God's Kind of Space--May 24, 2021

God's Kind of Space--May 24, 2021

"Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession." [Hebrews 4:14]

Let's start with this: God isn't "up" somewhere else.  God's kind of existence--God's way of being, you could say--isn't confined to our limited perception of three dimensions.  In our conventional way of thinking, we often talk about God being "up" in heaven, which makes it sound like if you travel a certain distance into the sky (feet?  miles?  light-years? parsecs? who knows?) you will find some place called "Heaven."  It doesn't help that every so often you'll see memes floating around on social media with heavily edited astronomical photos that have a heavenly city superimposed into the frame, as if some telescope had finally located God's Kingdom at "the second star to the right, and straight on until morning" as the line goes, or blurry black and white graphics in low-quality tabloid newspapers doing the same.

None of that is how the biblical writers intend us to think about God's kind of space.  It's another kind of existence altogether.  Maybe it would be helpful to take a quick refresher course in the lessons of Flatland.  In Edwin Abbott's classic thought experiment, "Flatland," a being from a world of only two dimensions (hence the name, Flatland) is visited by beings from a realm like ours with three dimensions, and eventually is plucked up out of his flat plane of a world to see existence in three dimensions.  When he goes back home to his world and tries to explain where he has been, he says he has gone "up," but they only have the categories to think in north, south, east, and west.  So he has to help them to create a whole new way of conceiving of space--upward, not northward.  The idea plays out in the story with beings who exist only as lines and only as points, as well, and you can imagine how frustrating it would be to suggest to a single point (who can only imagine himself existing, and believes he fills his entire "universe") that there is a reality beyond himself, much less suggesting that there are more directions to travel in.  

I wonder if this is a helpful way for us to think of Jesus and "where" he has gone.  To be honest, this is the real challenge we Christians have in making sense of the idea that Jesus "ascended to heaven," especially since the story of Jesus' ascension has him floating on a cloud until he disappears from sight.  At first blush, that sounds like we are being told that God is in fact "up" somewhere at some distance in the sky.  And of course, that creates the additional trouble, once you realize that the world itself is a tiny speck in a vast ocean of space, so that "up" from one point on earth is actually "down" from another spot on the globe, and that all of these points in space are constantly moving in dancing orbits around suns and galactic centers and the like.  The point of Jesus' ascension isn't to say that there's a divinely-appointed "X" to mark the spot in our three-dimensional space where God is, but rather that Jesus' presence is now beyond the limits of our three-dimensional existence, and so he can be both fully in the presence of God and also present to each of us wherever we are in the world, all at once.

Maybe one more bit of science-infused fiction might help.  In Madeleine L'Engle's classic book, A Wrinkle in Time, she has characters travel across vast interstellar distances, not by rocket ship or warp drives, but by folding space itself--creating a sort of "wrinkle," as the title suggests.  The idea is that, much like you can take a flat piece of paper and fold it so that opposite ends meet and then you could take a needle and pass it through the opposite sides of paper at the same time, so you could travel vast distances if you could fold the fabric of space-time itself.  It would allow you to touch multiple points all at the same time.  So, let me suggest that Jesus' existence is something like that--he is beyond the limits of our kind of space now, so that he can touch all the points of our reality all at the same time--rather like there is air surrounding a piece of paper in my hand at all points, and the air is immediately present to all of the paper all at once, without having to travel between points on the page.

So when we hear the writer of Hebrews say that Jesus has "passed through the heavens," it's not with the heavy feeling of having been abandoned. He's not saying, "Well, since Jesus has left us on our own, we'll just have to hold onto our faith even tighter, since he's not here any longer."  Rather, it's just the opposite.  He isn't bound to one point on the map at a time, having to choose moment by moment which one place he should be.  Rather, Jesus can be immediately present to the very face of God and also immediately present to all of us, all of the time.  Jesus is now more accessible to us, not less.  That means it is good news that Jesus has "passed through the heavens," because it actually makes him immediately available to us, rather than having to go to some spot on the map where he is currently holding office hours to get an appointment.  He is accessible to you and to me, right here and now.

So, then, the reason to "hold fast to our confession" isn't because we're on our own now, but rather because we have all the more assurance that the one in whom we confess our faith--Jesus himself--is holding on to us even more tightly, and at every moment.

Now, let's face the day knowing that.

Lord Jesus, keep holding us, wherever on the map we find ourselves.