Difficult Questions:
Hell
20 September 2015
Texts: Isaiah 14:12-20; Psalm 139:1-18; Revelation 6:1-8; Luke 12:1-12
The Top 10 Things to Know
about Hell
10. About 99% of the images in
your head of hell- the red demon with a pointed tail, the levels of suffering,
the pit of fire, the presence of those who never knew Christ, the darkness, AND
the eternal wailing and torment (plus the image of Judas in hell)- are all from
Dante’s The Divine Comedy (or The Inferno). His writing was a piece of
political literature that condemned powers of his day that he didn’t like. It
also was Dante’s way of confirming himself as a poet for the ages by using the
poet Virgil, who lived and died before Jesus, as his guide. Additionally,
Dante’s work was a distillation of Greek and Roman mythology, some alleged
gospels from the second, third, and fourth centuries, and one other work that
had serious influence in Dante’s lifetime. The majority of the artwork about
hell is not from Biblical interpretation, but is based on The Inferno- which takes very little from actual Holy Scripture.
9.
What was the influential work that circulated in Dante’s life? It was a work
that had been translated
8. Isaiah
14, when it mentions Lucifer, is not talking about Satan. It is a prophetic
statement against the then present-day Babylonian leader who brought suffering
upon God’s people. The punishment for the shining leader would be an ignoble
death and then to be completely forgotten. The prophecy also turned about to be
prediction as no one is quite sure to which king this passage refers. Dante, as
well as John Milton in Paradise Lost,
expounded upon medieval Christian ideas of the ruler of the underworld being an
eternal force that opposed God and was cast down. What force, anywhere, would
have the temerity to attempt to oppose an eternal God? Also God has no eternal
counterparts. Only God, as the Holy Parent, Holy Word, and Holy Spirit, exists
outside of time.
7. The
four horsemen in Revelation are not signs of the apocalypse. Apocalypse means
disclosure. The four horsemen, as the images in Revelation 6 are called, are
signs of apocalyptic literature. They help the reader to know that they are
dealing with a story that seems to be about the future, but is really dealing
with present realities. The four horses and their riders are the gospel, war,
poverty, and death. These things struggle together, but only one will triumph.
Those who are believers must remember to place their trust in what is truly
permanent and act accordingly.
6.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the dead are dead. Period. Sheol is a place where the dead may be gathered and perhaps they
are shades, or shadows of their former selves in that place. Ancient Israelites
did not engage in ancestor worship, unlike most of the other regional religions
of the time. Furthermore, an attempt to contact the dead (as Saul did when he
used a fortuneteller to contact Samuel) is a sign of failure to trust in God as
the one who holds the future and in whom one should place all confidence. Sheol is sometimes perceived to be a pit
where one might descend spiritually- like the psalmist or the prophets Jonah or
Jeremiah. Yet the fear is of being forgotten and God does not forget God’s
children. Even in the deepest depths, God still knows the intimacies of
creation.
5.
Satan is an adversary in the Hebrew Scripture, but not an eternal being. When
Satan’s name is used in the New Testament, it is either a pseudonym for powers
and principalities or how the presence of evil, within one’s own heart or
outside of one’s self, is named. When contemporary religionists empower the
name of Satan by attributing works to him or giving him characteristics that
are not biblical, they are engaged in a form of idolatry. Idolatry is not only
worshipping the wrong god. It is also idolatrous to be afraid of the wrong
power. The idea that there is a force equal to God with evil intent and
the power to lure us into eternal separation and that we would be motivated by
the fear of that being… Nope. That is not the essence of the Gospel, which is
about the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
4. When
Jesus talks about hell and says, “hell”, he is referring to an actual
geographical location outside of Jerusalem. There, outside the city, was a
horrible trash pit that burned constantly. The place was called Gehenna and it is the word that we have
translated in the gospels as “hell”. Gehenna
had once been the site of child sacrifices, the very sacrifices that were
forbidden to Jews, but were practiced by other religions to appease their gods.
It eventually became the place of the very worst trash and it was where Roman
soldiers would dump the bodies of people who were crucified. It was this
horrible place- a place of ignominy, terror, and avoidance- that Jesus urged people
to avoid by encouraging them to care for one another, to tend to the sick and
the dying, and to practice a radical kind of welcome. The Way of Christ would
have meant being a community that saved one another, and the outcasts of
society, from being burned with trash and forgotten.
3. Some strands of Christianity hold these truth to be self-evident: “Baptism, praying in the name of Jesus, and
the King James Version of the Bible are all magical talismans against suffering
in hell. Not drinking, dancing, swearing, or getting caught wanting to are also
important.” If “I will draw all people to myself” (John 12) AND “Nothing
can separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8) and “I have seen the Lord”
(John 20) are true, then which of God’s children will be cast into an eternal
separation from the presence of grace? We are not all traveling up the
same mountain. We are not all feeling different parts of the same
elephant. But if God is God AND God is love AND God has been revealed in the
person of Jesus AND the Spirit intercedes for us in a variety of ways, then we
cannot confidently make predictions about anything that comes after what we
know, except to say, “God will still
be God and, therefore, in charge.” Is it in keeping with how God has revealed
God’s own character to the world to punish people for an infinite amount of
time for bad decisions made during a finite period of time?
2.
He descended to the dead. Everything from Acts to 1 Peter to the Gospel of
Nicodemus to The Inferno written
about Holy Saturday- the day between Good Friday (when Jesus was crucified) and
Easter (when he was known to be raised from the dead)- everything written about
Holy Saturday is an attempt to answer the question, “Where the hell was he?” Truth: no
one knows. We are comforted by the idea that Jesus took the message of his
triumph over death to the spirits of those who had died and brought them (or
those who believed) to heaven. It makes great artwork. We don’t know. Theologian
Yvette Flunder says, “Religion is violent because we insist on making the
uncertain certain.” Trying to
create a definite answer for what happens on Holy Saturday is, essentially, an
attempt to nail Jesus down. Again. So that we don’t have to live with a little
mystery.
1. Hell
is not a geographical location. It’s not even a spiritually geographical
location. Hell, if it is anything, is a perception of the absence of God. A
perception that is patently false, but that appears when our own experiences,
ideas, certainties, or doubts attempt to make gods of themselves through
confidence or through fear. That perception is transformed through our
acceptance, with Christ’s help, of the height and depth and breadth of grace.
People need hell to exist as a reality because they don’t trust that there’s
enough of God’s love, grace, or mercy to go around. If there’s not, they want to
be sure they’re on the receiving end of it.
When
we open ourselves to the hopeful truth that God’s grace overflows- in terms of
time, space, context, materiality, and spiritual revelation- we then become
more rooted in the joy of our salvation and the good news of freedom in Christ.
Rejecting hell as something that must
exist removes the scales from our eyes so that we can see how the kingdom of
God is at hand.
Living
faithfully, through God’s grace, means separating what we have ingested
culturally through literature, art, theater, movies, and television and
actually examining the written Word and the revelation that can come from tradition,
reason, and experience. Anything else
leads us away from the grace
that is amazing, transformative, salvific, and eternal. And you know what?
Resurrection grace says, “To hell with that.”
Amen.
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