Chapter 33: Heaven is “Up”?

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky ? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:9-11)

I would say that the position “up” is a representation that allows us to associate this idea of Heaven with a place that has a physical location. There are many people who take these Biblical words literally and think Jesus floated up into the sky, human body and all. But if this passage were meant to be taken figuratively, why wouldn’t the resurrection story as well? So let’s examine this.

The cosmologists tell us that up above the clouds there is space, then other planets, then other solar systems, then other galaxies, that extend for billions of light years. So Heaven must be past the last galaxy — assuming there is a “last” galaxy, which there really isn’t. But even if there were, it would be kind of far away.

In 2004, an international team of astronomers discovered a galaxy 13 billion lightyears away. So let’s pretend Heaven is right around there somewhere. Since the Apostles watched Jesus rise up in the sky, he couldn’t have been going that fast. Even cruising up at 6 trillion miles per hour (speed of light), we’re looking at a total journey to Heaven of 13 billion years, assuming, of course, we did discover the farthest galaxy from the earth. If that’s the case, Jesus is not at the right hand of God yet — he still has 12,999,998,030 years or so to go. Did he have a space suit? Did he have enough food and water for the journey to sustain his human body? And was he even going in the right direction?

We no longer live on a flat earth. That means that “up” could be down depending on where you are in the world and what time of year and day it is. So if it were the wrong time of day, Jesus could have gone “up” to Hell, and that would be a total bummer. So only sometimes Heaven is “up” and other times it’s either below us or to the right or left of us.

These kinds of ancient beliefs do actually make perfect sense when they are put into a world with a flat earth and a three-story universe (Heaven on top, earth in the middle, the underworld below). It’s just funny how today so many people still look “up” to heaven to pray and tell their kids “Grammy and Grampy are up in Heaven, watching over you.” Assuming Grammy and Grampy have amazing eyesight, it’s possible that they are looking 13+ billion light years “up” at little Joey, not down.