Heaven offers more humanity, hell brings banishment

6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Sir 15:15-20
Second Reading: 1 Cor 2:6-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 5:17-20

It is dangerous to teach that something is wrong, for always, someone takes it to be right! However, “in order that the deceits of the enemy may be avoided, it is necessary first of all that they be laid bare,” Pope Pius XI said.

Accordingly, Jesus repeated the commandments and “unfolded” all their demands, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

God has given us freedom to choose life or death, good or evil. “Whichever one chooses, that shall be given.”

Some people argue that God, who loves even sinners, would never send anyone to hell. However, they misunderstand three points.

First: We go to hell not because our bad deeds outweigh our good, but because we claim the “right” to persist in evil and thus reject redemption, Pope St. John Paul II explained.

Second: To go to hell means being separated from God forever ”by our own free choice,” the Catechism says.

Our choice may be gradual, but we affirm it by every sin. If we repent, God forgives us, but repenting takes humility, and we all inherit the pride underlying Adam and Eve’s original sin.

In any particular sin, we might not have full knowledge or give full consent. However, with repetition our choice can harden into a habit and then a principle. Even before we articulate it, it can amount to a real, deliberate, rejection of God.

“Explicit hatred of God may be rare, but there is a form of self-love that is equivalent,” such that we have only “to be confronted with God to hate him,” Frank Sheed warned.

God gives us a lifetime to decide for or against him; he gives all the help we will accept and all the wakeup calls we can hear. As long as there is hope, he gives us another chance.

However, “confronted” with our freedom, he makes himself powerless, said Pope John Paul. Once he knows our minds are made up, he accepts our decision. Finally, if we do not say, “Thy will be done,” he says, “Then thy will be done.”

Thus we choose hell. There we can save our pride, boasting that we “took the blows and did it my way!”

Third: We must interpret the Bible’s images of hell correctly, Pope John Paul said. Their purpose is not to “create anxiety or despair,” but to show us “the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God.”

Jesus described hell as punishment, banishment, and destruction. Banishment from God is hell’s chief punishment, for only God can give us life and happiness. When you add the element of destruction, you get what C.S. Lewis calls the state of having been human.

To enter heaven is to become more human than you were on earth, he explains; “to enter hell is to be banished from humanity.” To be fully human means “to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God”; to be an ex-man, a damned ghost, means “to have a will utterly centered in itself and the passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.”

In hell, the damned are isolated, shut up in themselves. “Their fists, their teeth, their eyes are clenched,” Lewis says. “At first they would not, but now they cannot, open their hands for gifts or their eyes to see.”

Such creatures do not have the capacity to enjoy God in heaven; but neither, we may suppose, can they suffer like humans. To those who choose it, then, hell may not be the hell it rightly appears to us.

In describing the next world, Jesus often appealed to our natural desires, thus confirming that earthly pleasures point toward heaven. However, we must never mistake them for the real thing. We must keep alive in ourselves the explicit desire for our true country, even though we cannot even imagine “what God has prepared for those who love Him.”