Welcome to Resurrection Parish.  We are beginning the fourth week of our message series, “Important Enough.”  This series has been looking at the issue of when is enough, enough?  There are a lot of areas of life where we ponder if we are dedicating “enough” time and energy into them.
    Today we are going to explore the question, “How good is good enough to get into heaven?”  This reminds me something that the late-Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete said during a retreat he was giving that I attended.  Msgr. Albacete was born in Puerto Rico, and was literally a rocket scientist, having a Ph.D. in Astrophysics.  Later he responded to God’s call and became a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, and completed a second doctorate in theology.  Eventually he became the spiritual director for the North American area of the ecclesial community, Communion and Liberation.
    As he related it, when he was a boy, preparing for his First Penance, he was taught about what a venial and mortal sin was, and about Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell.  Having a good sense of himself, the youthful Msgr. Albacete realized that he was not good enough for heaven, so he said that Purgatory was good enough for him, then God could do the rest to get him into Heaven.  While unaware of the theological truth of the matter, the 7-year-old Albacete was not far off the point.
    Most polls of people who say they believe in God say they think they’re good people and they think they’re going to heaven….or at least purgatory.  The ultimate insurance policy: purgatory.  For many people, especially “cultural” Catholics, they use a sort of spiritual calculus:  I got a calculation going on with God. I’ll be just good enough to get it into heaven. I don’t want to be too good because then I will miss out on having a good time in this world, but not so bad that I tip the scale.
    This attitude lends itself to a basic uncertainty since we’re basing our calculation on a hunch. We do not have a mile-marker or standard to go by. In school we have grades and report cards. In sports we have the score and other stats to tell us how we are doing. At work we have annual reviews or job performance evaluations. However, we don’t have that when it comes to getting into heaven.
    As we have been saying throughout this series, while we may worry about enough, enough is not even the right goal. Making good enough our goal for heaven just doesn’t make sense either. So what is our goal? What does Jesus have to say about this?
    To answer that question we’re going to take a look at a passage we find in the Gospel of St. Mark. At one point Jesus takes on the topic of heaven and hell, and he appears to make it seem incredibly easy to end up in either place. St. Mark tells us that Jesus once said, “Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward” (Mark 9:40).
    Jesus seems to say that receiving reward from God can be as simple as giving someone “a cup of water to drink.” That sounds crazy, there has got to be more to it than that. Jesus adds a little word, that we use all the time, that he actually used only once in a while. He only used this word when he wanted to especially emphasize a point, he says, “Amen.”
    What’s he trying to emphasize? God’s openness and accessibility, God’s generosity. And God’s generous view of us and our good works. Our acts of service actually have eternal value. To receive reward we don’t have strive for amazing, incredible things for God, we can do simple stuff.
    Please note what Jesus doesn’t say: he doesn’t say the drink of water gets us into heaven. It gets us rewards in heaven. We still don’t know how good enough is good enough to get into heaven.
    All of which makes the next verse even more confusing and uncomfortable. He says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown in to the sea” (Mark 9:41).
    Jesus took sin VERY seriously. He says that if we lead someone into sin, especially someone who is either young and innocent or just young in their faith, it is pretty much the worst thing that we could do. He pretty much says, violent death would be preferable. So he’s pretty serious about sin. He continues in this same vein, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go down into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:42).
    A side note:  Gehenna was a real place. It was the town dump for Jerusalem, and they kept the trash burning all the time.  It really smelled bad, and it had a bad history. At one time, when the Israelites were being unfaithful to the covenant and worshiping the god Moloch, they would take their child there to be a burnt, human sacrifice to Moloch.  It came to be seen as an image of Hell.
    Jesus continues this line by suggesting self-mutilation of other body parts if they are causing you to sin.  Now he was using hyperbole, or exaggeration, to make his point, and some of his audience might have found it funny. But its no joke. Sin starts in our heart and so no self-mutilation can solve that problem. The reality of living a life of unrepentant sin is tantamount to hanging out in that smoldering dump. It is a terrible way to live, and that is his immediate concern here: not so much that we’re going to hell when we die, but that we’re living in hell right now, today.
    It seems to present a contradiction: on the one hand, it is incredibly easy to please our heavenly Father and earn rewards in heaven, a ridiculously low bar. On the other hand, he takes sin with bracing seriousness, an incredibly high bar we can’t even meet. And we still don’t know what’s good enough, and what isn’t good enough to get into heaven.
    How good is good enough to get to heaven? Wrong question. We don’t “get to heaven” by our own effort. Jesus never preached that God lets good people go to heaven and automatically sends sinners to hell. He taught that God was intent NOT on giving people what they deserved or what they had earned because that would never be good enough. God gives heaven to anyone who is willing to receive forgiveness through his son Jesus Christ.
    Our actions matter, they bring us into the kingdom of heaven, but not because they tip the cosmic scales in our favor, but because we do them in Christ. Every time we sin, it’s like hanging out in that dump. Every time we exercise charity or virtue, we’re living in Christ, we’re building up rewards in heaven, and our character is being shaped and transformed to be more like Christ.
    You don’t have to worry about being good enough, because on the cross Christ is more than enough.
     Good people don’t go to heaven, forgiven people do.