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.
