‘Unless you repent, you will all perish’

3rd Sunday of Lent, Year C
First Reading: Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15
Second Reading: 1 Cor 10:1-6, 10-12
Gospel Reading: Lk 13:1-9

“I have observed the misery of my people,” God says in this Sunday’s First Reading. “I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”

The other readings are less comforting. “Unless you repent, you will all perish,” Jesus says. “If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall,” St. Paul cautions.

In the Apostles’ Creed, we say that Christ “descended into hell”—not the place of eternal damnation, but the abode of the dead, Pope St. John Paul II explained.

However, “the place of eternal damnation” is real. The angels will gather “all evildoers” and “hurl them into the fiery furnace,” Jesus said, while he pronounces the judgment: “Out of my sight, you condemned, into that eternal fire!”

Is the existence of hell contrary to God’s love and mercy, as some people think? No.

First: we go to hell not because our bad deeds outweigh our good, but because we claim “a right to persist in evil—in any sin at all”—and thus reject redemption, St. John Paul explained.

Second: hell is the state of “self-exclusion from communion with God,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. To die without repenting a mortal sin means separating ourselves from God “by our own free choice.” Unrepentant rebels lock the doors of hell on the inside to keep God out.

“Explicit hatred of God may be rare, but there is a form of self-love that is equivalent to it,” author Frank Sheed noted. A man “may go through life ignoring God,” but “building up such a love of self that he has only to be confronted with God to hate him.”

Our choice of hell may be gradual, but we affirm it every time we sin. We can always repent and be forgiven, but the original sin was a sin of pride, and that pride, which we inherit, makes repentance difficult.

God gives us a lifetime to decide for him or against him, offering us all the help we will accept. As long as there is any hope, he will always give us another chance.

However, faced with the freedom he himself has given us, he makes himself powerless, said St. John Paul. Once our minds are made up—and he, who knows everything, knows when that is—he accepts our decision. If, finally, we do not say to him, “Thy will be done,” he says to us, “Then thy will be done.”

Third: the Bible’s images of hell should not “create anxiety or despair,” but simply show us “the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God,” said St. John Paul.

Jesus describes hell twice as a fiery furnace, Pope Benedict noted, but three times as the dark or night outside, and seven times as a place of “wailing and grinding of teeth.”

“Separated from God and therefore from love, you begin to freeze,” Pope Benedict explained; “your teeth begin to chatter.” The poet Dante Alighieri pictured hell’s centre as ice, not fire. Indeed, cold iron can damage us just like fire.

Hell is horrible, but the damned might find it endurable, for only there can they save their pride. “The one principle of hell is, ‘I am my own,’” said preacher George MacDonald.

C.S. Lewis imagines the damned always quarrelling and moving farther away from one another. Their fists, their teeth, their eyes are clenched, he says. At first they would not, but now they cannot, “open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.”

Satan, Lewis says, is not the majestic, tragic personage of Milton’s Paradise Lost or the “humourous, civilized, sensible, adaptable” Mephistopheles of Goethe’s Faust. No; deep within “the father of lies” is “nothing but a black childishness, an aimless empty spitefulness.”

Nevertheless, Satan is powerful. Tempted by him, let us turn to God rather than trusting in our own strength.