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.