The people of Israel, descended from Abraham and Sarah, had
their beginnings as a poor group of slaves running away from their masters in Egypt. They had
to fight for a land to call their own. But like people everywhere, when the
Israelites stopped being slaves and started to become prosperous, they didn’t
worry too much about social division. The rich became richer and the poor
poorer; some people slept on ivory beds while others lost their family’s land,
and with it any hope of supporting their families. In the end Israel’s kings started playing power politics
with the superpower nations around them – Assyria,
Egypt, Babylon – and lost. The people had to leave
their land. And the Hebrew Bible says that this disaster was a judgment from
God, because they were no longer acting justly, as God’s people.

Last week I spoke about
God’s mission to challenge injustice on a structural level, to speak unpopular
truths to powerful people. Prophets in the Hebrew Bible like Isaiah, speaking
to their people in exile, looked forward to a day when God’s chosen ruler would
bring justice to Israel
and to the world. Here is one of the descriptions of that ruler, which
Christians believe looks forward to Jesus.

Here is my servant! I
have made him strong. He is my chosen one; I am pleased with him. I have given
him my Spirit, and he will bring justice to the nations. He won’t shout or yell
or call out in the streets. He won’t break off a bent reed or put out a dying
flame, but he will make sure that justice is done. He won’t stop or give up
until he brings justice everywhere on earth.

Injustice is just one aspect
of wrongdoing or sin. In the newspapers, sin seems to mean sexual misconduct.
But the Bible also condemns the hypocrisy of respectable people who pretend
they are perfect – and that might give both newspaper journalists and the
people who buy and read the papers cause for thought. Two major ways Christians
understand sin are as missing the mark we have aimed at – not achieving
perfection – and as deliberately turning away from God and God’s purposes for
us, which I spoke of last week. And sin, however we understand it, inevitably leads
to God’s call for justice and to God’s word of judgment.

Much of the Hebrew Bible
takes a very simple line on justice and judgment: if you do what God commands
you will prosper, and if you break God’s laws and do wrong you will suffer for
it. On the other hand, the Hebrew Bible also contains the story of Job, a man
who did nothing wrong but still lost everything and everyone he held dear,
because God was allowing the devil to test him, to see whether he would turn
against God. The book of Job shows that just because bad things happen to you
it doesn’t necessarily mean God is punishing you; bad things also happen to
good people. This is part of the mystery of life. When Job asks God to explain
his unjust suffering, God responds that since Job cannot even understand how
the world came into being, how could he possibly understand the answer to his
question?

In most of the Hebrew Bible
justice and judgment play out in this world, and there is little interest in
life after death. Whether you have been good or bad in life, the world of the
dead is seen as a shadowy existence; it is this life in which you live
with the consequences of your good and your bad deeds. It is this life in which we are called to love
and be just, to act in favour of widows, orphans, foreigners, people who have
no one to support them, and to fulfil all God’s purposes for our life.

In the New Testament, however,
Jesus tells stories about judgment after death, sometimes called the Last
Judgment. This is pictured as a time when Jesus will return to sort good fish from
bad in the fisherman’s nets and throw the bad away; to sift weeds from wheat at
the harvest and burn them; to chop down a tree that has borne no fruit after
careful tending.

Jesus tells two longer
stories about life after death. One is about a rich man who, while he is alive,
ignores the wretched state of a poor beggar. When he dies, he is in fiery torment
but the beggar is in a place of honour by Abraham, because in his lifetime the
rich man had everything, and now it is the beggar’s turn for good things. He
begs Abraham to send the beggar with cooling water, but there is an
unbridgeable gap between them. Then he asks to go back to earth, to warn his
brothers. But Abraham refuses. His brothers could
find out for themselves, if they would read the Hebrew Bible; but they will not
change their ways, even if someone came back from death to tell them of the
danger they are in.

Jesus’ second story also separates
good from evil in the Last Judgment. This time he is compared to a shepherd
separating the sheep in his flock from the goats. The sheep will go to heaven.
They fed hungry people, gave clothes to the naked, visited prisoners – and
though they did not know it, by helping others they helped Jesus. The goats will
go to hell. They had the opportunity to help others but did not take it, and when
they ignored others in need, it was Jesus they were ignoring.

The Last Judgment as
described in this story takes place after Jesus’ promised return to earth, in
other words after the last chance
people have of being sorry and being forgiven for their mistakes. For Christians
believe that while everybody sins – everybody human misses the mark of
perfection sometimes – in this life there
is always the possibility of forgiveness and a second chance. Indeed, we are
told that we should always forgive
others when they do us wrong, that we should love our enemies and pray for them, because through Jesus’ death
and resurrection, God shows us how God has already forgiven us what we have done wrong. However, these stories also teach us that after
we have died, each of us must take responsibility for our actions in life, good
and evil.

Life after death used to be
one of the most important teachings in Christianity. Preachers made their
congregations behave well by threatening them with hell if they did wrong. The
church drew a lot of its power from presenting itself as the place which could
issue you a passport to heaven or commit you to everlasting punishment in the
flames of hell, with ministers having the authority to decide who should be
forgiven and who should be punished. I believe this was a mistake. Why should people
believe that God is love, or that they should love one another, if they are
made to do so only in order to avoid everlasting torture?

The belief that justice
comes only after we die also made Christians less interested in seeing justice
here and now, so unjust systems could remain unchallenged. But times have
changed. Christian Aid, an aid agency that works with people of all faiths all
over the world, has as its slogan: We believe in life before death. This is what the
Hebrew Bible tells us too: God wants justice in this life for people who are poor and vulnerable.

Another reason why life
after death is no longer such a key belief for Christians is that some
Christians think that Jesus’ resurrection, his return to life after his death,
did not happen literally, but is a story explaining why Jesus’ influence on his
followers survived even his dying. If people do not believe that Jesus
had a life beyond death, they can be even less sure about their own survival after death. And of course,
this is an area where there can be no
certainty. The New Testament stories about Jesus’ resurrection all show his
friends doubting that such a thing could happen, until they experienced it for
themselves.

Most Christians who do
think there is such a thing as life after death do not believe in hell as a
place with literal flames. Instead, it is a condition where people are completely
separated from God: in other words, completely separated from all love, beauty,
goodness. Indeed, for someone to end up in that condition, there can have been no goodness left in them at all. Like a
tree that bears no fruit, such people – if any such people exist – would be fit
for nothing except destruction. One of Jesus’ vivid word-pictures of hell was
of Gehenna, the rubbish dump outside Jerusalem,
where the fires burning rubbish never went out and the worms eating rotting-down
compost never died.

Heaven, by contrast, is the
place where we will encounter God directly – but it, too, is not seen as a
literal place. Sometimes Jesus’ words speak of heaven as a state of mind,
something within us. Sometimes it seems more like a perfect earthly place, somewhere
where there is no war, no crying, where babies do not die young and old people
are healthy and long-lived, where God is so fully present that none of us will
need to explain God to one another or argue about who is right, for God will be
with each one of us.

Such a place is hard even to
imagine, and it is also hard to imagine ourselves fit for such a place. Some
Christians believe, therefore, that after we die there will be a process of
removing our human imperfections, making us good and strong enough to live in
the light of God’s presence; this idea is called purgatory, because it purges or
cleans away what has been wrong in our lives.

You’ll already have realised
from these dialogues that Christians don’t all think the same way about
everything, and the question of just who will go to heaven and who to hell is
not something all Christians agree on.

Some Christians believe that
only the people in their particular church, who believe exactly as they do,
will be found worthy of heaven. To me that makes God very small-minded, if God
can only find goodness in people with one very specific way of looking at the
universe. Even a heaven filled only with people who think exactly the way I do
doesn’t seem very attractive to me, and I doubt you’d want it either!

Other Christians believe
that Christians will go to heaven, but people of other faiths will not, because
they think that only believing that Jesus is God, and accepting God’s
forgiveness for our sins through Jesus, can let us in. Christians who think
this way often quote one of Jesus’ sayings from John’s Gospel: I am the way,
the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. This
saying contains a profound truth, which I am beginning to appreciate more
through learning something about Islam in these sessions. The idea of God as
Father, as our loving parent, is a unique understanding which comes through
Jesus, a gift which Christians can offer to people of other faiths, who have
encountered God in other ways.

However, Jesus also says in
John’s Gospel, when he is speaking of himself as a good shepherd: ‘I have other sheep who do not belong to this
fold.’ So just because I do not recognise people as part of my tradition,
that does not mean Jesus does not know them. Of course, I am running the risk
here of being offensive to people of other faiths, if it sounds as though I am
saying, They are really Christians, they just don’t know it. It’s also
possible that the reverse may be true – I may be a Muslim and just don’t know
it. But I am sure that our merciful God recognises the goodness in each
individual, and will never let that goodness go to waste.

The other difficulty
Christians have about who we expect to find in heaven brings us back from mercy
to justice. If everyone is forgiven
their sins, if Hitler and Stalin and people who abuse and kill children are all
let into heaven, where is the justice in that? Yet if we say that anyone is
beyond the power of God to cleanse, heal and restore, we are limiting God, and
that we cannot do either. This is a mystery too deep for me. I am content to
trust myself and everyone here to the justice and the mercy of the God in whom
we all believe, Jews, Christians and Muslims.