Hebrews #33 - 4:9-11 (part 7)
Speaker Notes Sabbath: The Sabbath of Eternal Rest
Collect for Advent
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness,
and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in
which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last
day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick
and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and
reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Hebrews 4:9-11
9 There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10 for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. 11 Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken
Chapter VIII - The Way of Grief - pages 185-186
One of the greatest occurrences of my own grief was the strange thing that began to happen within a day or two of her death. It was the flooding back to me of all the other Davys I had known. She had been in this year of her dying the Davy she had become - the Christian Davy of Oxford and since. Even when we had read about Glenmerle days under the oaks, she had been the Davy she had become. But now the young girl of Glenmerle, the blithe spirit of the Islands, the helmsman of the schooner - all were equally present. They had been gone - except perhaps for those fragile days of heartbreaking young love during the coma. Now they were all with me - for ever. The wholeness of Davy. That wholeness can only be gained by death, I believe. In writing to Lewis of my understanding of this astonishing phenomenon, I used the analogy of reading a novel like David Copperfield that covers many years. In that book one follows the boy David running away to his Aunt Betsy Trotwood, the youth David loving Dora, the mature David with Agnes. While one reads, chapter by chapter, even as one lives one’s own life week by week, David is what he is at that particular point in the book’s time. But then, when one shuts the book at the end, all the Davids - small boy, youth, man - are equally close: and, indeed, are one. The whole David. One is then, with reference to the book’s created time, in an eternity, seeing it all in one’s own Now, even as God in His eternal Now sees the whole of history that was and is and will be. But if, as the result of death, I was now seeing the whole Davy at once, I was having a heavenly or eternal vision of her. Only, in heaven I would have not vision only but her - whole.
Chapter IX - The severe mercy - pages 203-204
So it appeared to me. It appeared to me that Davy and I had longed for timelessness - eternity - all our days; and the longing coupled with my post-mortem vision of the total Davy whetted my appetite for heaven. Golden streets and compulsory harp lessons may lack appeal - but timelessness? And total persons? Heaven is, indeed, home.
I attempted that spring something impossible: a sort of picture of what heaven might be. I could only describe it, though, in temporal terms. We haven’t the words for eternity. It is perhaps worth noticing how many words - italicised - suggest time and are, therefore, quite inadequate. Still, this is what I wrote:
It is a heavenly afternoon. Davy and I have just had atimeless luncheon (I am assuming that God will not waste so joyous an invention as taste). I then say to her that I shall wander down to sit beneath the beech tree and contemplate the valley for awhile, but I shall be back soon. I do so. I contemplate the valley for some hours or some years - the words are meaningless here where foreverness is in the air. At all events, I contemplate it just as long as I feel like doing. Then I get up and start back, but I meet someone, C. S. Lewis, perhaps, and we sit on a bench and maybe have a pint of bitter and talk for an hour or several hours - until we have said all we have to say for now. And then I go gladly back to Davy. She, meanwhile, has played the cestial organ, an organ on which perhaps every note of every song can be heard at the same time: that is, the song not played in time with half of it gone and half yet to be heard. She has played the organ for a few minutes and is just turning to greet me when I come in. Whether I was away for an hour or a hundred years, whether she has played for ten minutes or thirty, neither of us has waited or could wait for the other. For there simply is no time, no hours, no minutes, no sense of time passing. The ticking has stopped. It is eternity.
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