Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Hell. Some people avoid talking about it, some people refuse to accept that it exists, some people say if hell is real, then Christians cannot claim that God is all-loving. But, “[t]he teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity” (CCC 1035). Indeed, no person in the Bible talks about hell (“Gehenna” or “the unquenchable fire”) more than Jesus of Nazareth—God himself! So, what is hell?
So, what is hell?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) defines hell as the “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033). Hell is a consequence of a personal and persistent choice to reject God, resulting in an eternal or permanent separation from him and those who are united with him in heaven (the saints). Obviously, it has a lot to do with the nature of God, including the fact that he is all-loving.
See, because God is Love (see 1 Jn 4:8), He created us not because He needed us, “being perfect and blessed in Himself”, but because, “in a plan of sheer goodness”, He wanted us to “share in His own blessed life”. We accomplish this, responding to His call and assisted by His grace, by seeking Him, knowing Him and, ultimately, loving Him (see CCC 1). For there to be any possibility of a reciprocated love, however, both parties must freely choose to love. That is why we have free will. We can never say someone truly loves another if that person is compelled and forced to do so by forces extrinsic to themself. This also means, however, that there is a possibility of us freely choosing to not love God.
What Does It Mean To Love God?
To love God means to keep his commandments (see Jn 14:15). Therefore, “we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbour or against ourselves” (CCC 1033). The reward of loving God is to finally see him as he is, face to face, forever in heaven (see CCC 1023; 1 Cor 13:12). If God is goodness itself, life in its fulness, perfect bliss and joy beyond all our imagination and eternal rest, then freely choosing to love God and persevering in that choice to the end (see Mt 24:13) is choosing those things. It follows that freely choosing to not love God (and persisting in that choice to the end) is choosing the complete opposite of what God is. We call that hell.
Biblical Images
The Bible gives some images to help us imagine what this state of eternal separation from God is like: Gehenna (where both soul and body can be lost) (Mt 5:29, 10:28), unquenchable/eternal fire (Mt 25:41), a fiery furnace (Mt 13:42.50), the pool of fire (“which is the second death”) (Rv 20:13-14), and, in this Sunday’s Gospel, the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth (Mt 22:13).
As Our Lord tells us in his parable, God calls and invites all of us to rejoice with Him in his “feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines” (Is 25:6). He calls everyone, and even when He is rejected, “rather than giving up, He starts over and asks that all those found at the thoroughfares be called, excluding no one. No one is excluded from the house of God” (Pope Francis, Angelus (11 October 2020)) because “God predestines no one to go to hell” (CCC 1037).
Nevertheless, we can freely choose to ignore God’s invitation, preferring rather to mind worldly cares. God persists in coming after us, pursuing us, reaching out to the very margins to which we go in search of lesser things to satisfy our ceaseless appetites. At times we even respond violently to His summons, we reject those He has sent or even persecute them. Sometimes we accept the call but remain indecisive, half-hearted and lukewarm: we accept the invitation to the banquet but refuse to wear the wedding garment. We oppose the work of God’s grace in us and refuse to be converted.
Eventually, the time to make up our minds runs out. At death, our definitive response to God’s love is confirmed. We have either chosen to love Him, or we have rejected His love (by remaining in a state of mortal sin without repentance). As C. S. Lewis puts it in The Great Divorce, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”
Image: Photo by Marino Linic on Unsplash
