It’s All about Grace

Paul Walton
28 September 2004

All of us have heard stories about getting to the Pearly Gates and meeting St Peter. Stories like this one:

A young couple are killed in an accident on the day before their wedding. They arrive at the Pearly Gates. St Peter feels sorry for them, and asks if there is anything he could do to make being in heaven even more pleasant. So they look at each other and ask if it would be possible to be married in heaven. St Peter looks a little thoughtful and says, ‘I think we can do that. Leave it with me.’

About a hundred years go by. One day, they run into St Peter and ask about the wedding. ‘Everything is being arranged,’ he assures them.

Another hundred years pass, and they see St Peter again. They remind him about the wedding and say, ‘We know that in heaven, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, and time is of no consequence ... but we’ve been waiting over two hundred years.’ St Peter replies, ‘I am truly sorry. All the arrangements were made the day after you arrived but there’s one problem.

‘What’s that?’ they ask.

St Peter says, ‘Have you ever tried to find a minister up here?’

A minister dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Just ahead of him is a bloke who’s dressed in sunglasses, a T-shirt, denim jacket, and scuffed sandshoes.

St Peter addresses this bloke: ‘Who are you, so that I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?’

The bloke replies: ‘My name is Mohammed Hassan. I drove a taxi in Sydney.’ St Peter consults his list. He smiles to himself and shakes the taxi driver’s hand. He says, ‘Take this robe of silk and staff of gold and enter the kingdom of heaven.’

The taxi driver goes into heaven with his robe and staff, and it’s the minister’s turn. He can’t wait to see what he gets, if a cabbie gets that treatment! He stands erect and booms out, ‘I am Fred Foghorn, a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia for the past fifty two years.’

St Peter consults his list. He has to flick through it for a while. Finally, he finds the minister’s name on a scrap of paper. He says, ‘Take this cotton robe and wooden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘Hold on,’ says the minister. ‘That man was a taxi driver, and he gets a robe of silk and a staff of gold. How can this be?’

‘Up here, we work by results,’ says St Peter. ‘While you preached, people slept; while he drove, people prayed.’

Stories like this are sometimes just fun; but often there is a sting in the tail. They are great stories; they tell us something about who we are before the ultimate questions of death in a way that we can bear.

Yet most of us don’t suppose they tell us anything about what actually happens when you die; most of us don’t imagine there are actually queues of people lined up outside huge gates made of pearl, with a bearded man in a nightdress smelling vaguely of fish, who is checking names off a list.

The story Jesus told about the rich man and Lazarus is similar. Most of the commentators are convinced that Jesus didn’t make this story up; it was doing the rounds, like stories about the Pearly Gates. People may well have heard it, or a story like it, before.

It’s important to realise that straight off, because it helps us to see that the truth of this story is about standing before the ultimate questions of death in a way that we can bear. It’s not about what ‘actually happens’. It is not telling us that people really recline at a feast, leaning back on Abraham himself. There is no great gulf fixed between those who are feasting, and those in torment; and people don’t have conversations across that gulf.

In this story, the beggar Lazarus had nothing; he sat by the rich man’s gate, not crying out for justice, but merely longing for scraps. He hoped for grace and mercy while the dogs licked his sores.

He didn’t receive it from the rich man. We don’t know why not. Perhaps the rich man was offended by his presence, though if he were why didn’t he simply arrange for him to be removed from his gate? I suspect that the rich man never even noticed Lazarus, or gave him a moment’s thought. Or perhaps he thought that’s the way it is, and the way it should be. God has blessed me with riches; this beggar must have done something wrong to be where he is. I’m a self-made man; I don’t need charity, and I’m not giving it to a beggar.

I remember singing the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ in school assemblies as a child in England. I wonder if you know the original version? The second verse of this nineteenth century hymn didn’t make it into the Australian Hymn Book; it didn’t even make it into the 1931 Methodist Hymn Book. It goes:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Could you sing that verse? I couldn’t. Yet our ancestors in faith sang it with gusto. It sounds like it comes from this parable: ‘the poor man at his gate’. And interestingly, it is likely that ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was written from a castle, Markree Castle, in Ireland.

For Jesus, it’s not about how some unfathomable, incomprehensible, inscrutable God ‘orders’ things. For Jesus, it’s all about mercy and grace. All his life, Lazarus looked for mercy and grace; in the bosom of Abraham, he finds it. All his life, the rich man was a stranger to grace and mercy; in Hades, he is a stranger to it still.

If we think of life and death being about mercy and grace, we will not go far wrong. We are given the grace of life, and the grace of new life in Christ. As recipients of grace, we live by grace; we are meant to notice the ‘lazaruses’, those in need of mercy and grace from us. Grace is meant to be the air we breathe. If we breathe it ‘down here’, it won’t seem too strange ‘up there’.

Let me finish with another story:

A man dies and goes to heaven. Of course, St Peter meets him at the pearly gates. St Peter says, ‘Here’s how it works. You need 100 points to make it into heaven. You tell me all the good things you’ve done, and I give you a certain number of points for each item, depending on how good it was. When you reach 100 points, you get in.’

‘Okay,’ the man says, ‘I was married to the same woman for fifty years and never once cheated on her, not even in my heart.’

‘What a start!’ says St Peter. ‘That’s worth three points!’

‘Three points?’ the man says. ‘Well, I went to church all my life and supported its ministry with my time, talents and money.’

‘Terrific!’ says St. Peter, ‘that’s certainly worth a point.’

‘One point? Golly. How about this: I started an op shop in my suburb and worked in a shelter for street kids.’

‘Fantastic, that’s good for two more points,’ St Peter says.

‘TWO POINTS?!!’ the man cries. ‘At this rate, I’ll only get into heaven by the grace of God!’

St Peter beams and says: ‘Come on in, my friend!’

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