Love Wins: At the Heart of Life’s Big Questions. Rob Bell
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would not free-fall indefinitely down into an abyss of giant red caves and hissing steam.
I show you this painting because, as surreal as it is, the fundamental story it tells about heaven—that it is somewhere else—is the story that many people know to be the Christian story.
Think of the cultural images that are associated with heaven: harps and clouds and streets of gold, everybody dressed in white robes.
(Does anybody look good in a white robe? Can you play sports in a white robe? How could it be heaven without sports? What about swimming? What if you spill food on the robe?)
Think of all of the jokes that begin with someone showing up at the gates of heaven, and St. Peter is there, like a bouncer at a club, deciding who does and doesn’t get to enter.
For all of the questions and confusion about just what heaven is and who will be there, the one thing that appears to unite all of the speculation is the generally agreed-upon notion that heaven is, obviously, somewhere else.
And so the questions that are asked about heaven often have an otherworldly air to them:
What will we do all day?
Will we recognize people we used to know?
What will it be like?
Will there be dogs there?
I’ve heard pastors answer, “It will be unlike anything we can comprehend, like a church service that goes on forever,” causing some to think, “That sounds more like hell.”
And then there are those whose lessons about heaven consist primarily of who will be there and who won’t be there. And so there’s a woman sitting in a church service with tears streaming down her face, as she imagines being reunited with her sister who was killed in a car accident seventeen years ago. The woman sitting next to her, however, is realizing that if what the pastor is saying about heaven is true, she will be separated from her mother and father, brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends forever, with no chance of any reunion, ever. She in that very same moment has tears streaming down her face too, but they are tears of a different kind.
When she asks the pastor afterward if it’s true that, because they aren’t Christians none of her family will be there, she’s told that she’ll be having so much fun worshipping God that it won’t matter to her. Which is quite troubling and confusing, because the people she loves the most in the world do matter to her.
Are there other ways to think about heaven, other than as that perfect floating shiny city hanging suspended there in the air above that ominous red and black realm with all that smoke and steam and hissing fire?
I say yes, there are.
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In Matthew 19 a rich man asks Jesus: “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”
For some Christians, this is the question, the one that matters most. Compassion for the poor, racial justice, care for the environment, worship, teaching, and art are important, but in the end, for some followers of Jesus, they’re not ultimately what it’s all about.
It’s “all about eternity,” right?
Because that’s what the bumper sticker says.
There are entire organizations with employees, websites, and newsletters devoted to training people to walk up to strangers in public places and ask them, “When you die and God asks you why you should be let into heaven, what will you say?” There are well-organized groups of Christians who go door-to-door asking people, “If you were to die tonight, where would you go?”
The rich man’s question, then, is the perfect opportunity for Jesus to give a clear, straightforward answer to the only question that ultimately matters for many.
First, we can only assume, he’ll correct the man’s flawed understanding of how salvation works. He’ll show the man how eternal life isn’t something he has to earn or work for; it’s a free gift of grace.
Then, he’ll invite the man to confess, repent, trust, accept, and believe that Jesus has made a way for him to have a relationship with God.
Like any good Christian would.
Jesus, however, doesn’t do any of that.
He asks the man: “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”
“Enter life?”
Jesus refers to the man’s intention as “entering life”? And then he tells him that you do that by keeping the commandments? This wasn’t what Jesus was supposed to say.
The man, however, wants to know which of the commandments. There are 613 of them in the first five books of the Bible, so it’s a fair question. In the culture Jesus lived in, an extraordinary amount of time was spent in serious discussion and debate about these 613 commandments, dissecting and debating just how to interpret and obey them.
Were some more important than others?
Could they be summarized?
What do you do when your donkey falls in a hole on the Sabbath?
Rescuing your donkey would be work, and that would be breaking the Sabbath commandment to rest, but there were also commands to protect and preserve life, including the life of donkeys, so what happens when obeying one commandment requires you to break another?
The Ten Commandments were central to this discussion because of the way in which they covered so many aspects of life in so few words. Jesus refers to them in answering the man’s question about “which ones” by listing five of the Ten Commandments. But not just any five. The first four of the commandments were understood as dealing with our relationship with God—Jesus doesn’t list any of those. The remaining six deal with our relationships with each other. Jesus mentions five of them, leaving one out.
The man hears Jesus’s list of five and insists he’s kept them all.
Jesus then tells him, “Go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” which causes the man to walk away sad, “because he had great wealth.”
Did we miss something?
The big words, the important words—“eternal life,” “treasure,” “heaven”—were all there in the conversation, but they weren’t used in the ways that many Christians use them.
Shouldn’t Jesus have given a clear answer to the man’s obvious desire to know how to go to heaven when he dies? Is that why he walks away—because Jesus blew a perfectly good “evangelistic” opportunity? How does such a simple question—one Jesus could have answered so clearly from a Christian perspective—turn into such a convoluted dialogue involving commandments and treasures and wealth and ending with the man walking away?
The answer,
it turns out,
is in the question.
When the man asks about getting “eternal life,” he isn’t asking about how to go to heaven when he dies. This wasn’t a concern for the man or Jesus. This is why Jesus doesn’t tell people how to “go to heaven.” It wasn’t what Jesus came to do.
Heaven, for Jesus, was deeply connected with what he called “this age” and “the age to come.”
In Matthew 13 Jesus speaks of a harvest at the “end of the age,” and in Luke 20 he teaches about “the people of this age” and some who are “considered worthy of taking part in the age to come.” Sometimes he describes the age to come simply as “entering life,” as in Mark 9—“it’s better for you to enter life maimed”—and other times he teaches that by standing firm “you will win life [in the age to come],” as in Luke 21. And then, just before he leaves his disciples in Matthew 28, Jesus reassures them that he is with them “always, to the very end of the age.”
Jesus’s