This Advent, like last year, we are preaching through the Four Last Things — death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Last year I got heaven. This year I get hell. I’m trying not to read too much into that.
Today I want to focus not so much on the allusory details of hell itself, but rather on how God’s character illuminates the meaning of hell and on the function hell plays in the teachings of Jesus. Put briefly, hell confronts us with the choice between good and evil. Jesus’ teachings remind us that what we do now — what we love, what we pursue — forms us into people of joy or misery.
The text for the sermon comes from the 9th chapter of the Gospel according to St. Mark:
“If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire.”
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I grew up with an image of hell as God’s eternal torture chamber. Of course I was always taught that God loves us very much, but there were also more than a few hints here and there that God was also pretty angry. Every once in a while, the story of salvation was told somewhat like this: “God is enraged at you for your sins, but luckily he already got all his rage out of his system by crucifying Jesus, so if you accept Jesus you’re off the hook. But if you don’t accept Jesus, God will torture you forever.” Like all heresies, this one has elements of truth — but distorted.
Likewise distorted is the image of God as, in the words of C. S. Lewis,
“not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’”
According to this view, God will greet every person with a warm embrace in the afterlife and usher every one of us into a consequence-free paradise. This is not the picture of God as revealed in Scripture. As Lewis says,
“I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed [by a senile benevolence.] But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.”
This is the key. If you find that your conception of hell cannot be reconciled with the God who is love, then either you have misunderstood hell — or you have misunderstood love.
Let’s look at a few of the gospel passages that describe hell. The first New Testament allusion to hell is in Matthew 3. When a group of Pharisees approach John the Baptist, John — always known for his gentle demeanor — refers to them as a brood of vipers, and then he issues a stark warning: “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He” — Jesus — “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matt. 3:10-12, ESV).
Note the strange link between this “unquenchable fire” and baptism: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” We’ll come back to that detail.
If we turn to Mark 9, our sermon text, we find Jesus’ most disturbing advice: “And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire…. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire.”
The undying worm alludes to Isaiah 66, where the worms in question consume the corpses of those who rebel against God. The reference to being “salted with fire” is somewhat obscure, but salt — both here and elsewhere in the gospels — is an attribute of the faithful. The passage continues: “Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
Meanwhile, in Matthew 8:12, Christ refers to the destiny of those who reject him as “the outer darkness” where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And the epistles describe hell as a place where demons are chained in gloomy darkness (2 Pt. 2:4; Jude 6).
These images — fire, worms feeding on the dead, prison, darkness — are mutually exclusive. They cannot all be read literally at the same time, and I would suggest that we go beyond what the text can bear in reading any of them as literal descriptions. But this hardly matters, because all of them are deeply and profoundly disturbing! Whatever the literal reality behind these metaphors and images, we can be sure that it is horrifying.
How can this be reconciled with the God who is love? To understand hell we must understand God’s divine simplicity. Things are going to seem a bit abstract for a few paragraphs here but stick around, because I have found the doctrine of divine simplicity to be a key to unlocking many difficult passages of Scripture — and to understanding a great deal about my day-to-day relations with God and with others.
Though until quite recently a unanimously held doctrine in the Church, divine simplicity has in the past century come under assault by some who see it as unbiblical. To the contrary, divine simplicity is nothing other than the fruit of sustained reflection upon complex biblical data — most significantly, the divine name first revealed to Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:14) and claimed by Jesus repeatedly throughout St. John’s Gospel: “I AM.”
The divine name tells us that God is not a discrete being among others but is rather the ground of being itself. He does not merely exist; rather, he is, in some sense, existence itself. As such, God does not have discrete parts; his attributes are not distinct from his person. What he is is synonymous with the reality that he is.
When we act lovingly, we are shown to be loving persons, persons who have love God is different. He is loving — because he is love (1 Jn. 4:8). He is love without any “variation or shadow due to change” (Ja. 1:17).
That God is love seems hard to square, though, with those descriptions of hell or of God’s wrath or with the Old Testament passages where God seems to change his mind. The short version of the answer — and it lacks nuance and qualification, but we don’t have time for the long answer — is that apparent changes in God’s demeanor towards us actually reflect changes in our own disposition towards God. King Saul, for instance, moves from God’s favor to his wrath precisely when he rebels against God. The change is not in God but in King Saul. As St. Paul says, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).
Divine simplicity is closely connected to another classic and recently much assaulted doctrine, that of divine impassibility. Impassibility teaches us that God does not experience emotions — not, at least, as we do. He is not changed by our actions, nor is he subject to whims of human emotion. Much of the contemporary resistance to divine impassibility flows, understandably enough, from the feeling that a God who does not feel our emotions must be robotic and indifferent to human misery.
But, within the Christian tradition, divine simplicity and impassibility in fact teach the opposite: God is always, always and everywhere, always and at every moment, love. He nevers fails to love — because he is love.
In fact, divine simplicity teaches us that what we think of as God’s wrath is in fact indistinguishable from his love — more precisely, it is his love experienced from a position of rebellion and estrangement.
Imagine an infant who wants nothing more than to play with the wonderfully inviting flame flickering at the end of an Advent candle. And as that baby keeps trying to grab the flame, you keep grabbing the hand and pulling it away from the flame. To the infant, you will shortly become history’s greatest monster. Your act of love is received as nothing other than malice and hatred. This dynamic does not end with infancy, as I’m sure the parents among us can attest, nor is it restricted to the parent-child relation. I suspect we have all had experiences where acts of genuine love for friends or siblings — or, in my case, students — are received as judgment or even hatred. Perhaps more tellingly, how often have we shrunk back from a difficult act of love — precisely because we know it will not be understood, experienced, or accepted as loving.
God’s wrath is his love.
Let’s return to a few details from our New Testament passages with divine simplicity in mind. In Matthew 3, the fires of hell are linked with baptism. In Mark 9, “everyone will be salted with fire.” Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 3, St. Paul says that all of us will pass through fire, and that fire will burn away whatever is not built on the foundation of Jesus Christ.
What is this strange fire?
Let me suggest that the answer may be found in Hebrews 12:29, which tells us that “our God is a consuming fire.” In other words, the fire of God’s love and the fires of hell may be one and the same fire — but experienced differently.
Jesus’ words about hell provoke and startle. In our sermon text, Jesus emphasizes extreme measures in cutting sin out of our lives. If our body parts are the sources of sin, we should indeed cut them off. Of course, our body parts are not the cause and source of sin; rather, they are God’s good creation. The point is not to remove body parts. Rather, cut sin out of your life — by any means necessary.
Why? Because sin by definition places us in opposition to God, who is the good. The consequences of sin are not that an intolerant God turns against us — rather, sin turns us against God! Sin turns us in on ourselves. It closes us off to others, to creation, and ultimately to God himself. Habitually engaged and deliberately pursued, sin will transform us into creatures who hate God.
In the gospels, Jesus always invokes hell to press his hearers to make a choice. We are confronted with that choice still. Will we love God or not? Will we live out of the life granted to us in our baptism — when we were crucified with Christ and made alive in him (Gal. 2) — or will we forsake our birthright for the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil?
I mentioned earlier the mushy universalism of some who portray God as fondly embracing all who come to him, no matter what. In fact, I think there is something to this. God will embrace all of us in the consuming fire of his love — but we forget that an embrace is only pleasant from those we love. An embrace from someone you dislike is distinctly unpleasant, is it not? When the One who embraces you is the Source of all existence, the Glorious Majesty upon whom no man can look and live (Ex. 33:20) — then that embrace must be either supremely joyful or supremely hateful.
I grew up thinking of hell as a place full of people desperately wishing they could be in heaven. I think it is better understood as a place full of people desperately fleeing the presence of a God whom they have come to loathe. One day we will all be in the presence of God’s consuming fire. The question is whether we will love it.
“If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire.”
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