Our mansion awaits

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/073121.cfm
Leviticus 26:1, 8-17
Matthew 14:1-12

What does the Jubilee year tell us about God? I believe it points to the place of our eternal rest, our home, mansion, and thereby land promised for us in God's Kingdom. The year-long correction of land ownership in the Old Testament, the Jubilee, is held every 49 years as a time for rest, restoration, and return. It's a time for God to fix just one piece of creation, a tiny nation, built on his land and parceled out as he decreed. God showed us how land that belongs to him should be doled out. God's house, in his Kingdom, where we will be given a mansion, then, is previewed in every Jubilee year.

Three trustworthy holy people contributed to this notion—an ancient Catholic theologian, a woman doctor of the Church, and a holy king from 150 years ago. Granted, concluding that a corrective Jubilee year gives insight into God's housing plans is no more than conjecture, but I find it lovely, visionary stuff.

The majority of insights here were taken from the Interior Castle (or, The Mansions) written by Saint Teresa of Avila (1582 AD). Her writing is bookended here by two others. St. Aurelius Augustin's commentary (430 AD) on John's Gospel speaks to the confines of God's Kingdom as inclusive of Heaven plus all other of God's locales. Our mansions sit within God's house, which Augustine says may not actually be part of heaven. God only knows where that will be. The other bookend is a keen perspective by Chief Tamahana from New Zealand (1876), a hut-dweller. After seeing the stunning homes and castles in England, on his first trip to another nation than his lands, he noted that God's mansions in heaven must be altogether spectacular. 

"Ah, my Father's house's finer than this!" he said to his tour guide. No matter how impressive each castle looked to him, he explained to the guide that everything humans create will necessarily fail to meet the beauty of God's place for us. He soaked in the finest of human concoctions. Tamahana, though, expressed continual awe about how glorious God's fixings for us must be.

From Leviticus, we hear about the Jubilee year, which tells us that God went to great lengths outlining the life of the Chosen People. The Jubilee does more than explain land ownership in God's eyes. It explains his goal of "permanence" for us in his Kingdom.

It's a shocking intervention by God. Each Hebrew family's assigned land is sacred, and every 50 years any land sold off must return to the family, no matter what. The property with its crops, animals, water sources, seasons, and inhabitants reveals that union to God in our physical space is a big deal. Where we reside with him matters. The promised land to the Hebrews was meant as a symbol of a durable, everlasting abode with God. If a Hebrew family sold their land, lost it in a tragedy, or had it taken away, they got it back in the 50-year cycle. That's an unprecedented edict.

We can look to the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and remnant Jewish nation and religion as they engage God's moments of correction. He desires to correct what has disturbed his creation. Mercy, forgiveness, and abundance influence God's corrective relationship to his people. God wants us to know we inhabit our own holy place with him in perpetuity.

The Jubilee year is undoubtedly the most outlandish correction of human frailty. It embodies fixes of legal, economic, and property affairs found nowhere else in Hebraic history. Only God could come up with such a bizarre (to us) method of assignment. Due to the human foibles of cheating, poor planning, bad investments, and the many ways we disregard God's advice, bad stuff ruins the divine system. Sinful acts affect the balance of peace and prosperity built by God, damaging the structure of families, careers, morality, commerce, and food (to name just a few). By God's calculation, a Jubilee year reset the balance. He systematically turned back the clock on chaos. On each Day of Atonement, when a horn made from a ram was blown to announce the Jubilee, God restored five decades of decay. 

In doing so, God instilled the Hebrew people with a restoration process which reveals the kind of life we will have under his absolute kingship. In heaven, I'm assuming that no lost land, debt, or terrible circumstance will take away the mansion God provides for us. The land, sacred texts, nutritional requirements, and locked-down morality given to the Hebrew people mirrors the place we're going after we die. Most of us find the Jubilee to be odd, but it's a window into God's house. 

Jesus tells us in John 14:1-4 that, "In my Father's house are many mansions … I go to prepare a dwelling place for you." The Latin and Greek use of the word to "dwell" emphasizes "remain." This mansion the marked location where we have an abiding, everlasting home. 

That leads us to St. Teresa of Avila. She compares our soul, the home where we invite God, to a multi-level mansion. I think she's also outlining the characteristics of our mansion in God's house. After Jesus conquered death and instilled his coming kingdom, we each become willing vessels, houses for God. Or, we deny him entry. 

Teresa explains that the invited Holy Spirit dwells in our soul to love us, and live with us. Our brokenness, just like the Hebrew nation, requires constant repairs, just like those enacted at each Jubilee. The difference is that God is fixing us every single day. If we let him.

St. Teresa describes the layout of our soul as a mansion. This is the place where we meet God. St. Teresa's descriptions and the Hebrew Jubilee year restorations are in close partnership. She identifies seven spaces of intimacy with God, places where we need to reconnect to him. Each of these places describes how love works in the face of evil. To extrapolate, when sin has no involvement in our lives, the positive elements of Teresa's mansion descriptions represent the fullness of holy character for our home in the Kingdom of God.

Her first mansion space centers on the importance of prayer as opposed to self-indulgence. Being with God, in other words. Rather than our earthly life, shrouded often in darkness, light from God fills the second mansion character of our place with God. So, there is no mortality and no tempter of sin in God's house of prayer and light. Our minds are keenly connected to God, revealed in confidence and perseverance that take place as a matter of course. The key to that intimacy? We clearly hear God's voice. In our earthly abode, we must fight for light and struggle to persist in prayer. We seldom hear his voice.

St. Teresa parodies the Hebrew sins of wealth, boredom, lack of patience, and falling out of favor with God in the third mansion. These, too, are sinful challenges. None of these problems will exist in God's home. While we live entirely upon the mercy of God here, we will be complete in union with God in his house. All will be comforting love. 

Devotion to God marks the fourth mansion, an undistracted intimacy with our Creator and King. All tastes sweet in God's house, with no necessity for bitter reminders and sour challenges to keep us on a path. The Hebrews and we suffer miserably in this life, needing regular correction. We require constant consolation. No such problems in God's house.

The fifth mansion describes the syncing of our intellect with God. We know an eternity of discovery awaits us if we are joined with God after our deaths. The limits of a short life, 50 years plus a gift of some decades more, affect our trust. Fear and distrust won't exist in heaven. There will be no limit to our access to God.

Trials of life fill the sixth mansion of our soul. In our heavenly mansion, though, we won't hit speed bumps toward intimacy with God. No illness takes us from our missions. No anxiety or any human weakness either. God's house is a lovely, alive place.

The final mansion rooms of St. Teresa aptly describe the life of love we will live with God. There will be no need for courage, for jealousy, or for noises to fill awful silences. Love is everywhere. The rapture of living with God goes beyond anyone's experience. 

St. Aurelius Augustin (or St. Augustine) predates Teresa by more than a thousand years. Yet, his various comments on the Kingdom of God and the mansions therein provide the segue from the nation of the Chosen People to the born again, Spirit-filled ready residents of God's house (albeit with a "laver of regeneration" as the 5th Century saint calls our purification). Augustine bluntly tells us that perseverance will keep our heads toward God, listening to him, reading scripture, being friends with his followers. Our time here is too short to live any other way.

In our reading today from John, Jesus responds to a people of one nation, one Chosen People of God. These holy people housed a temple of the one God, and they raised up prophets, priests, and kings. They did all of this to foretell and indeed to even birth the Messiah. Such was Jesus. Jesus shifts human history from a temple land to a truly holy, indwelled people. We embody elements of the mansion God is preparing for us.

Teresa rightly described our souls as a place of mansion design with many rooms and a resident place for the Holy Spirit. Jesus comforted the disciples with a mansion analogy in order to sync them up with the Kingdom of God. Each of us have a place there. We enjoy a similar mansion structure in our soul. Here we have fought trials, struggled with God, brought our prayers, and sought the Spirit as our source of strength and wisdom. We hopefully have worked hard to fix up the place where God comes to us. That's OK, but it's just a warm up. We are told by Jesus that we will join God in his house, in a place he will fashion for us. Our soul's mansion will be housed in him.

We are practicing our life here, then, as St. Teresa outlines it. The place of our soul moves patiently into God's Kingdom. Nothing untoward, miserable, or able to decay can live in God's house. We are of the unkempt stuff that cannot go there. Jesus, though, will take us there. He will clean us up, fill in all our cracks with his Spirit and love. He'll remove our sin, purge us of impurity, and regenerate us as pure and worthy.

If we study Teresa's Interior Castle descriptions we can know a little bit about our place in God's house. St. Augustine assures us God's house is majestic. But as King Tamahana says, as we construct an image of such a wonderful place, "Ah, my Father's house's finer than this!"