors and even ourselves. We have God’s Word and God’s promise but we still face cancer and Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Our marriages dissolve, our children and grandchildren go along wrong paths, and we wonder why so many bad things happen even to good people. And we wonder if death is really what we have been striving for. Yet God has implanted in the human heart both a longing and a hope that this life is not all there is.

As Jesus told his hearers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a God of the living not of the dead. Those who believe in Him though they die, yet shall they live, those who believe in Him will never really die. And as the Psalmist promised Israel, “The Lord is righteous… the upright shall behold His face,” and “as for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness, when I awake I shall be satisfied, beholding your likeness.” And Job confessed, “I know that my Redeemer lives… and in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see God, with my own eyes—I and not another.” The Jewish writer, Philo of Alexandria, writing before the Christian era, held up the vision of God, the Father of all things, as a human’s greatest blessing; and our text, “We shall see God as God is.”

And we shall be like God. Even now, John writes, we are like Jesus our Savior and Lord and brother. We follow Him in faith, we are strengthened by His example, we are nourished by His Supper and purified by His suffering and death. The Beatitude says, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” but the word really means “clean in heart,” those who are innocent and without sin. In our epistle text, the word used is different. When John writes, “All who have this hope in Him purify themselves, just as He is pure,” it really means to be made clean, purified by God’s Word and Sacraments, forgiven by Christ’s suffering and death. John is talking about a cultic, ritual purity that is ours by faith. We will be like God even with our limitations and imperfections. Adam and Eve fell into sin because they wanted to be like God; we will be like God through God’s action to redeem and restore us in Christ.

We still live in this time of struggle and doubt. We have God’s promise of life and eternal life but we have only faith and not sight. We trust in God’s love and care for us but can not even imagine how wonderful it will be because “what will be has not yet been revealed.” But we believe this—we shall see God. Amen.

Copyright 2006, James D. Kegel. Used by permission.