A familiar translation speaks of many ‘mansions’, which is less accurate. The original Greek word is monai. In the fifth century the Latin translation of the Scriptures known as the Vulgate transliterated this as mansiones. Then when John Tyndale translated the Vulgate into English in 1526, an act which cost him his life, he used the word ‘mansions’, which stuck.
‘Mansions’ are undeniably less prosaic and more impressive than ‘dwelling-places’. Mansions are either the stately country piles that adorn the English landscape, or they are the equally stately red-brick edifices that adorn this city’s streets as mansion flats. In either case they are solid, lasting and seemingly unchangeable. Yet monai means dwelling-places, and a dwelling-place need be neither solid, nor lasting nor unchangeable. A cardboard shack can be a dwelling-place (and is, for far too many of the world’s inhabitants).
Of what was Jesus thinking when he spoke of the dwelling-places in his Father’s house? Buildings that are massive and constant, or a refuge that is fleeting and transient? Our every fibre, I suspect, yearns for the former, for the assurance that we, together with the disciples, are destined for a place, for somewhere secure and immutable. Yet Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham and Biblical scholar, has recently challenged that view and has suggested that Jesus had something different in mind in this passage.
Tom Wright’s views appear provocative. Orthodox Christians, he argues, do not believe that when they die their souls go to a place called heaven. What they believe is that God’s longing is for the renewal of the whole of creation and that one day this longing will be realized; that the earth and the skies that we know will be made again; they will be finished and perfected as the places that God has always wanted them to be. They will be inhabited by those who God raises to life, by those called from the long sleep of death to enjoy all of eternity in what will really be God’s kingdom on earth.
So Wright observes that Jesus has used the phrase ‘my Father’s house’ before in John’s Gospel, specifically in the second chapter, when he visits Jerusalem for the first time and drives the traders from the Temple. ‘Stop making my Father’s house a market-place’ are his words on that occasion. Now, in the upper room, he speaks of his Father’s house again and insists that within it ‘there are many dwelling-places’. In the Temple, of course, there are many dwelling places. Yet although the size and scale of the Temple buildings was impressive the dwellings it offered were not. They were modest and temporary, comprising shelter and short-term accommodation for guests and visiting pilgrims.
On Wright’s account, what Jesus is offering his disciples in these words is not a glorious vision of heaven as a distinct place, whether a mansion or a cardboard shack. What he is offering instead is a glimpse of the temporary sleep of death before life’s pilgrimage is brought to fulfilment and all creation is reborn on the day of resurrection.
I’m not sure what you make of Wright’s argument. If I’m honest I’m not yet sure what I make of it. But it seems to me that it is assisted by Luke’s account of the death of Stephen; and it also seems to me that in common with that account it contains at least one powerful and important corrective that we would be well advised to digest.
In Stephen’s dying moments the vision that confronts him is not of the heavenly city, of the sapphire battlements and crystal towers through which he is soon to pass. It is of Jesus, of the crucified, risen and ascended Jesus who is sitting at God’s right hand. Here there is support for Wright. In Jesus we see God’s work of rebirth and renewal already complete. He is the first fruits of the new creation; he is not a disembodied spirit, he is Jesus, identifiably and unarguably Jesus, but now raised on high and glorified, as all the faithful will be on the day of resurrection.
Secondly, whether we are with Wright or whether we are not, Stephen’s dying plea is that Jesus will receive his spirit. It is the trust that is crucial. Stephen relies on God and God alone as the one who has power to save. The same emphasis is present throughout the address to the disciples in John 14. Where I am is where you will be: that is what Jesus promises. The place is unimportant, be it lofty mansion or humble shack, Jesus will be with them.
‘See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame’
Amen.
Sunday 20 April 2008
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