Dear President Trump,
As a Catholic priest, I take seriously your recently stated desire to get into heaven. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” you told Fox News yesterday. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
Mr. President, you have been working to bring peace to Ukraine, where Pope Francis said, “Christ is crucified in refugees who flee from bombs with children in their arms.” I can understand how working toward peace would awaken within you the desire to continue to do good and also turn your thoughts to heaven.
I can also understand the feeling that you are “at the bottom of the totem pole,” which we all feel from time to time. Spiritual writers often call this “compunction,” a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re all sinful in one way or another. Jesuits often say that we are all “loved sinners.” Loved by God, but sinful. We shouldn’t lose sight of either word.
Moreover, the desire to enter heaven is part of the universal human longing for union with God. As is of course, the equally human desire to avoid the fires of hell, which, by the way, I believe in.
So even though our lives are quite different, we are, like our fellow human beings, in the same boat: wanting entrance into the reign of God.
So where does one go from here? How do any of us get to heaven?
The first thing to recognize is that the desire for union with God (which finds its fulfillment in heaven, when we shall see God, as St. Paul says, “face to face”) comes from God. Therefore, that desire is to be taken seriously, maybe more seriously than anything else in your life. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord,” St. Augustine said. This is something of what he meant. In other words, it’s a call from God. So don’t ignore it.
The second thing to remember is that Jesus was clear about what it takes to gain entrance in the kingdom of God. Perhaps the most direct explanation Jesus gives of who is included and who is excluded comes in the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in a passage often called the “Judgment of the Nations.”
There, Jesus tells the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, where he compares himself to a shepherd separating the sheep (good) on one side and the goats (bad) on the other. My friend Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament professor, once joked that she tells her Jewish audiences that if you get to heaven and you see two signs, “Sheep This Way” and “Goats This Way,” follow the sheep.
But what determines who is a sheep and who is a goat? It’s simple. Jesus says that the sheep cared for him during their time on earth. But, they ask, “When did we do that?” Jesus says that whenever they cared for “the least,” they were caring for him directly. You probably know this famous passage:
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.
Likewise, the goats are told that they didn’t care for him during their time on earth. They ask the same question of Jesus: “When did we not care for you?” And they are told the same thing. When you didn’t care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked person and the imprisoned, you didn’t care for Jesus.
Given all the questions about how to get into heaven, it is refreshing that Jesus is so clear.
So, who would that mean caring for today?
Those who are hungry and thirsty are legion in our country. How are you caring for them? Remember: Caring for them is caring for Jesus. Many of us struggle with how to do this, but as president, it’s in your power to cut off aid—or increase aid—to precisely these people. But there’s more: Jesus is also clear in the Parable of the Good Samaritan that caring for our “neighbor” is meant in the broadest possible sense. Today, that includes caring for the poor and hungry overseas as well.
The “stranger,” in Jesus’s day, would have meant, as it does today, the orphan, the widow, the migrant and the refugee. (“Resident aliens” are fixtures in the Old and New Testaments, and we’re constantly asked to care for them.) But let’s get back to Matthew 25 and think about the stranger as Jesus himself. The prisoner, too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but imagine Jesus in Alligator Alcatraz. That’s something of what Jesus is talking about. If we mistreat the migrant, the refugee or the person in prison, we are mistreating him.
The untreated sick are still in our hospitals and on our city streets—as well as in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and in the developing world. Are we helping them?
Overall, the question Jesus asks his followers is: How are you caring for all these people?
But Matthew 25 doesn’t exhaust Jesus’s roadmap for how to get into heaven. His public ministry is radically oriented toward love, mercy and, especially, forgiveness. And it’s a forgiveness that often seems to stretch the limits of human nature. (Theologians would say, however, that it perfects it.) Even from the Cross, when one might imagine Jesus would be the angriest and most vengeful, he prays for and forgives those who have nailed him to the Cross. So there can be no revenge, bitterness or hatred, even of our enemies, in the Christian worldview. We’re supposed to love our enemies, not exact vengeance.
If you’re still curious about his worldview, then check out some of his parables, which I’m sure you know. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, a father who has every right to cast out a son who has wasted his life welcomes him back even before he utters a word of repentance. Forgiveness, again, is at the heart of the Christian message. Today, in fact, Pope Leo XIV said, “Let us all learn to forgive because to forgive one another is to build a bridge of peace.”
Mr. President, as I mentioned earlier, you have been working hard to bring peace to Ukraine and have even stated your desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize. If you want peace, you need to work for forgiveness, and that begins, as it does with all of us, in our own lives. Still another insight comes from Pope Paul VI, who said, “If you want peace, work for justice.”
Finally, the Gospel reading for this Sunday is helpful. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus describes entrance into the reign of heaven as going through a “narrow door.” And he says that not everyone who thinks they will get in will get in. “I do not know where you are from,” he says to some people. And who are they?
Well, often this reading is used to show the “reversal” in the reign of God: Those who expect to enter are turned away and those who thought themselves excluded are included. There is a sense of Jesus turning away those who say they’re Christian but don’t put their words into practice. As Jesus says elsewhere, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Jesus “doesn’t know” people who don’t walk the walk. Meaning they won’t get into heaven.
Some of your Christian followers might object to the idea that “works” get us into heaven—arguing that we are saved by faith alone. It’s an old theological question, and certainly no one gets into heaven without God’s help and saving grace. But Jesus also says that simply saying that you’re Christian or that Jesus is Lord is not enough. You’ve got to walk the walk. That means walking beside those who are poor, sick, naked, hungry, strangers or in any way struggling. I’m trying to do the same thing, imperfectly.
I pray that you may be open to this journey to the reign of God, which is open to all who can walk through that narrow gate.
Yours in Christ,
James Martin, S.J.
