13. The Hope of Heaven
13
The Hope of Heaven
The Christian faith is often compared to a journey through this world to the New Jerusalem. And as we travel, we often look backward to those who have made this journey before us, to those who have helped us in our journey of faith. C. S. Lewis worshiped here in this Oxford church from 1930 until his death fifty years ago this month. Though one of the most celebrated writers of his age, he was happy to be an ordinary member of this congregation. Some here will remember him personally, sitting in the same pew every Sunday with his brother, Warnie.
But others now will know him through his books and, curiously, that’s probably how Lewis would want to be remembered. In the 1930s, Lewis declared that a writer is not a spectacle, who says, “Look at me!” Rather, a writer is more like a set of spectacles, who says, “Look through me!” Lewis gives us a way of looking at the world and ourselves that has proved deeply satisfying to both the mind and the soul. In one of his more memorable quotes, he declared that his faith in Christianity lay in its ability to illuminate reality. “I believe in Christianity,” he wrote, “as I believe that the Sun has risen—not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
The Christian faith, Lewis discovered, gave him a lens that brought things into focus. It was like turning a light on and seeing things properly for the first time. The powerful image of the sun rising and illuminating a dark landscape captures Lewis’s basic conviction that Christianity makes sense of things—far more sense than the atheism he had embraced as a younger man. One of the themes that came to mean so much to him was the hope of heaven.
Like many other Christian writers before him, Lewis declares that the hope of heaven enables us to see this world in its true perspective. This life is the preparation for that greater reality. It is, as Lewis put it, the cover and title page of the “Great Story,” in which every chapter is better than the one that went before.
For Lewis, this world is God’s world and is to be valued, appreciated, enjoyed. Yet it is studded with clues that it is not our real home, that there is a still better world beyond its frontiers, and that one may dare to hope to enter and inhabit this better place. Lewis affirms the delight, joy, and purposefulness of this present life. Yet he asks us to realize that, when this finally comes to an end, something even better awaits us. Lewis believed that the secular world offers people only a hopeless end, and he wanted them to see and grasp the endless hope of the Christian faith and live in its light.
Does this mean that Lewis is a “world-denying” writer, who treats this world as devoid of value? No. Lewis was clear that to “aim at Heaven” is not to neglect this world or earthly concerns. Rather, it is to raise our horizon and elevate our expectations—and then to behave on earth in the light of this greater reality. We must try to infuse earth with the fragrance of heaven. The true believer is not someone who disengages with this world in order to focus on heaven but the one who tries to make this world more like heaven. Lewis was surely right when he declared that “the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”
As we look backward to remember Lewis, let us, like him, also look forward to anticipate heaven. As Lewis once remarked, “I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country.” Some lines from chapter 15 of The Last Battle, the concluding novel of the Chronicles of Narnia, capture this point particularly well. On finally seeing the “new Narnia,” Jewel the Unicorn declares, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.” For Lewis, the Christian hope is about returning home to where we really belong.
Lewis was no killjoy. He does not deny that we experience desire in this life, nor does he suggest that these desires are evil or a distraction from the real business of life. His point is that our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone. They are “good images” or signposts of something “further up and further in.” They are foretastes of the true source of satisfaction that we will find in the presence of God. For Lewis, heaven is the “other country” for which we were created in the first place. We should, he declares, “make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.”
This rich vision of heaven, deeply rooted in the New Testament, was something that brought Lewis hope, especially in the final years of his life. The Christian hope, Lewis insisted, was not, as he put it, some “form of escapism or wishful thinking” but was, rather, “a continual looking forward to the eternal world.” Hope is a settled state of mind in which we see this world in its true light and look forward to our final homecoming in heaven, trusting in Jesus Christ, who our gospel reading declared to be “the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51). Lewis would surely have echoed the famous statement of Cyprian of Carthage, who was martyred for his faith in North Africa in the third century: “Paradise is our native land.” Lewis shared Cyprian’s hope at the thought of returning to his true homeland. And he would want us to share it as well.
A sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford, on November 17, 2013, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis.