How do you get to heaven? Part 2: The Story That Messes With Everything.

Grace means that… Both sons are prodigals.

In Luke’s account of Jesus’ life he tells us about a moment when Jesus was teaching, and he’s speaking to these two very different groups. There’s a bunch of ragtag, messed up, reject ‘sinners’. People who’ve gone off the rails and know that they probably deserve the social exile that’s been imposed upon them. And then behind them there’s a bunch of Pharisees and teachers of the Law. These are good, respectable, middle-class people. They are the pillars of society. They give away at least a tenth of everything they have to the poor. They are religiously devout, and careful to keep all their social, religious and moral duties. They pray often, and earnestly. But Jesus always seems to have a problem with them. He keeps warning them that if they don’t repent – turn around 180 degrees on the deepest level – then they are heading towards ultimate separation from God. Why? He can’t stand their presumption. He says they walk into the presence of God himself and say, ‘Thank you God for making me good – not like those other people, those sinners,’ and that makes Jesus livid. He can see them right now, looking down at the ‘sinners’ who are there; he can see them silently, secretly placing these people somewhere in the bottom half of the Hitler-Teresa scale, and bumping themselves up a little bit in the process. So he tells a story. It’s Jesus’ favourite way to pick a fight.

There was once a Father with two sons. And one day the younger son comes to his Father and says,

“I want my share of the inheritance now.”

That’s the inheritance. That’s what you get when someone dies. He’s saying, basically, ‘I wish you were dead. I want your stuff instead of you please.’

So obviously the Father is gutted. He loves his son, but his son doesn’t care about him. That hurts in a way that no one who’s never had a child can really understand. And he doesn’t want him to leave. But, strangely, he says yes. He doesn’t shout – he doesn’t beat him – he doesn’t throw him out on the street with nothing – he sells half his land and hands his son the money, and lets him go.

And where he ends up, as far away as he can get, the son spends all his money on having a great time – parties, prostitutes. He’s really enjoying himself right up until the money starts to run out, and his friends run out with it. Then a famine hits that country. He ends up struggling to survive, with a job feeding pigs, so hungry he wants to eat the slops and pods he’s supposed to give them. And then it dawns on him, there in the muck with the pigs –

‘What am I doing here? The servants back at my father’s house have got enough to eat and good jobs. I’ll go back. I’ll have to face the shame, apologise to my Father and beg him to hire me as a servant, and maybe if I work hard enough I can start to pay off all the money I’ve wasted.’

So he gets up and starts the long journey home. Exhausted and alone – stinking from the pigs and the sweat – and full of shame.

And then Jesus gives us a powerful detail.

While he was still a long way off, the Father saw him in the distance.

How come? Because the Father had been waiting for him. Every day since he left he’d been watching and waiting and hoping that his son would come home.

And when he sees him – bare feet caked in dust, disgusting and ragged – he hitches up his robes, and he runs. He runs out to him, and he doesn’t care that the people in the village are pointing and laughing he’s just fixed on his son, and when he gets to him he throws his arms round him and picks him up like he used to when he was little, and he kisses him, and the son knows for sure that his father still loves him. And the father calls back to a servant from the house and says “Bring my best robe, put it on him!” – he doesn’t want him walking through the village dirty and ashamed. “Bring the family ring put it on his finger to show everyone that he belongs here, he’s my son. And bring sandals for his hurting feet. Then let’s kill the fattened calf and invite everyone round: we are feasting tonight! Because my son was dead and is alive again, was lost, and is found.”

The ‘sinners’ are wide-eyed, mind-blown. Their whole world is turning upside down. But Jesus looks up at the Pharisees and the teachers because he hasn’t finished yet.

Remember that other brother? The older one? That evening he’s still out working in the field like always. He’s a good boy, very respectable, always does his duty. And when he hears all the laughter and the dancing coming from the feast inside he calls a servant and asks,

“What’s happening in there?”

The servant explains that his brother has come home and his father’s thrown a feast, he beckons him inside. But the older brother turns his back and walks away.

When the Father realises that his eldest son is still outside he runs out to him.

He runs out to him. Just like he ran to the younger son. Just as humiliating for the father. But it’s the big brother who’s far off now.

He says, “Son, come inside, come to the feast!”
But the son replies, “Look. I’ve been slaving for you all my life and you never even gave me a goat to have a party with my friends. But now this son of yours, stinking of prostitutes and pig shit comes back and you kill the fattened calf for him?”

And once again, the father is gutted. He’s hurt. He never asked him to ‘slave’ for anything – it wasn’t supposed to be like that. Biting back a tear, he says,

“My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate because your brother was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.”

So here we are, asking the question – will he go inside? Will the family be reunited? But Jesus stops the story. He stops talking and he looks at the respectable crowd, as if to say, ‘Well then, are you coming in? The ball’s in your court. It’s up to you now.’

And with this story he’s redefined everything.

Redefining God: First of all a father.

This is a revolutionary picture of God. The Pharisees and the teachers were seeing God as a kind of distant arbiter. A referee. Watching us live our lives and assessing our performance. And of course the Bible does describe God as a judge – Jesus promised that he himself would be the ultimate Judge of every person in history – but Jesus is turning everything on its head by teaching the Pharisees that God is first of all a father. A loving father. A father who is deeply wounded by the rejection of his children. Who longs for them to come home. Who longs for the relationship to be put right.

Redefining sin: Not even a postcard.

Jesus takes a sledgehammer to the Pharisees’ definition of a ‘sinner’. He gives them a character that fits their categories down to the ground: dissolute, rebellious, sexually promiscuous, he’s even non-kosher with the pigs. But by showing us God as a father, Jesus points us to the heart of the problem. What is it that’s breaking his Dad’s heart all those days he’s sitting, looking out, waiting for him? Is it the parties? Is it the prostitutes? Is it the pigs? Not really, no. It’s that his son has run away from home. It’s that his son doesn’t love him back. It’s that his son wants his things and not his affection. It’s that his son wants him dead, and is living life as if he was. That’s the heart of ‘sin’. It’s not chocolate and lingerie. It’s the thing where we want God’s world but we certainly don’t want to hear his words. It’s the thing where we want the life that God has given us but we want to live it like he’s dead. That’s what grieves the heart of our Father in heaven.

Redefining goodness: Lost in your own back garden.

And then he goes a step further. The older brother: middle-class religious respectability through and through. Does everything he’s supposed to do, never puts a foot out of line, goes to church every Sunday. “I’ve been slaving for you all my life.” But hear that word, ‘slaving’. That doesn’t sound quite right. Why has he been doing everything the Father wanted him to do? Not because he loves him. Not out of joy and gratitude and affection. I don’t ‘slave’ for Rachael. He felt obligated. Not just that: he thought he was earning something. “You never even gave me a goat to have a party with my friends.” He’s been hoping for payment. He’s been working, obeying his Father so that he will get some of the Father’s stuff and can have some fun with his friends – people who are not his father. He doesn’t want his Dad’s love, he wants his stuff.

Sound familiar?

Jesus makes sure we know that the Father had to go out to both his sons. They were both ‘prodigals’. They were both lost all along. The older brother has just been lost in the back garden, digging away. And they both break the Father’s heart. They both bring dishonour on him as he runs out to get them.

Jesus is saying something deeply controversial here. He’s saying that the heart of the problem with all the ‘bad’ people in the world, is their rejection of God. And the heart of the problem with all the ‘good’ people in the world, is their rejection of God. Everybody is a prodigal because everybody is trying to make themselves somehow – whether that’s by running away from rules and religion, pursuing expressive self-discovery, or by strict obedience to convention. Everyone’s trying to save themselves and Jesus is saying that it’s never going to work. Everything Jesus did and said insisted that we have a problem that is so much bigger than bad behaviour, far too deep for ‘goodness’ as we know it to ever fix. We’ve all run away from God. We all want him dead.

Redefining hope: We can come home.

So Jesus is pretty clear that there’s no chance our self-generated ‘goodness’ is going to fix things between us and God – there’s no way it can reorient us at the deepest level so we actually want God, want to love and obey him, and don’t just want his stuff. So what hope is there for us? Well, there’s grace.

There is no better picture of grace than Jesus’ image of the father sitting, weeping, waiting, and then running out to his son. Wrapping his arms around his dirt-caked rags and picking him clean off the ground with the strength of his affection. Dressing him in the dignity of robes he does not remotely deserve – declaring him a member of the family he had tried to destroy – dancing all night with laugh-out-loud joy.

That’s God. That’s what he’s like. If we come home, if we want in, he is ‘gracious’ in the sense that nothing we could ever do will stop him throwing his arms wide open. He loves us, he wants us. He has seen every arrogant thought, heard every bitter murmur, he knows even the darkest, deepest secret and yet he looks at us and if we look back we’ll see nothing but irresistible affection. That’s what grace means.

And the ‘sinners’ in the crowd saw that look in Jesus’ eyes. And in time, so did some of the Pharisees. They heard him claim to be the judge of the whole world and they also saw him saying again and again to those who longed to hear it:
“Your sins are forgiven you.”
“Friend, your sins have been forgiven.”

“Daughter, your faith has saved you.”

“You’re faith has saved you, go in peace.”

But Jesus didn’t say that to everyone – it wasn’t a blanket proclamation. To some people he warned them that exactly the opposite was true and something needed to change. So what’s the difference? How do you know if you’ve really come home, or if you’re still lost in the back garden? I’ll have a look at what he said about that tomorrow.

How do you get to heaven? Part 1: A Weird Way To Propose

Recently I shared this photo on Facebook:

One friend commented saying that he really objected to this idea. Another messaged me saying that it might be a really stupid and annoying question but could I explain more about what this means?

But this is not an annoying question, this is one of the most important questions anyone could ask. How do you get to heaven? And how does ‘grace’ come into it? These are life-transforming questions. So I’ve thought a lot about it, and tried to write it down.

I’ve written this blog in four parts, and I’ll post them one a day for the next four days.

In the meantime, if you’d rather go straight to the source – almost everything I say here I’ve drawn from Luke’s biography of Jesus’ life. Luke’s a much better writer than I am, and he’s the one who spoke with the eyewitnesses, so please do read that instead of (or even as well as) whatever I have to say. It’s all available for free up here.

So that’s all sorted then. Here goes for thing one.

Grace means that… Ultimate reality is personal.
Intensely personal.

If I say ‘heaven’ what is the picture that comes into your mind? What’s the logic? I half-remember drawing a picture of heaven in Sunday school once in which Skittles played a fairly large part. Maybe for you it’s not Skittles, but I reckon there are two ideas about heaven that in our culture most of us absorbed pretty naturally when we were kids. One is the vague harps/dresses/clouds imagery, which is deeply lame compared to the images in the Bible. (A city – a feast – glorious physical bodies – hate-free, pain-free, death-free loving community between people – heaven and earth colliding to create something spectacularly, immaculately, concretely new.) The other is the idea that basically heaven works like nectar points. You build up credit as you go about your daily life, and then heaven is the reward that you cash in at the end. Or maybe more like a holiday in Majorca: as in, heaven is for putting your feet up after a long life’s work and getting some well-deserved rest.

But those ideas didn’t come from Jesus, they didn’t come from the Bible. That’s what the institutions want to teach us – the school assemblies, the semi-secular versions of religion that politicians prefer, even the big, powerful churches who’ve largely forgotten about Jesus. They want to take that lurking possibility in our minds that there might really be a God who made us, and use it to produce in us a vague sense of niceness and conformity.

“Jesus says, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’” as every primary school assembly for seven years reminded me, “So what he means is that if you’re nice to other people, they will be nice to you.”

I mean, that’s not quite what he said…

But it’s close enough, right? And anyway you won’t notice the difference because you’re 6.

And as I drank this ethical system in with all those little cartons of milk, I was also swallowing the corresponding idea of heaven as a way in which God gives you a cosmic gold star for good behaviour. If you keep being nice to other people on the playground, then God will be nice to you in the big assembly at the end of time and maybe even give you a prize.

The Bible’s idea of what God wants for us after we die, however, is all in all a bit more adult. One might even say X-rated. When Jesus talks about ‘heaven’ he talks about it as a wedding feast. He loves to call himself ‘The Bridegroom’. At one point, St. Paul is talking about how incredible the mystery is of a husband and wife becoming ‘one flesh’ – and he means it in the fullest, most explicit sense – and then he turns around and says, “but I am talking about Christ and the church.” God and his people. Bride and groom. Heaven is not nectar points. Heaven is a marriage.

That’s not to say it’s just a kind of zen union of disembodied souls with the Ultimate One. No – like I said, Jesus’ vision of ultimate reality is much more interesting and much messier than Plato’s. It’s a whole new world, as Aladdin would say, glorious, physical, perfect, infinitely exciting, unimaginably beautiful, full of culture and relationships and everything that is good about this creation. But in and above and beyond all of that, it’s a world utterly drenched in the person of God himself. God. Right there.

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.”

“They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”

 “They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”

Not only that but “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” Consider that image for a second. Have you ever felt what it is for someone else to wipe a tear from your cheek? Think of that tenderness, that intimacy. When I think about ‘heaven’, I want to try to think about that.

So I think maybe when we ask, ‘Who gets to go to heaven?’ we’re already on the wrong track because if we asked it to God I think he’d look at us like he’s not sure that’s the right question. For a start it’s quite a self-centric way of looking at the ultimate destiny of the universe. The more fundamental question is surely, ‘Where is the world headed – and what part do I play in that?’ But even if we’re thinking about our own personal future – which is still a fair enough thing to consider – we’ve got our mental geography all wrong. ‘Who gets to go to heaven? Don’t you mean, come?’

I think the more I read of how Jesus talked about it, the more I realise the question is something a bit more like: ‘Who has, forever, a relationship of mutual love and passionate devotion with the living God of the universe, revealed in Jesus?’ (I realise that’s a bit wordy.)

And already at this stage we can see something of how drastically the normal, dare-I-say-CofE-primary-school way of thinking about it has missed the point. Forget for a moment that I’m with Rachael (this will be easier if you didn’t know it in the first place…). Imagine that I met a girl at uni, and I really liked her. So I thought about it, and I remembered all the times that someone has said to me that I’m a really nice guy. I remembered all the times I’d been kind to someone, or made a sacrifice for someone else. I remembered all the times I’d told the truth, and all the nasty things I hadn’t done, certainly in comparison to some other people I know. So I drop this girl a facebook message and I ask her out for coffee. And we have a nice chat, and she laughs at a couple of my jokes, and after half an hour or so I kind of shuffle in my seat and rearrange my hair in that way I do when I have something important to say – then I look up at her and say:

“Look, I’ve been thinking about it. And I’m pretty confident I deserve to marry you.”

That’s not how it works, right? Because relationships with real, personal people don’t work on the basis of merit. They are not a points system. This is a fundamental difference between Christianity and a lot of other religions and beliefs, maybe all of the others. Grace is a concept which only makes sense if we start by seeing that if God is a person. So life is not a kind of gameshow where our ultimate good is the prize of an all-expenses paid eternal holiday on the Costa-del-Sol, instead it’s an ultimately personal, everlasting life with him so close he can wipe the tears from our cheeks. Because if that’s the case then a merit system would be pretty weird.

So if it’s not a merit thing like the assemblies/politicians/general-defenders-of-respectability say, what is the situation? If Jesus doesn’t draw a line somewhere on the spectrum from Hitler to Mother Teresa and declare everyone above it to be ‘in’, what does he propose instead?

Tomorrow I’ll start to answer that question by taking a look at possibly the greatest, and scariest story, ever told.