I was a bit late getting into the Harry Potter books. When most of my friends had finished them, I was only just getting going. This meant that I was in continual danger of plot spoilers. Warning: this article will contain some too!
Sure enough, a friend did let slip some rather significant information about the death of the main character! However, when it came to it, things didn’t pan out in quite the way I expected. Yes, a number of characters did die and J. K. Rowling portrays a kind of afterlife to which they have gone. However, it seems that she couldn’t bring herself to finish the story in that rather ethereal heavenly location but for the story to have a truly happy ending, she needed to bring them back to this world.
I think the stories sum up many people’s current ideas about life after death. Most people I meet are not strict atheists, especially not at funerals! We like to think that there is something after death, that people don’t just cease to exist and that maybe one day we will get to see them again. Indeed, the opposite seems too hard to properly contemplate. However, when we come to think about what that after-life is like, our ideas sometimes seem rather ‘fluffy’. They often include clouds, harps and choir practice! While we think that it’s good that death is not the end, our conception of the life beyond doesn’t fill us with longing. It is this world now that captures our imagination with its very real and physical joys. The idea of a purely spiritual dimension is hard to comprehend.
Fundamentally our problem with life after death is that we are not totally sure whether it exists or whether it is really that good. This is why it would be good to consider what the Christian faith has to say about life after death. As we do, we will find that it is both far better and far more certain than we have thought.
Far better
When talking about life after death people often talk about ‘heaven and hell’. It may therefore surprise many to discover that the Bible never talks about both heaven and hell in the same breath. The biblical expression is always ‘heaven and earth’. The beginning of the Bible story talks about how God creates both the heavens and the earth. Yet very quickly something goes tragically wrong. Humanity, the pinnacle of God’s creation, turns its back on its Creator. This precipitates a disastrous series of events which results in heaven and earth becoming divided. Earth becomes a place of rebellion and brokenness characterised by conflict, suffering and death and is separated from heaven and from God.
This view of the past also affects our view of where we are going. For many, salvation means escaping the suffering of earth to enter heaven. However, the biblical hope is for both a new heaven and a new earth (Is. 65:17, 2 Pet. 3:13, Rev. 21:1). Therefore, Christian hope is not to escape this world but rather the renewal of this world. The biblical idea is not destruction but transformation (Rom. 8:18-25). God won’t destroy the world, rather all that spoils and ruins it. As the author, Joshua Ryan Butler puts it, ‘God will kick the hell out of earth!’
In a sense therefore, J. K. Rowling was right. That which we long for is not just an ethereal spiritual dimension but something like this world without the suffering, pain and death. This is what the Bible promises. In the penultimate chapter of the Bible, we have a beautiful picture of the future, not of us going up to heaven but rather heaven coming down to earth. The chasm of separation has been destroyed and now God can live with us.
Of course, this raises a question. If God is going to get rid of all the rubbish in the world, what about the rubbish in our hearts? We are all partly responsible for the mess the world is in. Incredibly we discover that God himself was willing to take responsibility for all our wrong. Through his suffering on the cross Jesus experienced the hell that we deserve and is now able to offer complete forgiveness to all who will receive it.
Far more certain
The Christian hope is not just better than we imagined; it is also more certain. Yet how can we know with certainty what lies beyond the grave?
Until 500 years ago, Europeans didn’t know what lay beyond the bottom of Africa. Many had tried to sail beyond South Africa’s Cape Point but came to grief on the stormy seas in that region. Then a Portuguese sailor, Bartolomeo Dias, did what no other sailor had done. He sailed beyond that point, continued all the way to India and came back again! Now people knew what lay on the other side. As a result, they changed the name of the headland from ‘The Cape of Storms’ to what it is now known as, ‘The Cape of Good Hope.’
There is one person who has done the same with death – going beyond the unknown and coming back from the other side. The resurrection of Jesus means that death, the place of stormy uncertainty, can become a place of good hope. This is not some religious make-believe. It is rooted in historical evidence that you can investigate for yourself. Many sceptics have done that and had their scepticism challenged in the light of the overwhelming evidence they have discovered.
The best is yet to come
While I enjoyed the Harry Potter stories, my favourite books are still C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis was a sceptical atheist who changed his mind on Christianity later in life when he looked at the evidence for Jesus.
In the Chronicles of Narnia, as in Harry Potter, the main characters also die. However, Lewis doesn’t have to bring them back to this world for the stories to have a happy ending. Lewis’ stories are shaped by his Christian convictions of the hope of a new creation. So we read a beautiful description of a renewed and transformed Narnia to which the children now belong. This captures our imagination and starts us thinking about what a new and transformed earth might be like one day. He finishes the stories with some of the most beautiful lines I’ve ever read:
And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
For the follower of Jesus, heaven is not a consolation prize. We look forward to the renewal of all things. The best is truly yet to come.