“This world is not my home/I’m just a-passin’ through.” Much of my theological career has been spent cautioning Christians that this good old song is deeply mistaken.
This world, this planet Earth, is our home. We were made for it—literally made from it.
And when God renews it, we will spend the age to come on it (Revelation 21–22).
Still, the song does strike an authentic New Testament theme. This world as it is presently constituted and governed is certainly not my home.
“My treasures are laid up/somewhere beyond the blue” is exactly in line with Jesus’ advice about investing our lives:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19–21).
Indeed, this question of treasure shows up several times in the New Testament in another striking contrast between the two economies.
Peter tells his flock to “live out your time as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ” (I Peter 1:17–19).
This kind of language is so familiar to well-churched Christians that its shock value has worn off. Let’s see if we can usefully recover it.
Several people in expensive suits confer over a mahogany table in a richly furnished room. They are making a huge international financial deal, so dollars, pounds, Euros, yen, yuan, and rubles are all in play.
The conversation is intense, with the principals poring over spreadsheets and calculators while assistants scurry quietly back and forth to their laptops for further data. Then someone walks into the room carrying a large white bowl—full of blood.
Consternation breaks out immediately. (I’ll let you imagine the actual expressions of shock and dismay.) “What are you doing with that?” someone finally asks the newcomer.
It all depends, doesn’t it?
If you’re trying to broker the financing of a giant construction project in Africa, then you’re wise to conduct your conversation in terms of the world’s great currencies. A big bowl of blood in that context is wildly incongruous—even offensively absurd.
If, however, you’re trying to solve the world’s greatest problem, heal the world’s biggest wound, and pay the world’s biggest debt, then all the money in the world is just so much trash, just so many pointless ones and zeroes. In the global economy that matters most, the economy of salvation, you need blood for that: the Saviour’s blood.
Those of us who have been introduced to that Big Picture cannot any longer live as if we haven’t been. Those of us who have been bought with that price cannot any longer live as if money matters most—nor any other worldly currency: not fame, not pleasure, not security, not luxury, not power.
We are, as Peter says, strangers, people from Somewhere Else, playing a different game according to different definitions of success and failure.
Today happens to be Election Day in the United States of America. We recently had a provincial election here in New Brunswick and we’re headed for a national election in Canada soon. It’s easy to get caught up in the worldly currencies of votes and dollars and offices, talking and worrying and fuming and rejoicing as if those are all that matter.
They do matter. They affect the lives of people—and other creatures, too—who are loved by God. They affect the welfare of the planet he made for us and will one day remake for us. Those things matter, and we ought to work with God and each other to bring as much shalom to the earth as we possibly can through them.
On such a day, however, as on every day, it is good to remember the Big Picture, the Gospel Story, the economy of salvation. It is good to recall the frame of reference that puts gold and silver in their proper places, as it does also all rulers and authorities, all principalities and powers.
It is good to remember what matters most. And what it cost. And to live accordingly, not in service to what can be bought with money but to what has been bought with the precious blood of Christ: our new life, the life of the world to come, in God.
