Audio reading of the following article
“These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seem them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”
Hebrews 11:13
“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you…”
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Homelessness
Home is a valued thing. Think about it. We all know John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, where he sings: “Country roads, take me home / To the place I belong”. In nostalgic homesickness, the narrator1 describes West Virginia, where “Life is old there, older than the trees / Younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze”. He is constantly reminded of this home: “The radio reminds of a home far away / Driving down the road, I get a feeling / That I should have been home yesterday…”. Even the Bible speaks of home, for in Psalm 137, the Psalmist says: “By the waters of Babylon, / there we sat down and wept / when we remembered Zion.” When the Israelite’s captors demanded that they sing, their reply was: “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” They were not home. They could not sing.
Or, ignoring the blasphemy and the terrible lyrics, observe how Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes casts home in a romantic light: “Home is wherever I’m with you”. Loving You’s Like Coming Home by Don Williams echoes this sentiment: “It’s a lonesome and endless highway I’ve been searching for so long / After all the miles I’ve travelled loving you’s like coming home”. Moving to Augustine’s Confessions, the African bishop describes his friendship with a childhood friend, “sweet to me above all the sweetness of that my life”. The friend was close to death and was baptised when unconscious. When he regained consciousness, Augustine attempted to joke with his friend about the baptism, but “he shuddered at me, as if I were his enemy”. The melancholic punchline hits: “A few days after, during my absence, he had a return of the fever, and died”. The friend died without reconciliation. Augustine’s world was rocked: “My native country was a torture to me, and my father’s house a wondrous unhappiness; and whatsoever I had participated in with him, wanting him, turned into a frightful torture.”2
There are different types of homes. One type illustrated above is a geographical home. For the narrator of Take Me Home, this home was West Virginia. For the Psalmist in Psalm 137, this home was Zion. Another type of home illustrated above is a romantic home. For Williams, loving someone (presumably and hopefullyc his wife) was “like coming home”. Home by the Edward Sharpe band declares that home is not a concretely fixed phenomenon; instead, it is “wherever I’m with you”. There is no home but with one’s lover. Saint Augustine’s home, so to speak, was in his friendship. When that friendship was strained and the friend died without placation for Augustine’s mockery, Augustine became homeless. He still had a home, of course. But even his “native country was a torture” and his “father’s house a wondrous unhappiness”. Augustine felt homeless in the places that he was most familiar with.
The Biblical understanding is that home cannot ultimately be found in a place or a person. Notice how I say “ultimately”. C. S. Lewis remarked, “Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”3 Lewis recognises that “pleasant inns” are part of our pilgrimage. It would be radically individualistic to say we cannot find proximate homes. These homes may be in the form of church fellowship, familial love, edifying friendships, and many others. These homes may consistently last a lifetime. It is not wrong to enjoy these and rest in them. It is wrong to utlimately rest in these, as ends in themselves. I will expand on this thought soon.
It is not hard for some of us to consider why home cannot ultimately be found in a place. This geographical concept of home, as I will call it, is easier to understand for those who do not live in their ancestors’ country. You may have moved countries in your lifetime. You may even have been brought up in a particular country, and let us take New Zealand as an example, but your blood is Scottish, Canadian, Icelandic, Japanese, Zambian, or another foreign place. You may have legal residency in New Zealand, but is it really your home? Is it the place where your ancestors dwelt, built, lived, loved, fought, and died? Or let us say that you have returned to your home country. I did when I was a child. There is a picture of me standing in front of the Forbidden City, that grand palace where Chinese emperors resided centuries ago. I have another picture in front of the Shanghai skyline, where soaring skyscrapers cast coloured shadows on still water and paint the sky around them with luminous gleams. Yet another photograph depicts me and other small children from my father’s village crouched around a fire where the flames consume incense paper in that idolatrous art of ancestor worship. I did not feel at home in China, even in that place where nobody would ask me, “Where are you from?”.
Or let us subtract Communism and paganism. Let us say that you are an Israelite, dwelling in theocratic Israel in Old Covenant times under the auspicious reign of Solomon. Are we ultimately at home there? What about Israel makes that home, my good Israelite? Is it your king? He is flawed, and his wives, countless as the stars, are a living testimony to that. Is it your temple? But you may live far away from it. Is it the landscape? That is mere molecules. What about a particular geographical place makes it ultimately home? Is it the rocks? You find rocks everywhere. It is more sane to conclude with the wistful Lewis that “The books or the music [or places, one may add] in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited”.
But this homelessness is hardly mentioned, and again to quote Lewis: “In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.”4
Home cannot ultimately be found in a person, and this reality is detailed in Augustine’s Confessions. After recounting his friend’s passing, he writes: “Blessed be he who loves You, and his friend in You, and his enemy for Your sake. For he alone loses none dear to him to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost… For wherever the soul of man turns itself, unless towards You, it is affixed to sorrows, yea, though it is affixed to beauteous things without You and without itself.” The key is this: “For he alone loses none dear to him to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost”. When we love dying men in the undying God, those dying men ultimately cannot be lost.5
But what does it mean to love in the immortal God? “in” seems a peculiar preposition. My answer (and I am not sure if I am right) is that the love with which we love Christ is the love with which we ought to love others. This answer sounds, on the face of it, blasphemous and utterly contrary to what I was saying before about not finding our ultimate home in others. But my thesis is this: that when we truly love Christ and from this love of Christ extend this love to fellow men, it will not be an inordinate love. Just like an anchored ship that cannot severely stray off course, our love, if anchored in Christ and our union with Him, cannot stray in loving men inordinately. The paradox here is that in not loving men ultimately, as ends in themselves, but rather in Christ (in my sense), we will love them more than we ever could have if we had loved them ultimately. In fact, if we love others in Christ, there is a sense in which we cannot love them too much. So, when our loved ones perish, whether family or friends, whether platonic or romantic, having the anchor of our love ultimately in Christ and not ultimately in them means that our love and our home will remain, even though our boat will be rocked.
The aforementioned applies to Christmas because, among the festivity, our desire for home may be accentuated all the more. As N. D. Wilson said: “My wife and I tend to overgift to our kids at Christmas. We laugh and feel foolish when a kid is so distracted with one toy that we must force them into opening the next, or when something grand goes completely unnoticed in a corner. How consumerist, right? How crassly American. How like God. We are all that overwhelmed kid, not even noticing our heartbeats, not even noticing our breathing, not even noticing that our fingertips can feel and pick things up, that pie smells like pie and that our hangnails heal and that honey-crisp apples are real and that dogs wag their tails and that awe perpetually awaits us in the sky. The real yearning, the solomonic state of mind, is caused by too much gift, by too many things to love in too short a time. Because the more we are given, the more we feel the loss as we are all made poor and sent back to our dust.”6 The “real yearning… is caused by too much gift”. Amid jovial festivity, which is very good, we realise there is something greater we yearn after.
Lessons from the Prodigal Son
We all know the parable of the prodigal son. A younger son asks his father to receive his inheritance early, essentially saying to his father, “I wish you were dead”. He then wastes all this inheritance in “reckless living” (Lk. 15:13), probably in a whirlwind of prostitutes (Lk. 15:30), debauchery, hangovers, gluttony, and a congregation of other vices. When a famine arises, he becomes a labourer who feeds pigs, even yearning to eat the pigs’ food. Eventually, he “came to himself”, resolving to repent and to ask his father to make him a servant. When the father saw his son coming home, he sprinted to his son and “embraced and kissed him” (Lk. 15:20). The son begins reciting his planned speech, but the father provides the “best robe… a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet” (Lk. 15:22). The best calf is slaughtered, and a feast is held, for the son has come home. The elder brother responds in indignation. The father never celebrated his work. The elder brother certainly had not done anything as bad as the younger son.
The first point I want to focus on is the prodigal’s situation. We often, and particularly in contemporary evangelicalism, portray sin in passive terms. We are the mere victims of circumstance, the unwitting captives of original sin. This idea that humanity is basically good is a liberal, not a Christian concept. The Christian conception of sin is that we are “dead in [our] sins and trespasses” (Eph. 2:1) and that in this deadness, we act with every fibre of our being against God. We, like the prodigal son regarding his father, wish that God were dead or non-existent or even conjure up atheistic philosophies to shield ourselves from His gaze. We balk at the idea of a righteous God, caricaturing Him as an overbearing divine legislator who punishes us for thoughtcrimes.7 We wish that God were not so exacting, which really is to wish that God were not so righteous, which really is to wish that God were not so much like God.
Furthermore, we use the inheritance that He has granted us in His common grace8, whittling away his grace in reckless living. We act against the time-giving God in futile forms of entertainment, against the life-giving God in devoting our lives to idolatrous nothings, against the movement-giving God in pursuing that which is not Him, against the being-giving God in using every part of our being to serve another master, against the situation-placing God in wasting the opportunities that He has given us, and so on. Our prodigality is not merely monetary. And even after salvation, we desire the mud of pigsties rather than the resplendent haven of God. As Lewis said, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”9 We have left home for that which is not home, throwing rocks at the windows and setting the garden ablaze on our way out.
The second point I want to focus on is our homecoming. How is it that we can come home? I do not think that Jesus mentions it in this parable, and the simple reason is that parables are not meant to exhaustively convey truth. But we know it from other parts of Scripture. We come home through another Son, who was never a prodigal Son, becoming homeless. Our Lord said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Lk. 9:58). Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s homelessness: He was born in a manger. A bunch of untidy animals were probably among the first to gaze upon His glory. To interject Jesus into His own parable, it is as if our true elder brother (Rom. 8:29, etc.) saw our prodigality, came to us when we were living among the pigs, dirtying His spotless robes and breathing the dung-filled atmosphere, and lovingly carried us home at the cost of His own life. Because of us, He was made “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Again: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” (2 Cor. 8:9). Though we became impoverished and poor by our own debauched and depraved living, in Christ’s incarnation, He came to seek us.
Contrast the actions of Jesus with the elder brother’s response in Jesus’ parable. The elder brother said, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him” (Lk. 15:29-30). Could Christ not have a greater right to say that? Could He not have said: “Father, we have lived in blessed Trinitarian fellowship for all eternity. Father, look at this depraved mass of humanity, who have wrecked themselves in purposeful rebellion. Who are they that I should come and die for them? Who are they that my blood should spill and my breath be spent for them? Who are they that I should be estranged from you because of it?” But Christ, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:6-8).
Jesus left home so that we might find home. He was poor so that we might be made rich. He died so that we might live. He lived so that He might die, and with Him, our flesh (Rom. 6:6). Though He enjoyed the blessed bonds of unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, He divested Himself of all divine privileges and entered into a decrepit manger. He took on flesh and walked in our midst (Jn. 1:14). Christmas is a time of great joy, for without the incarnation, we have no salvation. Without God becoming man, we do not have a dying God, and without a dying God, we have no salvation. But Christmas is a time of sorrow, too, for it is our sin that makes Christ’s incarnation necessary. But just as light shines more brightly after we spend time in the dark, realising the darkness of our own hearts (Jer. 17:9) and the darkness into which Christ entered (Jn. 1:5) magnifies the Light (Jn. 1:4) all the more. It is Christmas. It is a time of merriment, for the Lord has come for the salvation of men so that He may secure their homecoming.
Conclusion: Finding Home during Christmas
The importance of this reality for you is that the Light has come and situated Himself in a manger. He has come for the salvation of men. This reality is Gospel: it is good news. But it is not enough to believe this Gospel in the abstract, such that you affirm its truth detachedly, just like how a botanist would affirm that a flower requires this and that nutrient. We are all faced with a choice that has cosmic significance: to either receive and rest in the God who became man so that He might die or to reject Him and suffer eternal damnation. We have a genuine choice either way. Either way, there will be a declaration of “Thy will be done”, but whether it is from us to God or from God to us is your choice.10 The latter option is the most terrifying thought in all the universe. For God to say to us, “Thy will be done”, and for Him to say to us, “I have sent my Son into this depraved world, filled with the aroma of sin and suffering, and He has become flesh so that He might die, yet you have rejected Him. Let your will be done. Pursue the world, flesh, and devil that you so earnestly yearn for.” is our death knell.
Christmas is joyful because, paradoxically, there is sorrow that awaits. Though a ruddy baby now lies in the manger, with Mary beaming at Him and pinching His flushed face, in a few decades, a sword will pierce her heart (Lk. 2:35). Let that thought of Calvary perfume the incarnational atmosphere. In a few decades, as the second-century bishop Melito of Sardis so poignantly wrote, “He who hung the earth in place is hanged. He who fixed the heavens in place is fixed in place. He who made all things fast is made fast on a tree.”11 In a few decades, Christ will be slaughtered as a propitiation and raised for our justification. He will ascend unto heaven, where He is reigning now. He is Lord of all. Believe in Him. Trust in Him to pay the price for your sins, to carry that weight on His shoulders and to give you the robes of His righteousness.
If you are not a Christian, then you are ultimately homeless. No geographical location, no multitude of gifts, and no romantic, platonic, or familial love will ever serve as a home. The only home is found in the Son who became homeless and departed from His celestial home into this shattered world so that you might return home. You are homeless of your own making. I am homeless of my own making. Christ is the only way home to the Father (Jn. 14:6). All other substitutes are empty and vain. If you are a Christian, then you are ultimately at home. The Father rejuvenates us with many temporary homes, even temporary homes that last a lifetime, but they are not ultimately home. When the homesickness that Lewis so astutely describes strikes, then remind yourself that we, like Abraham, are “looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10). We are pilgrims on the way to our home, yet we are already at home. It is this paradox that means there will be nothing to fear when we reach heaven and nothing fundamentally unfamiliar, but that when we gaze in the face of our Triune God, we will hear, “Welcome home”, yet also in a different sense “You have already been here quite a long time”.
Footnotes
- I say narrator because Denver may or may not have been to West Virginia or describing it. See https://www.southernliving.com/culture/john-denver-country-roads. I do not really care.
- See https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110104.htm. All quotes relating to this incident will be at the same link.
- See C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.
- See C. S. Lewis’ sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. The quotations in this paragraph and the previous ones are all from it.
- See footnote 2.
- See N. D. Wilson’s Death by Living.
- I believe that Christopher Hitchens made this Orwellian remark in a debate somewhere.
- Reformed theology recognises the existence of common grace, which is the grace that God extends to all people, regardless of whether they are saved or unsaved. Matthew 5:45, which speaks of God sending the rain and sun on both the unjust and the just, illustrates this. Common grace is distinguished from special grace, which God exercises only regarding His people.
- See C. S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory.
- This idea comes from C. S. Lewis, and I believe it was from his work The Great Divorce.
- See James White’s The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief for this quote. I believe the chapter that contained it was entitled something like “From the Mists of Time”.