Earth and Heaven

“For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.”—1 Philippians iii. 20, 21.

The passage: Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power by which he is able to subdue all things to himself.

St. Paul had just spoken of church members whose god was their belly, who minded earthly things. It’s a plausible view that here he meant to contrast his own mind, and that of those who imitated him as he imitated Christ, with theirs. Our translators probably thought so too, or they would hardly have rendered politeuma as “conversation” — a word that in the seventeenth century covered one’s whole course and habit of life, not just speech. But it could never carry what a word built from City and Citizen naturally carries: a condition and privilege belonging to certain people whether they used it or forgot it.

That natural sense, I think, is what Paul intends. He isn’t contrasting his own heavenly temper with their earthly one. He blames them for that temper precisely because he and they alike had a divine politeuma — a status claimed for them, rightfully theirs, implied in their very actions, with which such a temper was utterly at odds. The contrast isn’t between them and him; it’s between them and themselves. Nor is it between them and their professions, as if they boasted a high citizenship while being mere aliens. Their fault was too low an estimate of their status and rights, not too high a claim to it. They would rise above their grovelling ways — and above the conceit that went with them — if they understood what they actually were: what honors and estates were legally theirs, waiting to be claimed, and under what title they were held.

Still, the words “in the Heavens” plainly contrast with “earthly things” in the sentence before. Did the translators then make another, worse mistake — should they have used a future tense instead of a present? Should Paul be made to say “our citizenship will be,” not “is,” in the Heavens? Any reasonable reader will see they were right as it stands; the change would have destroyed the passage’s meaning and moral force. The earthly-minded could rightly answer, “We’re on earth; we need actual goods, not possibilities. Keep your shadows if you like — give us something substantial, even short-lived.” And Paul’s own language and deepest convictions would have left him no answer to that. All his exhortations pushed men from the fantastic toward the real. His whole life was spent presenting a present Saviour, able to free them from present bondage and sustain them under immediate death. Even the plainly future part of this passage — the coming manifestation of the Saviour, the complete redemption from bondage — would be just as emptied of meaning if his readers thought they did not yet have, but would only later have, a citizenship in the Heavens.

But how can such a thought ever become practical for us? Consider how it became one for Paul himself. He was a Roman citizen, valued the privilege, and it served him well more than once. Asking himself why it had been so prized by old Roman families, how provincials came to share it, how it came to be bound up with world dominion — what answer could he find? Was it won by men like those he saw in Nero’s palace, given over to animal pleasure, careless of past or future, minding only earthly things? Did Rome grow great under their care? Or was its power due to the opposite sort — men who scorned such indulgences, held fast the reverence for ancestors that these had lost, believed in some unseen protector of their land rather than a visible idol or a tyrant’s terrifying phantom? Were not the true citizens who built Rome different from the false ones now hastening its ruin, in this: that they minded earthly things less, and had some dream, however confused, of a citizenship in the Heavens?

But Paul was also an Israelite, a child of Abraham, and here the same facts appeared in far greater clarity. He saw everywhere — in every scattered city, in Jerusalem itself — men proud of their origin, clinging to their fathers’ traditions, yet in the fullest sense minding earthly things: money-getters by profession and heart, reading their sacred records through the lens of Mammon rather than Jehovah. Were these like the men those records spoke of? Very like those the prophets denounced for forgetting the Everlasting Covenant, for setting their hearts on gain, for drawing down God’s wrath and hastening the city’s destruction. And therefore the exact reverse of those heroes who had done great things on earth by mastering it. Those men did not mind earthly things; they believed themselves citizens of a city with foundations, whose builder was God, and lived and died in that faith. They held their heavenly citizenship while still on earth, and could hope, once their eyes closed, to understand still more of what it meant, and how many others shared the inheritance.

This was Paul’s schooling in what citizenship means — his preparation to believe there existed a city where Jew and Roman, Greek and Barbarian had equal standing, a city that must be in the Heavens, and whose gates, for that very reason, were never shut to any inhabitant of earth who chose to enter. In other words, he found there is a human society, for men as men, founded on the spirit, not the body — men become members of it because they have spirits, and are made free of it because the Father of Spirits has declared, in His Son Jesus Christ, that He is their Father, and they are brethren. So he mourned that men with such an origin and inheritance should think of themselves merely as sons of earth, living as though their fellowship depended on earthly accidents rather than on their relation to the unseen world. So far as they did this, their intercourse would be capricious and shallow — never deep enough to overcome the pull toward grovelling, separate, animal indulgence, never rising above pleasant words, acts, and the flattery of vanity. But so far as anyone traced their attraction to each other to a higher, diviner source — believing the bonds of friendship no more accidental or self-willed than the bonds of natural kinship, and referring both to God’s eternal love and to our relation to Him — their associations would be genuine and lasting, surviving circumstance, surviving even death.

To say, brethren, “our conversation is in the Heavens” would be bold for most of us; conscience would sting us with memories — solitary hours wasted on miserable self-regarding speculation when we might have conversed with higher things; social hours spoiled by carelessness when we might have learned wisdom or gentleness from lips now silent and eyes now closed; hours when our lips drew near to God while our hearts held no converse with Him. But to say “our citizenship is in the Heavens” needs no such faltering. That confession belongs to Lent: it declares God true and us liars, affirming that He has not made our lives insincere, or our friendships poor and short-lived — that all the fragility and transience is our own doing, our failure to recognize the stamp of His eternity on us and on our attachments. We sever by sin and unbelief the links He has fastened; our noise disturbs the quiet deep of memory His Spirit broods over. But His order stands firm however little we abide in it. Human affinities, like natural ones, are all constituted and maintained by Him. The unity of one man’s own frame is less mysterious than the unity between members of the body politic — the latter indestructible, whatever happens to the former, because our polity is in the Heavens. We are made one in Christ.

Therefore the dream each man dreams — that he is the center of the world, that everything can be referred back to himself — is monstrous and ridiculous. Therefore no friendship between men can have its origin in mere choice. Therefore anyone who will own his friendships as derived from Christ, and fulfilled in Him, may have them restored — the youth of old loves renewed, years of famine spent under selfishness’ canker-worm followed by years of plenty from the inexhaustible treasury of God’s love, sought from Him, not from earth or self.

Given this meaning, Paul’s words concern us as much as the Philippians — by their very nature they cannot be local or temporary, and it is for our humbling, not our pride, to accept them fully. What meaning this gives to the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ! It says: because you are hard-worked, warring citizens of earth, beset by infirmity, temptation, and death, therefore you may claim your citizenship in the Heavens — for the One ascended into Heaven had an actual body, offered it on the Cross, raised it, carried it to God’s right hand. In Him you are united to your fighting brethren on earth, to past generations, to everyone who has passed from your circle into God’s nearer presence. In Him you may confess your cold, hard, selfish acts, your forgotten holy influences and resolutions and aims — and the confession brings forgiveness, freedom, new life. It is God’s will that we cast off the burden of past neglect and sin, self-reproach and shame, unrequited love and unfulfilled duty; that we believe constantly that He regards us not as poor separate creatures but as one body in Christ, justified, offered as a pure sacrifice; that we go forth to every task assured the whole family of God works with us and cheers us, and that the veil dividing us from them will one day be withdrawn. For if our citizenship is in Heaven, if denying that truth has made our lives here bewildered and inconsistent, if this slavery to earthly things has left us unable even to understand earthly things or fulfill rightly the duties they impose — then we may surely expect a day when laws are vindicated and anomalies swept away, when we see ourselves and all God’s creatures as He sees them, not through the mists of this lower world.

So the latter part of Paul’s words is a sure warrant of Hope for what shall be, as the former was a warrant of Faith for what now is. “From whence we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” If we stood in no relation to this Lord — if He were not Head of a body of which we are members, if He had not come to save that body from division and make it one in Himself, if He had not ascended to raise it above its visible bondage into the eternal life of the Father — I do not know what this expectation could mean to any of us. To expect merely that a man born at some point in a Judean village should reappear at some uncertain future time would be poor comfort to those groaning under misery and sin, and feeble terror to those causing it. It does not matter what wonders we credit His first coming with, or what power we assign His second, so long as we regard those wonders as peculiar to a bygone age — they only stand in cold contrast to our present experience, and a future power we feel no effect of now is too vague, too easily imagined as indulgent or escapable, to overcome a real temptation or rouse flagging spirits to a hard duty. But to believe that He who showed on earth His dominion over Nature and over human wills — a dominion always His, exercised even now over us and over every corner of God’s Kingdom — will vindicate that dominion against all that defies it or sets up hostile tyranny; to believe that He who claimed us as members of one Family in heaven and earth, Himself its Head, will not let us go on treating earth as cut off from Heaven, or the death He made a living way to God as a barrier between us and those about His throne; to believe that this body He has given each of us will not always hinder our spirits but become their helpful servant, will not always separate us from one another but bear clear witness to the necessity and permanence of that fellowship — this agrees with reason, though hard to grasp by sense, and proves itself true the more we hold to it, by its power over our lives and by the victory it gives us over the earthly things that would have us worship them.

It was natural for Paul, having rebuked the earthly-minded by telling them of their heavenly polity and pointing them to their ascended, invisible King, to declare his sure conviction that He would change the body of our humiliation to be like His body of glory, by the power that subdues all things to Himself. Natural, because without this his earlier words would be incredible — if this were false, the rest could not be true. If men are not spiritual beings possessing bodies, but merely bodies into which some spark or soul has intruded, then there can be no polity in Heaven; the notion is a fond dream, an outrage on fact. But if they are spiritual beings, their bodies must suffer wrong, degradation, and death, incapable of free exercise until the Spirit fully asserts its true state and is united to its rightful Lord. All through life we are slowly learning, amid perplexity and relapse, what our spirits truly are, who their Lord is, what their redemption means. Many instruments serve this schooling — Nature some, sorrow more, weakness, temptation, the sense of sin, and the need for deliverance still more. By what little we know of others’ education we may judge God’s method with us, and be sure He is working the same in them. But bodily suffering forms so large and regular a part of this discipline, so steady a means of teaching the spirit to feel its wings and long for freedom, that we know the body’s redemption must belong to a later stage. Its pains are themselves continual prophecies of that redemption — the loss of strength and beauty, their unwonted endurance, even the look that remains on a corpse. Surely all these prophecies shall be fulfilled! Surely no energy exists without its perfect development and purpose fulfilled; surely no loveliness of infancy or manhood of which Death can say, “I have crushed it.” For He shall make it like His glorious body — this is Paul’s declaration, the pledge of Christ’s Sacrament. As we eat His flesh and drink His blood, let us say boldly: we will believe this for others and for ourselves, not for our own comfort, but for His glory who gave His soul to death and brought His body through death, that death might have no dominion over us, that we might rise above it and above earthly things, inheritors of His divine and eternal life. And there is another blessing in this: the meaning of the great Hymn we sang today shall be fulfilled. Winds and waves, lightnings, storms, and green things even now praise the Lord; a few of us are privileged to hear His voice in Nature’s harmonies. How much more, when the souls of the Righteous are purified in the blood of the Lamb and their bodies redeemed from corruption, will they lead the songs of the heavens, and teach all things to bless and magnify the Lord for ever!