A meme is making the rounds lately. When I first saw it, I felt sick. How could someone who professes to be a follower of Jesus have such a deep misunderstanding of the very nature of the gospel? How could they misunderstand the compassion, love, and justice embodied by Jesus in the New Testament?
First, the gospel is not about getting into heaven after we die, because we’ve been through a thorough vetting process and found to be acceptable by God. One of the core ideas, perhaps the core idea, of the gospel is grace grounded in love. If heaven practiced extreme vetting, we’d all lose out. The fallenness of humanity and our need for a redemption that we cannot secure on our own is ignored here.
And the picture many have of the afterlife is inconsistent with the picture we are given in the New Testament. As N.T. Wright puts it, “The traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage, postmortem journey represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope.” The hope of Christianity is the redemption of all creation, of a new heaven and a new earth, the redemption of our bodies and all of reality, including the physical.
There are other problems, other disanalogies, present here. The United States is not heaven, or the New Jerusalem, and Donald Trump is not God.
Second, the Bible is very clear about what true religion is; it leaves no doubt. James 1 says that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” There are plenty of orphans and widows among the refugees of our world. We must find ways to care for them, if we want to live out the implications of the gospel.
Third, issues of national security, the process of vetting, and our obligations to refugees are complicated issues that a proof-text from the Bible is not sufficient for solving. However, for those who are followers of Christ, there is a clear mandate to help those in need, which in our day and time includes refugees. As Matthew reports, Jesus says,
I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
To be honest, as someone who tries to take seriously the words of Jesus and put them into practice, this passage is a bit chilling. We do some to help “the least of these,” but if I’m honest we could do much more. To simply dismiss all of the world’s refugees because of some misguided ideas about heaven, or the false gods of safety or Christian nationalism, is simply unacceptable.
The task of the follower of Christ is to figure out how to put these words into practice in our contemporary situation. I certainly don’t have all the answers here, but I am confident that whatever the practical implications of this passage are, they are diametrically opposed to the misguided ideas expressed above about gates, walls, and extreme vetting in heaven.