Who gets to heaven?

Fr Tom Weston (a Jesuit priest) tells a story about someone explaining what it means in Christianity when Jesus says that you can get into heaven only through Him. She said: Jesus is standing at the gates of heaven, saying, ‘Come on in!’ E equals MC squared means that no one is left out and no one is left behind. About people who die with unfinished business: God sorts all of that out on the other side for people who have stuff that needs sorting out. We do not have to get all of the knots untied before going to God. We go to God (whether this side of the veil or the other), and the knots are untied (Charles H. Spurgeon).

Fr Vincent Lampert (a Catholic priest) tells a story about a woman who was worried about her husband, who was atheist and had committed suicide, and whether or not he would go to heaven. She went to a church devoted to St John Vianney, and she saw what she realised afterwards was a vision of St John Vianney, and he told her, ‘You were devout, and he supported that. He drove you to church on Sundays; he never complained about the amount of time and energy you gave to the church. God has taken all of these and many other good things into account. Don’t worry about him. He’s fine. Get on with your day.’

In the book of Jonah, God forgives the whole city of Nineveh, saying, ‘But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?’ He did this because he tended the great city and made it grow.

A few months ago, someone non-Christian, without a real belief in an afterlife, died after an illness. She appeared in dream to someone left behind, laughing, and saying that everything was absolutely fine, and it’s not how she thought it would be, that things work differently, and that it would be too difficult to explain properly. We would understand, ourselves, when we got there.

The ‘I AM WHO AM’ name of God from the Old Testament is sometimes construed as: No matter what you do, I will never let you go.