When did you last witness anything supernatural? Recently, I hope, even if you didn't recognize it as such, and even if you didn't reflect upon it.
We live in a material age, and many of us expect to meet the supernatural very rarely, if at all. Even if we come to church, we may be there just for the fellowship we share. Even if we read the Bible, we may see it just as history, like the pages of any newspaper, or as useful advice, like a child-rearing manual. Even if we pray (and we do, don't we?), our prayers may be little more than hopes that someone will get well, that some problem will go away, that some friend may be kept safe from harm.
At the same time, there is a thirst for something more. The cinema box offices rake in the cash from people willing to watch the antics of Hobbits and boy magicians. People resort to drugs to take them "out of themselves". Bookshop shelves are laden with New-Age junk - magic spells, horoscopes and worse fantasies.
But the church, the Bible, our prayers are all gateways to the supernatural. Jesus forms the bridge between our own mundane, natural existence, and the supernatural world of Heaven. Heaven is not a useful name - it is too easy to think of it as the clear blue sky (with an occasional fleecy cloud forming a perch for a passing cherub!)
Heaven is the name for something transcendent, something outside ourselves. To describe it in terms of love, beauty, glory or power gives only part of the truth. John, in his Revelation, stops short of describing Heaven itself, though he gives us a partial glimpse through the "open door" (Rev 4:1ff). The person Paul knew who had "been caught up to the third heaven" had no words to describe what he had heard there (2 Cor 12:2-4).
Jesus is the bridge, and the Gospels illustrate this by recording the presence of angels and other heavenly beings at key moments of Jesus' life. His conception is announced to Mary by an angel, his birth is heralded by choirs of angels; a heavenly dove alights on him at the outset of his ministry; he is transfigured in the presence of Moses and Elijah, who walk with the Lord. And his Resurrection is proclaimed by angels in white (John 20:12), just as is his final Ascension (Acts 1:10).
The events of Holy Week seem very unheavenly. The crowds who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem were looking for wonders and were disappointed. The week ends with Jesus' cry: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", his death and his lying in the tomb.
But heaven was very close. The crowds that cried "Hosanna", "save us we beseech you", were recalling God's victory, declared in Psalm 118. The circumstances of the crucifixion reminded Christians very clearly of what the prophets had proclaimed about the Lord's servant, about God's Messiah, about the Day of the Lord. And even Psalm 22, which begins with those words from the Cross which seem to be of despair, turns repeatedly to praise of the One who is "enthroned on the praises of Israel."
John's Gospel, more than any other, paints the supernatural side of this decisive week. Jesus' prayer in John 17 gives us an insight into the relation between the heavenly and the mundane. "The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and they in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world."
May we too "know that God has sent him." And may we be brought closer in Holy Week and at Easter to the eternal, the heavenly, the wonderful, to the One who loved and was loved before time ever was.
HD