Au In the beginning was the Word
 

1.- It is not easy to talk about the hell. It is a scarcely mentioned topic. It, perhaps, could be due, in some cases, to an extreme reaction against the excesses and abuses of a still recent pass. In other cases, may be because of the secret conviction that this topic is something completely out fashioned in the modern world. In any case, we are in front of an emptiness, something we don´t talk about, as if some Gospel pages were superfluous. It could be better understandable if we talk about infernal situations, which we could live and that we are summoned to avoid. 

2.- Here are some inquires: Does really exist the hell? Wouldn’t it be a priests´ invention? Wouldn’t it be a way to make people afraid? How can we conciliate the hell with God´s infinite mercy? Can anyone make something deserving such a punishment? What is the hell? Is it a place or a situation? Will there be anyone condemned? Will they be a lot? What does God´s word say? What does the Gospel say?

3.- The hell (in Hebrew, seol; in Greek, hades) or the “hells” (in Latin, inferi), in Israel as in other peoples, is the lowest part of the earth, the home of the dead: the place the destiny of all the living (Job 30,23). In this sense, the apostolic Symbol says that Christ descended to the hell, id est, that he really died.

4.- In the biblical experience, the hell also appears like God´s judgement for the wick: You place them in slippery ground and make them fall to ruin (Ps 73,18), the godless are punished with fire and warms (Sir 7,17), the Lord Almighty will punish them in the day of judgement, with fire and worms under their skin, and they will keep on weeping, suffering for ever (Jdt 16,17). With cremation or burial, with fire or worms, the end of the impious is the death: the impious with their hands and words call for the death (Wis 1,16), the hope of the godless is like chaff blown in the wind (5,9-14). Nevertheless, the target of the just is the life: justice is immortal (1,15), the just live eternally  (5,15), for you will not abandon my soul to the grave… you will show me the path of life, in your presence the fullness of joy, at your right hand happiness for ever (Ps 16). In apocalyptic language, it is said that some will awake for everlasting life, others for eternal horror and shame (Dn 12,2).

5.- The Old Testament recalls two terrible experiences like the lucky symbol that can fall on the wick: the rain of fire and sulphur over Sodom and Gomorra (Gen 19,24) and the desolation of Toft, in the valley of the Gehenna, a place of pleasure that became a place of horror: And on their way out they will see the corpses of those who rebelled against me; their worms shall not die, nor their fire be quenched, and they will be abhorrent to all (Is 66,24). It is not spoken about those alive that suffer, but of corpses that are in corruption or burning. It is Jerusalem judgement, which will be terrible for those who live attached to the pagan practices. It also will be so for the aggressor empire (Assyria, about 701) that will finish in the burning place, in Toft, where the pagans sacrificed their children: For the pyre has long be ready, prepared for the king. Broad and deep is the fire pit, piled up with dry grass and wood: the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone will set it ablaze. (Is 30,33). The Gehenna (From Hebrew ge-Hinnon, valley of Hinnon) is a valley south of Jerusalem, with  arrival through the Gate of the Dirt, a cursed place from the epoch in which children sacrifices were offered (Jer 19,4-6; 2K 23,10). Corpses and dirt were burnt there.

6.- In the Gospel, Jesus uses the Gehenna image and calls for conversion. An effort is required, to take drastic measures, if necessary: If your eye makes you fall into sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye that keeping both eyes, to be thrown to the Gehenna where the worms that eat them never die, and the fire never goes out (MK 9,47), do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but not the person. Rather be afraid of him who can destroy both body and soul in the Gehenna (Mt 10,28). Like John the Baptist announces, it is necessary to produce conversion fruits; any tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire the one who comes after me will baptize with holy spirit and fire (Mt 3, 8-11). It is to say, that who is not baptized with Holy Spirit, will be baptizes with fire. The fire is God´s judgement symbol. The judgement is near and the Lord carries it out:  he has the winnowing fan is his hand to thresh out all the grain. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn in everlasting fire (3,12). False prophets will have the same end (7,19).

7.- In the parable of the sower, the Son of Man will send his angels and they will weed out of his kingdom all that is scandalous and all who do evil, and these will be thrown in the blazing furnace (Mt 13, 41-42); the son of man, as judge of the nations, will curse those rejecting the Gospel legates: Curse people, go away from me into the eternal fire (Mt 25,41). To the ignorant virgins the Lord will say: I do not know you (25,12). The useless servant, who was not able to negotiate the received talent, will be thrown out into the dark (25,30). In the rich man and poor man parable, the poor (when he dies) is carried him to take his place with Abraham; but, the rich man is buried in the hell (hades) and lives among torments (Lk 16,22-23).

8.- All these expressions are images and, so, they cannot be literally taken. They serve to express the horror of losing the sense of own existence, the life that Jesus announces, the life that does not end. With large freedom, Jesus also uses other words with the same meaning: to lose the life (Mk 8,35), I have never known you (Mt 7,23), weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt 22,13), eternal punishment (Mt 25,46)

9.- According to the theologian Karl Rahner, the man “must take into account the possibility of a definitive perdition”, since, “if not, the seriousness of a free history wouldn’t be possible”. But, that possibility “is found in a subordinated plane together to the doctrine saying that the world and the universal history, in its completeness, gets in fact out into God´s eternal life” (Fundamental course about the faith, Ed. Herder, Barcelona, 1978, 509).

10.- It is not God´s judgement, really, what makes the man innocent or guilty. Judgement denounces, but it doesn’t constitute that situation: God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world; instead, through him the world is to be saved. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned. He who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the Name of the only Son of God. This is how the Judgement is made: Light has come into the world and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil (Jn 3, 17-19). God´s judgement puts out in full light what is taking place now in the secret of the hearts.

11.- Above all, God´s plan is the salvation of all men: God wants that all men be saved (1 Tim 2,4), I do not want the wicked to die but rather that they turn their ways and live (Ez 33,11), Do not bring about your own death by your wrong way of living, do not let the work of your hands destroy you; God did not make death, not does he rejoice in the destruction of the living (Wis 1,12-14). Like the evil, the hell is man made, and not by God.

12.- Jesus talks about the hell as a power that does not display his action in the present time, the power of this world prince (Jn 14, 30), the adversary, Satan. The Dutch Catechism presents it as follows: “It is the strength that crosses our way, the adversary. But he is not at the same level than God, since he is neither perfect, nor as powerful as God, like the Bible precisely says. It is the chilling evil that we see taking place in the humanity and often overcomes so much the individual evil that obliges us to question ourselves: Which power unchains here? Is it a merely human power’” (Herder, Barcelona, 1969, 461).

13.- Revelation author sees in heavens a signal of what is happening in the earth: The Woman is menaced by the Dragon; a hard battle takes place between the Good and the Evil (Rev 12, 1-12). This is usually forgotten. Nevertheless, every day experience delivers us infernal situations in the family, social, political or religious field. Besides, our contemporary history knows of men animated by a really satanic will, men that do not doubt to rise their lives over the spoils of his fellow creatures.

14.- Hell is not a place, but a state. The Catholic Church Catechism defines the hell like the “state of a definitive auto exclusion from God´s and blessed communion” (num. 1033). Condemnation state means the definitive negation of the communion with God, the opposite to eternal life, eternal death. That who breaks with God, breaks with the own life and the own future. Death is the end, there is no hope (Gn 3,19). Saint Paul talks about eternal ruin, far from Lord´s presence ( 2 Tes 1,9). From the point of view of the relationship with the others, the hell is the negation of the communion, incommunication, loneliness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the cry addressed to nobody, lost into the emptiness. From the point of view of its relationship with the world, the condemned cannot disregard the new creation, but he does not find a place in it: the new universe is chaos for him.

15.- Backwards to God, to the others and to the world, the condemned becomes the opposite to what it is called to be. The life losses its sense, without a reason to be, without hope. It is so useless as the tree without any fruit, or the straw without grain, something that is thrown to the fire, because it doesn’t fill any purpose. The Jesus Gospel invites us to do the good, so that that resurrection be for us of life and not of condemnation (Jn 5,29). The Revelation talks about the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death (Rev 21,8).

16.- The second Vatican Council invite us, according to the Lord advise, to constantly watch “so that, once finished the unique time of our earthly life (Heb 9,7), we deserve to come in with Him to the weddings and to be counted between the elected (Mt 25,31-46), and not to be sent, like bad and lazy servants (Mt 25,26), to the eternal fire (Mt 25,41), into the dark where it will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt 22,13; 25,30)” (LG 48). The council denounces infernal situations, that are against God´s plan: “Anything attempting against life – homicides of any class, genocides, abortions, euthanasia, and even the deliberated suicide – anything that violates the integrity of the human person, like for example, mutilations, moral or physical tortures, the systematic conatus to dominate the mind of the others; all that offends human dignity, like life infrahuman conditions, arbitrary detentions, deportations, slavery, prostitution, white women and youngsters trade or degrading working conditions” (GS 27)

17.- Conversion is necessary. It is necessary to change, to avoid infernal situations, so that our world is habitable, a garden (Gen 2,8) according to God´s project, a fully human world. The living God, which intervenes in history, does not shut up before situations that claim to heaven and denounces the temple as a bandit’s cave: But you trust in deceptive and useless words. You steal, kill, take the wife of your neighbour, swear falsely… And then you come and stand before me in this temple which houses my Name and say: Now we are saved! to continue doing all those abominations (Jer 7, 8-11). Largest responsibility rests upon the powerful of the earth: Pay attention, you who rule multitudes… because an implacable judgement waits to those who are high; for the lowly there may be excuses and pardon, but the great will be severely punished (Wis 6,2-6).

18.- In a special way, the powers of evil that are in action in the world, are addressed against all times believers. Bestial powers attack a particular type of men, the saints of the Most High (Dan 7,18.25), those that do not surrender to the power of the beast. They receive a message of hope from God: they are named to judge history (7,9). The power of the hell will not overcome the disciples´ community (Mt 16,19). Amidst a world submitted to bestial powers that govern as absolute lords (Mk 10,42), Jesus Gospel announces the liberation to the oppressed, the good news to the poor (Lk 4,18).

19.- Jesus words about the hell are not there so that we live as slaves of the fear, under anguish and terror. They do not pretend to frighten, but to convert. Present faith experience carries us, in itself, to live in confidence, like sons of God: When do we know that we have reached a perfect love?: when we expect with confidence the Day of Judgement (1 Jn 4,17). Something similar says Jesus to Nicodemus: Whoever believes in him will not be condemned (Jn 3,18).

22.- Theologian Hans Küng denounces it. In the Church´s history, “Any mean seemed good to save oneself and others from the hell”: “Forced conversions, heretic burning, jews pogroms, witches mania, all that in the name of the religion of love, with the cost of millions of human lives (only in Seville, in 40 years, 4.000 persons were burnt), Really, the day of the final judgement, imbibed into the sequence Dies irae, dies illa, introduced by pope Pius the Fifth, old Great roman Inquisitor, into the deaths mass, that day of judgement – I say – has been impiously carried out by the Church innumerable times before the apparition of the universal judge”. As far as the birth control is concerned, Paul the Sixth maintained in his encyclical Humanae vitae (1968) the rigorist position: in other case, popes Pius the Eleventh and Pius the Twelfth “would have acted with the greatest imprudence condemning human acts that now would be permitted, with eternal punishments” (Eternal Life? Ed. Cristiandad, Madrid, 1983, 220-221). Although he was in the verge of doing it, Paul the Sixth did not correct the position of former popes and he did not pronounce the “liberator word” (A. Luciani) that so many hoped.

21.- Aside from this, when someone asks Jesus if are few those who save themselves, he answers in such a way that he does not allow a false confidence: Do your best to enter by the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able. (Lk 13,24)  Jesus calls to conversion and to watch. In this sense, the council of Florence (1442) goes further away of what is written down, when it affirms that “no one out of the Catholic church, pagan, jew, heretic or schismatic, has any part in the eternal life, but he goes to the eternal fire” (Dz 714). The second Vatican council corrects (in fact) the precedent excess: “Those that ignoring, without fault, Christ´s an his Church Gospel, look for God with a sincere heart and strive, under the grace influx, to accomplish with works his will, known by the own conscience judgement, can get the eternal salvation”(LG 16)

22.- One night in the autumn of 2001, Sheij Munir, imam of Madrid’s mosque, had a dream: a saucepan full of worms was burning on his kitchen-stove and Serhane (named The Tunisian, one of his faithful) offered him a spoonful. The dream happened only some hours after that Serhane neared him at the temple entrance with a consultation that disquieted him: “He took me apart from the people and told me if he could make me a question: Why the governments of the Moslem countries are incredulous? Can they be changed by force? I answered him that the Coram forbids the use of force against anything or anybody. I repeated it to him several times so it were very clear”. Serhane, presumed brain of the 11-M and one of the seven terrorists that later on committed suicide in the Leganes floor, did not rebate the answer. Well then, says the imam: “That night I wake up with the image of the dirt kitchen and Sirhane offering me those worms in the spoon. Next day I looked for him and told him my dream. I told him to clean the kitchen, to clean his dream, to go away from that mistaken way. This dream is a God´s message for you, I insisted him” (El Pais, 14 –04-04).

 

*          Dialogue about Gospel´s message on all this:

-                     God wants all men to be saved

-                     It is necessary to change

-                     It is necessary to avoid infernal situations

-                     It is necessary to deliver conversion fruits

-                     The sense of the own existence can be lost

-                     The life that does not end can be lost

-                     Strive to go through the narrow door