But that is not at all what Matthew, or Jesus for that matter, had in mind. Matthew makes it quite clear, and I think Jesus made it quite clear, what that phrase meant. Think of the Lord’s Prayer, which comes at the center of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5–7. At the center of the prayer itself we find Jesus teaching his followers to pray that God’s kingdom might come and his will be done “on earth as in heaven.” The “kingdom of heaven” is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth. When Matthew has Jesus talking about heaven’s kingdom, he means that heaven—in other words, the God of heaven—is establishing his sovereign rule not just in heaven, but on earth as well.
It is true that this phrase, “kingdom of heaven,” seems to have been understood from quite early on in the church not in that first-century sense (“God’s rule becoming a reality on this earth”), but in the quite different sense of “heaven” as a distant place where God ruled and to which he welcomed all those who followed Jesus. That seems to be already the case in the well-known hymn we call the “Te Deum Laudamus” (“We Praise Thee, O God”), which dates from at least as early as the fourth century. There we find the phrase (in the translation adopted by the Book of Common Prayer), “When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” Read Matthew’s gospel with that line in mind, and you are almost bound to see the “kingdom of heaven” as a place to which believers might have been barred because of sin, but to which now, through the death of Jesus, they have access. What’s more, though the hymn does not exactly say so, it hints at a parallel: Jesus opened the “kingdom” through his death, so it is presumably through and after death that believers enter this “kingdom” themselves. That, one might risk a bet, is how generations of Christians have understood that bit of the “Te Deum” as they have said it or sung it. And it is a whole world away from what Matthew intended. It is as though you were to get a letter from the president of the United States inviting himself to stay at your home, and in your excitement you misread it and assumed that he was inviting you to stay at the White House.
The second expression that has routinely been misunderstood in this connection is the phrase “eternal life.” For centuries within western culture, for the same reasons as before, people have simply assumed that the gospels are there to tell us “how to go to heaven.” The word “eternity,” in modern English and American, has regularly been used not only to point to that destination, but to say something specific about it, namely, that it will be somehow outside time, and probably outside space and matter as well. A disembodied, timeless eternity! That’s what people have imagined. So when we find the Greek phrase zoe aionios in the gospels (and indeed in the epistles), and when it is regularly translated as “eternal life” or “everlasting life,” people have assumed that that is the right way to understand it. “God so loved the world,” reads the famous text in King James Version of John 3:16, “that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
But it isn’t. In the many places where it comes in the gospels, and in Paul for that matter, the phrase zoe aionios refers to one aspect of an ancient Jewish belief in how time was divided up. In this viewpoint, there were two “aions” (we sometimes use the word “eons” in that sense): the “present age,” ha-olam hazeh in Hebrew, and the “age to come,” ha-olam ha-ba. The “age to come,” many ancient Jews believed, would arrive one day, to bring God’s justice, peace and healing to the world as it had groaned and toiled within the “present age.” You can see Paul, for instance, referring to this idea in Galatians 1:4, where he speaks of Jesus giving himself for our sins “to deliver us from the present evil age.” In other words, Jesus has inaugurated, ushered in, the “age to come.” But there is no sense that this “age to come” is “eternal” in the sense of being outside space, time and matter. Far from it. The ancient Jews were creational monotheists. For them, God’s great future purpose was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included.
If we reframe our thinking within this setting, the phrase zoe aionios will refer to the “life of the age,” in other words, the “life of the age to come.” When the rich young ruler asks Jesus “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” he isn’t asking how to go to heaven when he dies. He is asking about the new world that God is going to usher in, the new era of justice, peace and freedom God has promised his people. And he is asking, in particular, how he can be sure that when God does all this, he will be part of those who inherit the new world, who share its life. This is why, in my own new translation of the New Testament, John 3:16 ends, “. . . share in the life of God’s new age.”
Among the various results of this misreading has been the earnest attempt to make all the material in Jesus’s public career refer somehow to a supposed invitation to “go to heaven” rather than to the present challenge of the kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. Time would fail to spell out the further misunderstandings that have resulted from this, but we might just note one. Jesus’s controversies with his opponents, particularly the Pharisees, have regularly been interpreted on the assumption that the Pharisees had one system for “going to heaven” (in their case, keeping lots of stringent and fussy rules), and Jesus had another one, an easier path altogether in which God had relaxed the rules and made everything a lot easier. As many people are now aware, this does no justice either to the Pharisees or to Jesus. Somehow, we have to get our minds around a different, more challenging way of reading the gospels.
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