“Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man.”
John 1:51
This was Jesus’ premise to skeptical Nathanael. A bit of a strange thing to say on the face of it. Unless, of course, (like Nathanael probably was), you’re familiar with the story of Jacob’s wild dream:
A staircase. Stretching from the earth up into the heavens. Angels going up and down, back and forth between heaven and earth. And then God himself standing at the top, promising to multiply Jacob’s descendents beyond measure. (You can read the whole dream in Genesis 28).
It’s all about heaven and earth being intimately connected, about a God’s blessings pouring out over the entire earth.
After the powerful dream encounter—that was as real as any reality ever was to Jacob—he set up the stone that had served as his pillow in top of a pillar, poured oil on it consecrate it as holy, and named that location Bethel, which means “House of God.” That is, this was the place that heaven touched earth. This was the place of the stairway to heaven (or stairway to earth depending on one’s direction of travel).
Jesus then adopts this image to describe himself: Jesus is the stairway to heaven. Jesus is the stairway to earth. Jesus is the connection point between God’s sphere of reality and ours. Jesus is where God (along with his angels) “comes down” to us ; where we “go up” to him.
That’s the kind of cosmic good news worthy of an epic guitar solo.
