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Matthew 25:30 NRSV, Luke 13:22-30 CEB “‘As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” Jesus traveled through cities and villages, teaching and making his way to Jerusalem. Someone said to him, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” Jesus said to them, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow gate. Many, I tell you, will try to enter and won’t be able to. Once the owner of the house gets up and shuts the door, then you will stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will reply, ‘I don’t know you or where you are from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ He will respond, ‘I don’t know you or where you are from. Go away from me, all you evildoers!’ There will be weeping and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in God’s kingdom, but you yourselves will be thrown out. People will come from east and west, north and south, and sit down to eat in God’s kingdom. Look! Those who are last will be first and those who are first will be last.” Hell– “h,” “e,” double hockey sticks– the place of weeping and gnashing teeth, the outer darkness, what do we do with hell? The difficulty of discussing any verse talking about hell is how this poorly defined place has come to capture our imagination as many as “58 percent of Americans believe in a literal hell.”[1] Dante Alighieri, author of The Inferno, and John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, painted the landscape of damnation in poetic verse. They are not alone, however, as many other movies, TV shows, and books have delved into the deepest regions of the afterlife to describe the fire and the suffering that awaits everyone who strays from heavenly graces. Maybe we would find ourselves agreeing with one tract of the Talmud which says “‘the whole world is like a pot lid [in relation] to Gehenna,’”[2] ours is just the scant crust of mortality over the bubbling cauldron of hell. Jesus mentions hell more than once in the gospels, but what is the point of hell? Have we substituted morbid fascination with eternal punishment for the hopeful joy in the reality of a God who pulls us away from the pit? Are we disciples who obey and follow only out of fear of what might happen if we don’t? Perhaps rather than a fear of hell, it is the love of God that should motivate us.
Talking about hell is in part difficult because “hell” as a word does not exist in Hebrew or Greek in the Bible, and as a concept, it is a latecomer. The landscape of the afterlife is almost non-existent in the Old Testament as the writers talk about a place called Sheol, which is not the same as hell. Sheol, the “postmortem existence for everyone,” has no separation for the good or the bad, instead everyone goes to this pit, “a shadowy type of half-life: dark, away from God, away from either pain or pleasure.”[3] It is a place of gloomy sleep, not a source of reward or punishment, as opposed to life which is the only place that the people of God can faithfully live and act. Funny enough, most mentions of Sheol in scripture involve God rescuing people from it, like Psalm 16: “For you [Lord] do not give me up to Sheol or let your faithful one see the Pit” (Psalm 16:10 NRSV). Hannah in her song praising God sings out “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up” (1 Samuel 2:6 NRSV). Even Jesus’ death can be understood to be a rescue from Sheol, as when he says he will die as “a ransom for many,” he is citing Psalm 49, “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me” (Matthew 20:28, Mark 10:45; Psalm 49:15 NRSV). It is only after Old Testament times that Sheol evolves in a different direction. The evolution of Sheol into Hades and Gehenna can largely be blamed on the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. All influenced Judaism after the Babylonian exile, each ruling over Israel and sharing their cultures with extensive afterlives. The Greek religion, for instance, has a well-defined afterlife with Hades being not only the destination for all the departed but also filled with “punishment-fit-the-crime” stories about folks like Sisyphus and his never-ending boulder pushing and Tantalus with his unreachable fruits.[4] Greek is the language of the New Testament, so Hades pops up a lot as a descriptor of choice, taking the place of the pit. All three belief systems have this idea of the good being rewarded and the bad being punished, so by the first century, “many Jews had a robust sense of the triumph of good over evil and so of postmortem judgment.”[5] In the New Testament then, Sheol vanishes, replaced by Hades and by another place, one that had a grounding in reality, Gehenna. Gehenna, or more literally, “the Valley of Hinnom,” is located outside of Jerusalem “which was used as the city’s garbage dump and was kept continually burning.”[6] This valley had a nasty reputation even before Jesus’ time as in the past it has been the site of “abhorrent child sacrifice by [king] Ahaz”[7] as found in the book of 2 Chronicles.[8] Eventually, Gehenna becomes a place of fiery punishment for the dead, but it should not be lost on us that as Gehenna gets used in the New Testament by Jesus, he can turn to his listeners and point to an actual flaming trash pit in this life and say that this is the place, this is hell on earth. Was it a place of eternal punishment, as the Greeks imagined Hades to be? Hell, Hades and Gehenna are places that capture our imagination because, like most people, we want to believe that the good ultimately triumphs and the bad ultimately get punished. While in this life, the opposite seems more the case, we want the reverse to be true in the next life, especially when we say and believe that our God is not only good but just. When we imagine punishment in hell though, whose justice does that satisfy? Dante was famous for depicting his enemies in hell, with their various sins eliciting fitting tortures in the next life. Scripture, on the other hand, consistently depicts this place as far from God, and the opposite of God’s heavenly realm is not hell, it is non-existence. We see this reflected in some of the final passages of Revelation where those evil-doers in life find “their place in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8). A second death is a death, obliterated and no more. In the Gospels, Jesus tells his disciples, “‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell’” (Matthew 10:28 NRSV). “‘Destroy’ means exactly that: obliterate.”[9] To have a future one day where only goodness exists means the end of evil, so it does not make sense to keep people suffering in hell for the rest of forever. What about our passages today? Are they about hell? Matthew enjoys talking about an “outer darkness” a lot, and Luke and Matthew both mention the “weeping and grinding of teeth.” These sound like things that would describe hell, but we cannot forget the Jesus saying Luke caps his passage with where Jesus says, “‘Look! Those who are last will be first and those who are first will be last.’” You see, there are many in the world who think because of who they are or what they have done, their place is assured– at the front of the line in the kingdoms of earth and heaven, only to be surprised in the end. This weeping and grinding of teeth is the sound of frustration as they find out that they are at the back of the line, and all those people that they thought were unimportant, sinful, and undeserving are the ones front and center at the feast in paradise. This is the darkness found at the back of the line. Are these passages about hell? The answer is both yes and no. Look at Luke again, there are those who thought for sure that they had their spot reserved, and yet, Jesus says they will be told at the door “‘I don’t know you or where you are from. Go away from me, all you evildoers!’” These difficult words from Jesus are difficult because “[many] who think they will enter will not, and others (who are presumed to be excluded from God’s fellowship) will take their place.”[10] We cannot presume that we know God’s grace. Jesus seeks to shake our complacency, seeks to shake our tendency to assume who is good and who is not, who is destined for the back of the line, and who will be in front. Fear is a poor motivator because fear breeds its own kind of complacency. We will strive to relieve ourselves of fear by only doing the bare minimum necessary to feel safe again. We buy a dog or a weapon, put up a fence, or install an alarm system, but we don’t do anything to change the society or culture in which we live which drives some to steal and burn and take and destroy. The same is true of faith, “they are people who think themselves safe because they do the bare minimum of love of neighbor but still hang on to their resources rather than feed the hungry.”[11] Hell is a poor motivator for good behavior because we will only do the bare minimum believed necessary to keep out of it. Instead, the Gospels say that there is nothing we can do, we have to rely on grace, and we have to respond to grace. Rather than fear, it is love that must motivate us. If we are motivated by love, we are not consumed by keeping out of hell as we are too caught up in living in the kingdom. If we find we are living fully in God’s kingdom, complete with the kingdom values shared by Christ, we probably won’t be too surprised to be in the kingdom again on the other side of things. Dante, when he descends to Hell in his poem, famously finds the gates of Hell flapping open in the wind. The doors are not locked. C.S. Lewis, in his book The Great Divorce, says the doors are locked from the inside, and that all of Hell “is smaller than one pebble” on earth, “but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World [God’s kingdom].”[12] We have wasted so much energy and imagination on this realm that I fear that we have sometimes forgotten to live in the world God loves us into, the kingdom. It is not ruled by fear, nor are we to obey because we might be punished otherwise. That’s the logic of this world and of hell, not of heaven, where grace rules and love sways all to the highest of goods and the greatest of mercies. Amen. [1] Amy-Jill Levine, The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2021), 101. [2] Miguel A. De La Torre and Albert Hernandez, The Quest for the Historical Satan (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 88. [3] Levine 2021, 103. [4] Ibid., 104. [5] Ibid., 107. [6] Donald K. McKim, The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), s.v., “Gehenna.” [7] Katharine D. Sakenfeld, ed., The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), s.v. “Gehenna.” [8] 2 Chronicles 28:3 NRSV “[Ahaz] made offerings in the valley of the son of Hinnom and made his sons pass through fire, according to the abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord had driven out before the people of Israel.” [9] Levine 2021, 113. [10] R. Alan Culpepper, “Luke 13:22-30, The Narrow Door” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, Leander E. Keck, ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 277-279. [11] Levine 2021, 117. [12] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperOne, 1946), 138.
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