From the Second Letter to the Corinthians:
I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows — was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 (NRSV) – June 13, 2013.)
The third heaven? Secret unrepeatable knowledge? What sort of theology are we to create out this?
Maybe none. I don’t think theological development is what Paul is doing here. Instead, he’s just trying to bolster his bona fides. He’s bragged so much about himself in the first twelve chapters of Second Corinthians that the Greek epistolary conventions of his day required that he now switch to the third-person. He and his correspondents both know that he’s talking about himself, but hiding behind this third-person façade, he can do so without seeming to be too overbearing. (What? Paul overbearing? Never!)
I also know that he is appealing to a standard understanding of his day — authority based on visions and supernatural messages. Because Paul never knew Jesus in person, something about which he seemed to have something of an inferiority complex, he relies on this form of authority quite a bit, beginning with his dramatic conversion vision on the road to Damascus.
But come on! . . . The third heaven? . . . Things that are not to be told? . . . Things no mortal is permitted to repeat? This is the sort of stuff that drives some exegetes and preachers crazy, and others to develop outlandish theologies and cosmologies! What are we supposed to do with this stuff? Where, other than here (and maybe in some little-regarded apocryphal text like Third Enoch), does one find any mention of more than one heaven (or of layers or levels of heaven)? And what does it mean, anyway? Or, what is the point of bringing up something you’ve (excuse me, that nameless other guy you know) heard if it can’t be told or repeated?
That last bit gets Paul off the hook. He can claim (for that nameless other guy, wink, wink, nudge, nudge) the authority of a vision, but then doesn’t have to say what it was or what he learned in it because “no mortal is permitted to repeat” it. Nice rhetorical move, Paul!
Some evangelical exegetes assert that the Jews of Jesus’ and Paul’s time (and before) conceived of three heavens. The first heaven they identify with the atmosphere (the realm of the clouds and birds); the second, with outer space (where the sun, stars, and moon are); and the third, with the unseen dwelling place of God. There’s really no evidence of this in Scripture or in other writings. The Hebrew Scriptures frequently use the plural noun shamayim, i.e., “the heavens,” but Jewish cosmology developed no multi-leveled scheme until the Middle Ages. And then the mystics went whole hog (pardon the non-kosher metaphor) and elaborated a seven-layered view of the heavens.
So, although I don’t know what to do with this, I do know what not to do with this. It’s just Paul being Paul – arrogant, self-important, laying claim to authority by any means available, even a fanciful story of a trip through the cosmos. It shouldn’t be the basis of anyone’s theology!
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
I started to write a meditation about St. Paul’s arrogance (today’s epistle lesson is one of his bits of baggadocio that always annoys me. So when I reviewed today’s lessons yesterday, that’s what caught my eye.
The sycamore which Zacchaeus climbed is not the tree known to Americans as a sycamore. The American sycamore (Platanus Occidentalis) is also known as the “Buttonwood.” It was under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street, New York City, that the New York Stock Exchange was form in 1793; the founding terms are known as the Buttonwood Agreement. A very large buttonwood sycamore stood in the church yard of St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City until September 11, 2001. It is said that that tree shielded St. Paul’s Chapel from the destructive storm of debris from the fall of the World Trade Center towers, allowing the chapel to survive and become a center of recovery ministry during the clean-up in the weeks that followed.
Do we ever really know what is “before our eyes”?
Today, it is the evening psalm that I ponder.
In the Psalter in the Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer this verse (numbered “7” there) is rendered: “In sacrifice and offering you take no pleasure (you have given me ears to hear you).” I rather prefer the NRSV’s translation because the “open ear” can hear more than God, and that open-eared hearing of others is much on my mind this morning.
Justice. When I was initiated into the “free and accepted” fraternity of Masons, I was taught that justice is “that standard or boundary of right which enables us to render to every man [sic] his just due without distinction.” Justice, I was told, “is not only consistent with divine and human laws, but is the very cement and support of civil society.” Furthermore, my instructor continued, justice in large measure “constitutes the really good man, so should it be the invariable practice of every Mason never to deviate from the minutest principal thereof.”
OK. I’ll acknowledge and admit that there may have been good reason for Moses to lay down this law for his people as they were preparing to enter the Promised Land. He was concerned that they maintain their identity as the Hebrews, the People of the God of Sinai, and if they had taken on the gods or worship of the people they were conquering that might have been difficult. That he put these words into the mouth of God, however, is very problematic. It was a disservice to later generations and it has played havoc with ecumenical and interfaith relations in the modern era.
The writers of the psalms used trees a lot as a metaphor for the righteous. The very first psalm says, “They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.” (Ps. 1:3, BCP) Throughout the psalms we find references to specific types of trees, and today “a green olive tree.”
Confession: I have never followed any path exactly as it was laid out by anyone . . . even, I’m sure, God. Ever. Could that be why I’ve never lived long in any one place? The longest I ever lived in any place was in an exurban area of Kansas City on the Kansas side of the state line in a house I hated. (It was a split-level; I don’t like split-level homes.) Maybe not following the straight-and-narrow is why I’ve been something of a vagabond; the two do seem to go hand-in-hand.
