The Cobblestones of Heaven

In Revelation 21:21, when John the Seer is casting about for words to describe the vision of the New Creation he's just glimpsed, he tells us, among other things, that the street of the heavenly city was pure gold, like transparent glass.


Not that I've spent a lot of time ruminating on the infastructure of Heaven, but whenever I did, I always assumed this was intended to signify either the beauty of the city or the extravagance of its wealth. It reminds me a bit of 1 Kings 10:21, where it says that Israel was so wealthy under the reign of Solomon that nothing was ever made out of silver, because silver was considered of little value in Solomon's days.


It may still be, in the end, that when he describes "streets paved with gold" John wants to fill our heads with hopeful visions of the luxury that awaits us in that celestial city. Our pie in the sky when we die. I'm not sure. But the other day I was reading Talking the Walk, Marva Dawn's fascinating book about Christian doctrine, and she suggested something in passing I've never considered before.


She says that the "street paved with gold" is a vision, actually, of the great reversal that God will accomplish at the end of the age, when Christ's Coming turns everything on its head. "Here," she writes, "we think gold is of utmost importance, but there we will just walk on the stuff."

If she's right, she'd certainly be singing a tune in beautiful harmony with one of the major-- and most ignored-- themes in the New Testament, a theme that I sometimes call the "Upside down Kingdom" (with apologies to Don Kraybill). In God's Kingdom, things are continually turned upside down: the last come first; the greatest are the least; the Poor are called to rejoice and the Rich sent away in tears. Those who mourn are happy; the fools shame the wise; the Christ conquers through his public humiliation and brutal execution.

And the most precious ingots of all (perhaps?) become the cobblestones.

Of course, to vary that old saying about the banana a bit: sometimes lump of gold is just a lump of gold. And certainly when you look at how John uses gold imagery in the rest of his apocalypse, it still seems to signify the radiant beauty and transcendent value of heavenly things. But, right or not, I like Marva Dawn's reading here for its implications. Because if the gold we're toiling for today will become mere paving tiles in the Heavenly City, then it certainly begs the question: in that same God-illumined Jerusalem then, what will become of those things-- the humble, ignored, physically down-trodden and spiritually-degraded things-- that we tend to trample over now in our worldly ignorance?