The Kings and the Good Place
An Essay by Danny Fitzpatrick
The magi set out from the East seeking a particular place. Their eyes, parsing the heavens, found there a sign and followed it–not for its own sake, but for that to which it pointed. Their wonder, world-born, led them to the Word who had come to occupy the world he had made. They came to a place, and found the one who had made all places, and in him they found the fullness of all space and time.
The Christian knows that his life is going somewhere. No Stoic, content with the eternal dissolution and reformation of the universe, no atemporal pagan, the Christian is assured that time has a direction and that the final horizon of all things lies in Jesus Christ who will come again at the conclusion of time, when God will be all in all. And the Christian counts on his meeting some version of this end of all things in his own end, when, at the hour of death, he goes to his reward. So obvious are these observations that they would hardly seem to merit comment, were it not for the fact that the implications of our journey toward Christ the King seem to have escaped so many of us.
What the mystery of the incarnation, along with Christ’s passion and death, resurrection and ascension, reveals is that Heaven is not simply spiritual. If not a place in the way of earthly places, whose existence owes so much to spatial relations, Heaven is nonetheless a space, one inhabited by bodies. The New Jerusalem is no mere metaphor. But so many would-be Christians live and speak and think as though the fundamental truths of our faith were simply figures of speech. The notion rears its head in the statistics concerning Mass attendance and belief in Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, in discussion at parish spirituality groups over donuts and coffee: “I think the resurrection of the body is more of a spiritual thing”; “The Eucharist is just a symbol”; “Heaven is a state of mind.”
Such thinking is not endemic to our time. St. Paul knew it well and continues today to warn us of its dangers. If Christ did not rise, we do not rise. If the body is not resurrected, Christ was not resurrected. If the resurrection is not real, our faith is in vain. And if “for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all” (1 Cor. 15:19). A bodiless Christianity is the pinnacle of foolishness, and its issue in the end can only be despair.
We should not be surprised, perhaps, by the profound challenge of belief in these most critical of Christian articles. “This saying is hard,” said many in Jesus’s day. And if those who saw him in his power in those days, who ate of the bread he multiplied and watched him make the blind to see and the paralyzed to rise, found so much trouble in his words, then surely we, too, with our scientism and our skepticism, with our fear, hidden so often deep within us, that God might actually do what he has promised, will falter in our belief, will screen ourselves behind the comforts of metaphor and the soul sundered from the self.
If we struggle thus, today, Three Kings Day, is all the more salutary a moment to reclaim our faith, to set aside the ghosts and the similes and embrace a full-blooded, richly bodied Christianity, one that lets the Word of God in at our ears and the Body of Christ in at our mouths, into our stomachs, to filter our blood and make us one–not metaphorically, not aspirationally, but really one–with Christ and our fellow sharers in his patrimony. The magi sought a word from the heavens; they found instead a man on the earth, a man who was the Word and who has the words of eternal life. They followed an image on high, but they did not allow themselves to wander aimlessly round and round the world into an empyrean of their own invention; instead they stopped and did the child homage, offering him such gifts as were fit only for the king born to die.
We, too, are born to a sin-sick world. We, too, will die. But Christ gives us the words of life. And while we struggle to shape our words around reality, he is the Word who shapes what is, who speaks and makes things new. We are not journeying toward a metaphor, but toward the Heaven which is the body’s eternal rest, the space that is the presence of God. To begin to go there is, to borrow from St. Augustine, not to board a ship or set out on foot but simply to desire to go there, to will to valiantly and with all of our hearts. The Three Kings have arrived. Let us depart for the bodily Christ who is our end, who bids us eat his flesh and see our flesh anew in that heavenly day which knows no dusk.
Danny Fitzpatrick is the editor of Joie de Vivre and the author of Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature.