The Twenty-sixth Sunday of the Year - September 28, 2003

On several occasions I have heard people declaim that they do not believe in hell.  I have even heard this in public gatherings of Christians, of Catholics.  “I cannot believe that a God of love would ever send someone to hell,” some people say.  But do they really hear what they are saying?  Do they really understand the meaning of their bold proclamations?  I don’t think so.  For what they are really saying is that all of reality, the Catholic faith itself, is defined by, or limited by, what they are capable or incapable of believing.  “I cannot believe” they say, and that means for them that if they can’t believe or understand it, then it ain’t so.  This is a classic case of what is called narrow-mindedness:  the idea that reality can be no larger than my own mind’s capability.

            One wonders what they would make of today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus obviously believes in the reality, the possibility, of hell.  In fact, and anyone can investigate this for himself, in the Gospels Jesus spoke much more often about hell than He did about heaven.  One wonders what these deniers of hell make of the whole, two thousand years of Church teaching that follow the teaching of Christ Himself.  Perhaps part of the problem is that we stay too caught up the physical imagery of it all, when we should look at what the Church has always taught about hell, that it is not a created physical place, but the eternal state of being locked out of the very thing one was created for:  happiness -- forever, unending and too marvelous to describe.

            But to deny the possibility of damnation is not only to depart from the teaching of Christ and His Church, but it is to also loose a lot other things as a consequence:  namely, our freedom, the need for personal responsibility that brings self-respect, and our very dignity as human beings created in the image of God; that is, created with intelligence and will that sets us apart from all other earthly creatures.  Therefore, what we do, the choices we make, what we think, the thoughts we harbor in our hearts – it all has consequences; it all makes a difference; and so our human life – how we live – really does have meaning.  It is all chock full of meaningfulness.

            God created us free (we know from our Bibles and our catechisms) – God created us free, so that we might freely, moved by God’s goodness and love for us, freely choose God our Creator.  For that’s exactly the kind of relationship that God wants with us, one of freedom, of choosing and obeying God because we choose to do so, because we know that God is the source and end of all our happiness.  Hell is the end of the road for those who will not make this choice for God, for God’s goodness to them, for God’s will for them.  Hell is the result of saying “no” to God, saying no to God by sins committed and unrepented of.

            So in denying hell, we deny our own dignity.  We become pathetic creatures of whom God does not demand virtue, moral excellence, holiness.  When we deny hell, we deny all that Christian tradition would teach us through the beautiful example of the Saints, who fought great spiritual battles out of love for Christ and who are examples to us in our own struggle against sin and evil.  We deny the real meaning of Calvary, where, as we say, Christ died to save us from our sins, and about which the Apostles’ Creed speaks of His descent into the abode of the dead for our sake.  Dare we “rationalize” away the very thing – our sin – that nailed Him to the cross?  For that is the very thing we are doing in denying hell.  We are saying that sin, which Christ bore Himself as the Lamb of God on the agony of the cross, has no real consequences. 

            Why then would anyone want to deny such a pivotal teaching of the Church?  Because people are frightened by such a challenge, such an awesome accountability:  that we are before God accountable for our thoughts, our attitudes, our actions; we are accountable to God for this life that we have been given – and life is a gift – of how we live it, whether we offer it back, as we should, to our Creator, how we treat our brothers and sisters around us, who are also created in the image of God and redeemed by the Sacrifice of Christ.  But people don’t like accountability – until, that is, we understand that it is the key to our true happiness and fulfillment, both in this life and infinitely more in the life to come.

            Yes, this state of denial about the possibility of hell, and therefore of personal accountability to God, stretches back in human history all the way to the beginning, back to the Garden of Eden, in the tragic story of how Adam and Eve brought calamity upon the world in their rebellion against God.  They sinned.  And then they immediately denied any accountability for it.  “This woman you gave me,” Adam protests to God, “she caused me to sin against you.”  And Eve likewise, for she was also stained now by personal sin, she blamed the serpent that deceived her.  And the game has been going on ever since.

            But there is something appealing about that protest, “I just can’t believe in a God who would damn anyone.”  When I heard it proclaimed in one Catholic meeting, I noticed the sympathetic and compassionate, oh so compassionate, nodding of heads in agreement.  Then we come up against these words of Jesus Christ (He the most compassionate One, who spoke much more severe words even than the ones in today’s Gospel) – we come up hard against... well, reality:  the kind of people God created us to be, so much in His image that God shares with us a kind of authority over ourselves, our destiny, which can be exercised in our salvation or damnation. 

            As appealing as that seemingly compassionate protest sounds, it is false; for it assumes that damnation is God’s choice for someone who will not cooperate with Him.  Not so.  Hell is simply the result of human choice against God.  God’s choice for us is seen in Jesus Christ, in Him the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, in His agony upon the cross and in His glorious resurrection – all accomplished for us, for all people, for our salvation.  Hell is not a sign of God’s lack of love for us; it is, rather, the reminder that we have the responsibility in this life to more and more make our way toward God, who in Christ, has come so very near to us.  Because He loves us.  Because He created us to enjoy the unbelievably wonderful glories of eternal life, which are held out for us so generously through our Lord’s suffering, death and resurrection, through the sacramental life of the Church and which can only be ours if we freely choose it, if we freely choose God and thus declare war, as Jesus described it in today’s Gospel, declare war on anything that would keep us from that for which we were made – eternal happiness.