Hard Teaching 10 Sorry Mum, you can't come

Why did Jesus tell his followers to leave their families behind to follow him?
There are a couple of occasions where Jesus says things that sound very hard to our ears. Like this one:
Jesus called a man to follow him, and he said he would, but just needed to bury his father. Jesus replied, "Let the dead bury their own dead." Another one said," I will follow, I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:59-62)
Harsh? It sounds like it.
Then there as the time when Jesus was in a house teaching a crowd of people, and someone knocked at the door saying, "Your mother and brothers are out here, asking for you." Jesus' response was to say "here are my mother, father and brothers, right here in the room with me." (Matthew 12:46-50)

What to make of this?
Perhaps Jesus didn't want his followers to be tempted away from putting his priorities first. In the case of his own family, few of them believed in him during his lifetime, and they tried at least once to interfere in his mission. Perhaps he had to keep them at arms length, or they would have tried to prevent him doing what he needed to do.
His first retort to the man who was waiting for his Dad's funeral sounds especially bad, doesn't it? Let the dead bury their own dead? What kind of comment is that?
Well, probably not the kind of comment we think it is. "Let me bury my father" didn't actually mean, "he's dead and I'm waiting for the funeral." It usually meant, he's old, and I have to run the farm/family business/look after things at home until he dies, and then I'll be free to please myself. So it could be more of an excuse.
Jesus said that his presence wouldn't always be good for families. It would stir up division - some people would be for him, others against him. (Luke 12:51-54) It would be important for his followers to realise that becoming a disciples meant sacrifice. Better to be told that at the outset, than discover halfway through.

So maybe this is about counting the cost before you sign on the line. Maybe we want to have our cake and eat it too much, and sometimes being a Christian will mean some hard choices. Maybe it will.

But don't let anything I've said persuade you that it's OK to turn your back on your family. The fifth commandment still applies: "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you." (Exodus 20:12)

Honour them.

But don't let them be more important than God.

Hard Teaching 9 The Afterlife

"Where is heaven?"
"Where do non-Christians go when they die?"

I'm going to take these two questions together, and try and think about life after death. Traditionally, people think that Christian belief is that there are two places to go when you die: you either go to hell, and get prodded by devils with pitchforks, or you go to heaven and sit on a cloud for compulsory harp lessons.

I'm not sure anybody really believes either of these two caricatures any more, which owe more to writings like Dante's Inferno than the Bible.

So what does the Bible say? Not a great deal, if the truth be told. The last book of the Bible, Revelation, describes heaven the most, but it is hard to penetrate through the very symbolic language and work out what is a realistic picture. For instance, John, the writer says this at one point: "Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” and there was no longer any sea."

The translators put "new heaven and new earth" in quotes, as a kind of clue that this was not a literal description, but what about the phrase, "there as no longer any sea." No buckets and spades in heaven? If you're big into surfing, are you going to be disappointed? Again, this is much more likely to be symbolic than actual. In Jewish thinking, the sea represented chaos, the primeval mess out of which God established the order of creation. God is always holding back the sea, restraining the chaos that threatens to overwhelm our lives, so that we can enjoy some peace.

But one day, John says, there ain't gonna be any sea. Chaos won't be a threat any more, always nearly sweeping us away. It will be finally and completely defeated. God's order will have triumphed.
But identifying where heaven is, cannot be done. John the gospel writer talks about us having "eternal life" if we come to Jesus. A new quality of life that begins now and goes on for ever. For him, heaven isn't so much a place as a state of being. It's the state of being right with God. Nothing to fear, ever again.

So if heaven is the state of being OK with God, then hell is the state of being not OK with him. Hell might not actually be so bad, if you're not interested in God. Sometimes people say that the doors to hell only have handles on the inside. God can't get in - he can't open the door from the outside, but people inside can get out, and go and be with God any time they like. they are only in there by choice.

If God is indeed loving and merciful, then I can't see that he wants to insist on us having a relationship with him if we don't want to. If we want to live without him, we're welcome to do so, and he will let us go. All the negative imagery that's sprung up around this ultimate choice is pretty unhelpful, although people might find, when their eyes are finally opened and they say things as they really are, that eternity without God is a pretty lonely and miserable existence.