of Christ the King
Nov. 24, 2002
Matt 25: 31-46
Nativity, Brandon, Fla.
“Then the king will say to those on his left,
‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and
his angels’” (Matt 25: 41).
During a hot debate in the U.S. Senate back
in the early 1920s, one impassioned senator told a colleague to go to
hell. The affronted senator appealed to
the presiding officer, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, about the use of such
language. Coolidge, who had been leafing
thru a book, looked up and said, “I have been checking the rules manual, and
you don’t have to go.”
When people get angry, they’ll often curse
others. Wishing someone real harm, not
just using naughty words, is what cursing is.
But quite often someone says “go to hell” rather thoughtlessly. We say a certain injury “hurt like hell” or
we have “a boss from hell.” We’ve been
known to have “a helluva good time.” We
joke about hell—how if we end up there, we’ll have a good time with all our
friends.
Such flippant attitudes suit Satan quite
well. His best friends aren’t atheists,
who may be sincere and virtuous people, but people who don’t take sin
seriously, who don’t think their moral or immoral choices have consequences. If hell is a joke or just a 4-letter word,
then sin isn’t serious, and neither is virtue.
How awful is hell? Consider 9-11. All of us shudder to imagine what it was like
at the top of the WTC—a friend of mine died there—or at the Pentagon. We may gauge the horror from office workers’
preference to jump out windows rather than stay where they were. That
was an image of hell. People who
survived the Nazi concentration camps tell us they were in hell on earth, and
with good reason.
Those earthly
examples, however, have significant flaws.
Concentration camp inmates who sustained themselves with hope, e.g., of
seeing a spouse or a child again, appear to have had a markedly greater chance
of survival than those without hope. The
last seconds of office workers engulfed in burning jet fuel or choking in acrid
smoke may have seemed eternal, but they were
seconds. We all pray we never find out
what that’s like.
 |
| The Last Judgment by Hans Memling (Wikipedia) |
The real hell, the
one created for the devil and his angels, is everlasting, never-ending. Appropriately did Dante imagine a sign over
the gate of hell: “Abandon hope, all you
who enter here.” There are no 2d
chances, no reincarnations. The hell of
the Bible and of Christian doctrine is a hopeless eternity of pain, anguish,
self-loathing, hatred of everyone and everything. It’s no everyday matter. It’s no joking matter.
There’s a tendency
among some Christians to discount hell.
God is merciful, after all. Could
he really damn anyone for whom Christ died and rose from the dead?
Three answers to
that, and one hope.
1st answer: We have Christ’s own teaching that hell is a
reality and a possible outcome of his judgment on our lives. We’ve just heard his parable of the last
judgment. We may also remember his
parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus who wasted away at the rich
man’s doorstep, as well as some of Christ’s other warnings.
2d answer: We all have a natural instinct for justice,
an instinct planted in our hearts by God, in whose image we’re created. Justice isn’t fully administered in this
life; even when we try hard, as in democratic societies, we often fail. We believe that God is the inescapable,
undeceivable, just judge who in eternity vindicates the innocent and punishes
the wicked.
3d answer: It isn’t God’s choice to damn anyone. It’s our own choice. God wants us to turn from sin and be saved,
but the one force against which he is powerless is our free will. If we choose to sin and not to repent, he
can’t compel us to accept his pardon, can’t compel us into heaven. It’s as if he asks us, “Are you sorry for
your sins,” and we say, “Hell, no!” And
he says, “Is that your final answer?”
And we say, “Yes!” Only then will
he utter those terrible words, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal
fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Yet there is one
substantial hope. St. Francis de Sales,
the patron and namesake of the Salesian Society, believed that God in his mercy
calls each of us into eternity at the moment when each of us is best prepared
to go. One modern theologian[1]
published a book called Dare We Hope That
All Men Will Be Saved? which, while acknowledging that damnation is a real
possibility for each of us, answered positively that we may indeed hope that
God’s mercy will so touch every single human heart as to win its repentance and
salvation.
A final point—the point Jesus emphasizes in this parable
of judgment, as well as in the parable of the rich man and the beggar at his
door: we will be judged, and our eternal
fate depends, upon the mercy we extend to or withhold from our brothers and
sisters. It’s God’s grace that saves us
by moving us to repent and by moving us to imitate Christ in our lives. But it’s always within our power to reject
grace or accept it and act on it. And
we’ll be judged, according to what Jesus tells us, not by what we’ve
believed—all the mysteries of our Christian faith—but by what we’ve done, the
sin or the virtue in how we’ve treated one another. “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one
of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40).
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