The Regent
Spring 2010, Volume 22, Number 2
Home a t a s t
Hans Boersma
“I have come home at last! This is my real country!” cries the unicorn near the end of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, stamping his right fore-hoof on the ground. “I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”1 Our desire for heaven is like the unicorn’s. Once we get there, we’ll realize it is the land we had been looking for all of our lives. The reason we’ll have this shock of recognition is that it will be a place we’ve been before. The end of the story is very much like the beginning. The paradise of Genesis was filled with trees—“trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.” In the middle of the garden stood the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the garden was watered by a river flowing from Eden, separating
into four streams. Likewise, down the middle of the great street of the New Jerusalem a river will flow—the river of the water of life. The tree of life will be there too but, in the heavenly paradise, this tree will be even more astounding than it was back in Genesis: the tree will be on both sides of the river, and it will yield its fruit every month. And its leaves, John the Seer adds, are “for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2). Our origin is paradise, and our destination, too, is paradise. “To put the matter briefly,” says the great sixth-century theologian, PseudoDionysius, “all being derives from, exists in, and is returned toward the Beautiful and the Good. Whatever there is, whatever comes to be, is there and has being on account of the Beautiful and the Good. All things look to it. All things are moved by it. All things are preserved by it.”2 “And so it is,” he concludes, “that all things must desire, must yearn for, must love, the Beautiful and the Good.”3 Because we come from paradise, we long for it. Because we come from paradise, we’ll one day echo the words of the unicorn: “This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.” Once you recognize that we’re garden creatures at heart, all kinds of passages from scripture open up. Christ, God’s Wisdom is the tree of life in the paradise of God. “Nothing you desire can compare” to this heavenly Wisdom, says the Proverb (3:13). This paradisal Wisdom “is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed” (3:19). People who are truly
“blessed” or “happy,” Psalm 1 insists, become like Christ in his heavenly paradise; they are “like a tree planted by streams of water.” Such people yearn, as Dionysius suggested, to return to the beauty and goodness of the heavenly paradise. Filled with desire for Christ, their heavenly groom, they exclaim, “Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my lover among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste” (Sg 2:3). The biblical account locates us, as fallen creatures, “east of Eden,” in the dwelling place of Cain. But it is east of Eden that we’ve come to recognize the tree of life as being Christ himself. Christ is the tree planted by streams of water—Psalm 1. Christ is the apple tree among the trees of the forest—Song of Songs 2. And Christ is the tree of life to those who embrace wisdom—Proverbs 3. Our desires, misdirected though they often are as we journey east of Eden, come to fruition in the garden. They come to fruition in the tree of life. They come to fruition in Christ himself. Once we’re with Christ in heaven, we’ll shout out: “I have come home at last! This is my real country!” Hans Boersma, J.I. Packer Professor of Theology 1. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York, N.Y: HarperCollins, 2001), 760. 2. Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius : The Complete Works” trans. Colm Luibheid, ed. Paul Rorem, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, N.Y.: Paulist, 1987), IV.10 (p. 79). 3. Ibid.
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