A House Waiting in the Heavens

A House Waiting in the Heavens
2 CORINTHIANS 5.1-5

‘Life after death is one of the greatest mysteries in the world, but there’s no need to make it more mysterious than it should be.

I recently went for the first time to the magnificent Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, beside St Peter’s Church in Rome. There on the wall is the world-famous Michelangelo painting of the Last Judgment. I pondered it long and hard, considering the ways in which the scene it depicts was already thoroughly traditional by Michelangelo’s day (the sixteenth century), and the way in which paintings like that, by him and many others, made sure that, whatever people said in the pulpit or wrote in books, the image of some people going off to ‘heaven’ and others going down to ‘hell’ remained firmly fixed in the imagination...