What Jesus Is Saying Today: Don’t Worry About Heaven

Jesus is consistent. What He’s saying today is what He said 2,000 years ago. The message He presents in the four gospels, and the in the entire New Testament, is designed to help us not worry about the afterlife.

Looking at the text, Jesus talks much more about how to live in this life than about how to get into the next life. He’s saying, in effect, “Don’t worry about how to get into heaven. I’ll take care of that for you. Instead, use your mental energy to think about how to live this life.”

He’s telling us that there’s no way we could ever work or earn or figure out a way to get eternal life for ourselves. We simply can’t do it. So we should stop fretting about it, since it’s impossible for us to attain it, and simply receive it as He gives it to us.

In fact, it’s probably a lot more difficult to get into hell than into heaven. To get into hell, a person would need to consistently and stubbornly refuse God’s freely-given grace and mercy.

God’s forgiveness sets us free: free to stop being anxious about the next life, and free to devote our energies to serving Him in this life. Luther writes:

In everything we do or experience we should have a happy heart and know that for Christ’s sake we are in grace and that everything we do pleases God, even the fact that out of the needs of the body we eat and drink and do our work. Thus our heart should remain pure in the eternal and sound knowledge of God and in trust toward God through Christ, and it should believe that everything we are pleases God, not because of some merit or worthiness of ours, which is all polluted, but because of the gift of faith, that we believe in Christ.

There are some astounding tensions in Luther’s statement. We are “polluted,” and yet pleasing to God! How can that be? Human reason cannot fully see into the mystery of how Christ’s atoning work clothes us.

Likewise there is a paradox in having “a happy heart” and yet being susceptible to the “needs of the body,” which leave us vulnerable to illness and pain, to grief and depression.

We can only surrender to Jesus: He’s telling us that He’ll take care of us. We can’t thoroughly understand how. Jesus simply directs us to busy ourselves with this life, and to rest in the confidence that He’s arranged something very good for us in the next life.

Natural Justice and Natural Religion: Naturally Wrong

There is a sense of morality which occurs naturally to the human mind. One possible interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s works would even lead the reader to see this system as built into the structure of the human mind.

There is a striking ubiquity to this type of natural law, which presents itself as arising from a natural theology. It is a quid pro quo ethic, consisting of rewards and punishments.

It is also sadly mistaken. Richard Rohr captures this error:

Almost all religion, and all cultures that I know of, have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished, and retribution is to be demanded of the sinner in this world - and usually the next world too. It is a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good guys and bad guys, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the normal economy of merit or “meritocracy,” and it is the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, lawyers, and even most of the church, which should know better, can do.

This fallacy, which occurs so easily to the human mind, overlooks the simple fact that all humans are imperfect and flawed. Not only can we say that “to be human is to be imperfect,” but more: “to be human is to be essentially and necessarily imperfect.”

Given what human nature is, any ethic of reward and punishment can only end with more punishment than reward.

Humans, who are essentially unrighteous, can’t work their way up to earning a reward which is given only to the righteous.

A more accurate understanding reveals that an intervention is necessary: humans need help to attain that which they can’t attain on their own. This help has various names: grace, mercy, forgiveness:

The revelation from the cross and the Twelve Steps, however, believes that sin and failure are, in fact, the setting and opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender - and then the future will take care of itself. It is a mystery that makes sense to the soul and is entirely an “economy of grace,” which makes sense only to those who have experienced it.

Moving from ‘natural religion’ to ‘revealed religion’ is to gain the insight that only a help sent from beyond the self can create the opportunity for humans to receive better than they deserve.

To be surrendered is the notion that the individual can do, earn, merit, achieve. To be gained is a breathtaking gift: unearned, unmerited, freely given. There is nothing to be done prior to the gift: after the gift, the only reasonable response is thanksgiving.

To see one’s self as utterly passive in the face of this gift is to be all the more energized in the thanksgiving offered in response to the this gift. Properly seen, the remainder of life is thanksgiving.