Day: November 12, 2023

“Our citizenship is in heaven”

We are “strangers and pilgrims” who seek “a better country, that is, an heavenly,” as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us in the Octave of All Saints’. That “better country” is what Paul means by “our citizenship in heaven”, for “we have here no continuing city.” Some worldly utopia is not our end, however we imagine it in the sense of being a human construct. What we desire is indeed a critical feature of our humanity but our desire for what is absolute and good is precisely beyond our constructing. Such is the delusion of thinking that we can make heaven on earth.

The readings today challenge our culture and church which assumes that the church and religion should mirror and reflect our ideological agendas. It doesn’t either anciently or now. Paul’s statement about our citizenship being in heaven points to the idea of how the things of this world have their truth and meaning only in God. The secular finds its truth only in the sacred; this is the strong teaching of these readings which transcend the opposition of sacred and secular to show the nature of their interrelation. It is neither a dogmatic assertion of the heavenly at the expense of the worldly nor is it mere relativism.

What is stated in the epistle is illustrated in the Gospel. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. The distinction is crucial to the understanding of our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in this world. Caesar here is symbolic of the powers of this world; in short, the secular. Yet it has its truth and purpose as belonging to the greater truth and power of God. As Jesus says to Pilate, “thou couldst have no power … except what has been given you from heaven.”

We have forgotten this and have turned the secular agendas of our world and day into forms of religion and cult. The institutional churches fall prey to the assumption that religion is only a reflection of cultural and social ideologies and agendas. This is the advocacy culture which demands not acceptance and toleration but the celebration of identities and interests that negate the givenness of creation and the transcendence of God. Paul’s claim that our citizenship is in heaven does not negate the forms of our secular or worldly lives but redeems them by suggesting that they only have their truth in God. “We have here no continuing city.”

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