4 We Look Forward
4
We humans are hopers by nature. Hope motivates, energizes, and drives us. It is natural to us to look ahead and long for any good things that we foresee. That is how God made us. It was always in his plan that we, his embodied rational creatures, should live our lives in this world looking forward to, and preparing for, something even better than we have known already.
How humanity would have transitioned into that even better life, had there been no fall into sin, and whether in that case any form of physical wearing out would have preceded the transition are more than we can know. The Old Testament comes to us out of a world in which the originally planned transition has already come to grief through sin and been replaced by a grim reality not known before, namely death, in which self and body are separated. One of the plethora of good things that the New Testament makes known to us, however, is that the essence of this part of God’s creational plan has now been restored for us through the death and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ.
But one of the truly sad features of today’s secular Western culture, post-Christian as it likes to declare itself to be, is that it has no place for any such hope. Short-term, this-worldly hope—hope of recovering from this or that illness, or disability, or relational or financial setback, and hope of succeeding in this or that enterprise and of avoiding this or that disaster—are familiar to us. But long-term hope, eternal hope as we might call it—hope, that is, that looks beyond this world and extends endlessly—is tied to faith in God, the triune God of Christianity, and as such is something to which our world has become a stranger.
The countries that once called themselves Christendom have drifted away from Christian faith and thus have lost touch with Christian hope. This is a huge loss; for as the New Testament presents the Lord Jesus Christ as fulfilling the divinely promised hopes of Israel, so it presents faith in him as restoring to us the hope of an unimaginably glorious future. There will be an effectual elimination of evil, an endless extrapolation of good, an ecstatic extension of fellowship with the glorified Christ and glorified Christians, and an eternal enjoyment of God’s glory and beauty in ways that we cannot at present begin to conceive.
“In this hope we were saved,” says Paul, picturing what is coming as total renewal of the cosmos (Rom. 8:24). And Peter unleashes his full resources of rhetoric in celebration of the wonder and joy of it all for persons with faith:
God . . . has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Pet. 1:3–9)
The New Testament is full of eager anticipation of the public appearance of Jesus Christ to raise and re-embody all the dead, to renew and reorder the cosmos, and to judge all mankind, taking the faithful to himself and separating from himself those who, whatever role they played in church life, were never truly his, along with those who rejected him from the start.
We cannot survey all this material here, and in any case not all of it is relevant to our present purpose. But I can, and do now, urge that the world-changing impact made by Christians during the first hundred years reflected directly the joy and excitement with which they grasped this hope of glory (or, should I say, with which this hope of glory grasped them). The Roman Empire was a world that, like our world today, lacked any energizing hope of its own, which explains why so many listened hungrily to the Christian message. And I go on to urge that recovering and reappropriating this hope is a prime task for us who are aging today.
W H A T L I E S A H E A D
The passage I shall now explore for this purpose is 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:10.
Note first its context and flow of thought. Paul is making an extended apologia to the Corinthians for the apostolic ministry that he fulfills and that they have belittled. Having celebrated his privilege in ministering the gospel of Christ to them, and thereby God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, he acknowledges that “we have this treasure in jars of clay” (4:7) and generalizes about his divinely appointed life of affliction (4:8–12). “Our outer self,” he says, “is wasting away” (4:16). This theme, of strength being drained by pains and pressures, reappears in 6:3–10, 11:23–29, and in 12:7–10, where Paul speaks of his permanent thorn in the flesh, of which we know only that it was physical (or he would not have said it was in the flesh) and that it was painful (or he would not have called it a thorn).
Paul’s aim of restoring his relationship with the Corinthians leads him to show himself to them as the battered apostle—an emphasis that must resonate today with many whose bodies give them increasing trouble (aches, pains, restrictions) as they live through the elongated aging process that modern medical services bestow upon them. This elongation commonly brings increased body-consciousness, by which I mean sustained awareness that our bodies are not all they were and now in effect beg us to go easy in the demands we make on them. Such body-consciousness belongs not in youth, but in old age, when it is not a blessing but a burden. Paul was somewhere in middle life when he wrote 2 Corinthians; one guesses that with the ill treatment he had received, he had aged fast and felt it.
But Paul’s spirit was not broken, not even, it seems, bruised, by the state of his battered body. Linking his missionary colleagues with himself, he explains that “we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (4:11), and he declares more than once that “we do not lose heart” (4:16; also 4:1; 5:6, 8). The verbs he uses here express cheerful, eager confidence in the face of trouble. And now he moves into a high-flying passage (5:1–10) that grounds this cheerful confidence in four momentous things that “we know” (5:1); that is, four revealed truths.
First revealed truth: We know that a new body awaits each servant of Christ (2 Cor. 5:1). Paul pictures this as a house in heaven, already built by God for us to live in, with our name on it as it were, now awaiting our arrival. The body we inhabit at present is by comparison a tent: a temporary residence, with earth flooring, that may leak and that lacks amenities and will inevitably wear out in a way that the new house will not. Tentmaker Paul knows that living in the new house will be far and away the better option.
Second revealed truth: We know that the experience of moving into this upgraded accommodation, our resurrection body, linked as it will be in some way with the body we have now—though as different from it as a seed is from the plant that grows out of it (see 1 Cor. 15:35–49)—will come to us as an enormous enrichment of the embodied life as we have known it up till now. In 2 Corinthians 5:3–4 Paul speaks of this transformational event as an experience not of being stripped or denuded through finishing with our present bodies, but of being “further clothed” (or “clothed upon”), as when, on a cold day, one adds an overcoat to what one is already wearing before venturing out of doors. Paul’s somewhat unusual verb expresses this quite precisely. His metaphor is fuzzy at the edges, but clear at the center; it pictures, not the method of our transition from the old body to the new one, but its result.
In the new body we shall be fully comfortable in our new environment (“heaven”—2 Cor. 5:1), just as a person wearing an overcoat is fully comfortable when out in the cold. And in the new body there will be no sense, ever, of reach exceeding grasp, or desire outstripping capacity, or weakness sabotaging strength. Whatever we find ourselves wanting to do we shall discover that we can do. All that is mortal and points to our mortality will have been “swallowed up by life” (5:4). Paul finds this glorious to look forward to, and as our present bodies grow weaker, so, like him, should we. God prepares us for our transforming transition by stirring us up to desire it, and he assures us that it is on its way to us by means of our experience of the Holy Spirit’s present supernaturalizing of our lives, whereby we acknowledge the truth about Jesus Christ and come to experience his power (5:5).
Third revealed truth: In heaven, clothed in our new bodies, we shall see and be at home with Jesus our Lord in a way that while we inhabit our present bodies is not possible. And our purpose then, grateful, whole-hearted, adoring, and spontaneous, will be to please him, just as for real Christians it is already (5:6–9).
Fourth revealed truth: We, with all other Christians and all other people too, will one day face the judgment seat of Christ. What will be determined then (on resurrection day, presumably) is not where we shall spend eternity—that was decided when we first committed ourselves to Christ and received our forgiveness and reconciliation with God through the cross—but in what condition we shall spend that eternity of life with Christ.
Paul’s thought apparently is that the quality of our unending enjoyment of Christ’s love and goodness will in some way correspond to the quality of love and devotion to him that marks our lives now (5:10). His reference to knowing “the fear of the Lord” (5:11) then hints at the sad possibility that slackness and irresponsibility in Christ’s service now might unfit one for the fullest fullness of heaven’s joy. So he takes care not to grow slack in his ministry of evangelistic persuasion.
We see, then, that Paul’s knowledge of his hope in Christ had great invigorating, driving, and refreshing force in the very bumpy ride of his peripatetic ministry. We see too that whatever admonitions Paul might have addressed to aging Christians (the New Testament gives us no example of such), recommending relaxation and taking things easy would not have been among them.
W H A T N O W ?
One of the staples of folk wisdom everywhere is that, when all is said and done, you have to do the best you can with what you have got. How does this apply to aging Christians like the present writer and his peers? Let us pull together some threads from what we have been saying and try to see.
What have veteran church-linked Christians got as resources to deploy, treasures to share, and wisdom to draw on? Assuming that, though elderly, they remain sound in wind and limb, and free from conscious or unconscious mental disorders, distortions and delusions, do they bring anything unique to the table of Christian fellowship, of kingdom vision, and of disciple-making strategy? Four things touched on earlier call for mention here.
Opportunity
The twenty-first century is a new era for seniors in the Western world, in the sense that today’s health services lengthen life and maintain mobility beyond anything that earlier generations ever envisaged. It has become commonplace for seniors to function fairly well right through their eighties and into their nineties. The assumption that was general in my youth, that only a small minority would be fit and active after about seventy, has become a thing of the past. Churches, society, and seniors themselves are still adjusting to the likelihood that most Christians who hit seventy still have before them at least a decade in which some form of active service for Christ remains practicable.
Maturity
“Ripeness,” to use Shakespeare’s felicitous word, develops as does fruit—by a process of assimilating nutrients and reacting to the climate: a process that takes its own time and cannot be hurried. This is as true of Christlike spiritual maturity as it is of any other form of human growing. The nutrients in this case are the truths of the Bible and its gospel; the climatic factors, if I may put it so, are the aspects of Christian community in church, in family, and in other human units that have been the Christian’s milieu over the years.
Christian seniors ought to be further along the path of ripeness than others, but variations of nutrients and climate will affect spiritual growth in significant ways. Spiritual maturity is a deep, well-tested relationship to our triune God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and a quality of relationship with both believers and unbelievers that embraces concern, sympathy, warmth, care, wisdom, insight, discernment, and understanding. It is a quality that is identifiable only in relationships; one that all pastoral ministry requires; and one that should, and in fact constantly does, mark out Christian seniors, equipping them for ongoing usefulness in care-centered, outreach-oriented congregations.
Humility
Pride, that is, self-promotion and self-aggrandizement in disregard of God and at others’ expense, has classically been identified as the heart of human sin, as we noted earlier. Humility is the product of ongoing repentance as one decides against, turns from, and by watching and praying seeks to steer clear of pride in all its forms. And as the battle against pride in the heart is lifelong, so humility should become an ever more deeply seated attitude of living at the disposal of God and others—an attitude that veteran Christians should increasingly display. Real spiritual growth is always growth downward, so to speak, into profounder humility, which in healthy souls will become more and more apparent as they age.
Intensity
By this I mean not nervous tension, but strength of focus and concentration on pleasing God and furthering his cause and his glory—in a word, zeal, as we analyzed it a moment ago. Secular society does not expect or encourage any form of zeal among the elderly, but that is just one facet of the world’s winding-down ethos for seniors that this book urges Christians of all ages to repudiate.
When one has a sure hope that thrills one’s heart, eager anticipation of it, delight in the prospect it opens up, and zeal in pursuing it are natural and should be applauded, not derided. As seniors’ powers of body, memory, and creativity grow less, so their conscious focus on their hope of glory should grow sharper and their meditations on it grow more joyful and sustained. As this happens, passion to continue being of use to God and his people, in holiness, love, and what Scriptures conceives as neighborliness, should and will intensify, to the very end.
In this it is important that we should not forget our own families, even if they seem to be forgetting us. In the urban West, the nuclear family (one or two parents, with usually one, two, or three children) has come to be seen as the natural, indeed ideal, human unit, with which grandparents, uncles, aunts, and other seniors should only be loosely linked and to which they will not ordinarily be asked to contribute more than goodwill from a distance and sometimes a spare pair of hands.
For seniors to invade family circles unasked—dictatorial in-laws, for instance, who have not grasped that in life, as in Scripture, loyalty to one’s spouse should trump the claims of parents—is undoubtedly unhealthy. But it is also bad for families to ignore mature wisdom that is available to them in the persons of older relatives and friends. Christian seniors should make a point of being available to give as much help of this kind as families are willing to receive, and of showing themselves affectionate, equable, and (if I may coin a word) unsnubbable as they do so. And they should remember that, in any case, the larger need and the wider sphere of ministry to which they should be attending is in the church.
To seniors who, rather than settle for being served by the church but otherwise not counting in its life, have it in them to welcome the opportunity for further serving Christ that their extended health gives them, and who seek to match my threefold anatomizing of the healthy ager’s heart, as set out above, I now say: over to you. Ask God, and consult your congregation’s pastoral leaders, as to how you might do the best you can with what you have got and model in your own person the mobilizing of over-sixty-fives to continue giving all they can for as long as they can to contribute to the mutual ministry that goes on within God’s flock.
As a carer for the needy; a friend and encourager of the lonely and depressed; a companion of the walking wounded, those weakened by bitterness, anger, and hurts that continue to bleed; a helper of sufferers from dementia, Alzheimer’s, and all conditions that rob us of the ability to look after ourselves; or as a counselor of those facing marriage, the baptism and upbringing of children, and the strains and crises of family life—each of us who is willing will be found to have a great deal to give for some mode of sympathetic-senior ministry that can in practice be invaluable.
In their book, A Vision for the Aging Church: Renewing Ministry for and by Seniors (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), James Houston and Michael Parker urge that such mobilizing as this can massively enrich churches today, and I close by declaring that I totally agree with them. I hope you do too, and will show it by what you do now.