Fr Antonio Pineda
or most Christians, the word “heaven” doesn’t mean very much, for two reasons. First, we just don’t think often about heaven. The practical demands of life on earth tend to monopolise our attention. But this is a dangerous mistake. Heaven is the goal, the destination of our lives on earth. How foolish a traveller would be to struggle forward without ever thinking about where he is going!
But there is another reason why our idea of heaven is so shadowy: it’s simply because picturing eternal life is hard for us. This is where Jesus’ revelation in today’s Gospel is so helpful. He tells us exactly what eternal life is: “And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God.”
The greatest joy of human existence even here on earth consists in relationships of love. What would wealth and luxuries be without others to share them with? Loving relationships can make life’s most boring activities enjoyable and meaningful. But here on earth, our relationships are fragile, like human life itself, and they can go sour, because of sin.
In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that heaven is nothing more or less than a perfect relationship of love, an everlasting getting-to-know-God, Christ, and all the saints. These relationships will never get boring or tedious, because God is infinite, and getting to know him is an adventure that will never end. If the best human friendships never lose their lustre, how much more indescribable will be our eternal friendship with God, from whom all good things come!
C.S. Lewis, in his classic children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia, has a beautiful way of explaining this. The books tell the story of some English school children who find their way into the magical world of Narnia, where they have many adventures and go on special quests to defeat the forces of evil. All the children love Narnia, and they love their adventures there. They are always sorry to have to go back to England at the end of each adventure.
At the end of the last book, however, it turns out that they don’t have to go back. They are permitted to stay in “Aslan’s Country”, the equivalent of heaven, forever. C.S. Lewis then tries to describe what their lives were like from that moment on. He uses the analogy of a book, a story. He explains that compared to life in heaven, absolutely everything that had come before heaven, all the amazing adventures and thrilling experiences, both in this world and in Narnia, were nothing more than the title and the cover page — they barely gave a faint idea of how wonderful the rest of the chapters were. And life in Aslan’s Country, he continues, was always getting better and better, like a book with an endless amount of chapters, each one better than the last.
Eternal life is like that. An everlasting adventure that keeps getting better and better. God is the source of all the goodness and beauty we see in the universe, and so he himself is pure, inexhaustible goodness and beauty — we never become tired of getting to know and enjoy him.