Whether fire or ice, hell warrants fear of the Lord

33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Prv 31:10-13, 16-18, 20, 26, 28-31
Second Reading: 1 Thes 5:1-6
Gospel Reading: Mt 25:14-30

As the liturgical year approaches its end, the Church reminds us of judgment: our own “particular” judgment and the final judgment of the whole world.

In our particular judgment, at the moment of death, God will grant us either entrance into heaven (immediately or after purification) or immediate and everlasting damnation. In the last judgment, after the resurrection of the dead, God will lay bare “the truth of each man’s relationship” with him, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

There will be no “glossing over” our rejections of him, no “compassionate pass” into heaven. God gives us chance after chance to turn to him, but he cannot speak untruth, any more than a teacher can write “pass” on the report card of a student who has chosen failure.

Jesus often spoke of “Gehenna” or “hell,” of “the unquenchable fire” where both soul and body can be lost, reserved for those who refuse to the end to believe and be converted.

To reconcile this doctrine with God’s love, we must understand three points.

1) We go to hell not for sinning but for refusing to repent. Our eternal destiny depends not on the net balance between our good deeds and our bad, but on whether or not God’s supernatural life is alive in us when we die.

2) If we go to hell, it is because we choose to. The damned souls lock the doors of hell on the inside to keep God out. To die in mortal sin without repenting means remaining separated from God for ever “by our own free choice,” says the Catechism. Hell is the state of “self-exclusion from communion with God.”

When we sin, we try to kid ourselves. “I’m not rejecting God,” we argue; “I just want to be happy.” True; but we want happiness our way, instead of God’s way, which, ultimately, is the only way: as his gift, a by-product of a life directed towards him.

At first, perhaps, we make our hell-ward choices without full spiritual responsibility. However, by repetition, they become habits. Gradually, we develop a resolution to continue sinning and to reject change. Then, at death, confronted with a perfectly clear choice, we unhesitatingly choose ourselves instead of God. And if, at the end, we do not say to God, “Thy will be done,” then God says to us, “Then thy will be done.”

3) Seven times, Jesus spoke of the “wailing and gnashing of teeth” in hell; three times, he also mentioned the “dark” or “night” outside, and twice, the “fiery furnace.”

“The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God,” says the Catechism, for only he can give us the life and happiness for which we long. And “in a world separated from God and therefore from love you begin to freeze – your teeth begin to chatter,” Pope Benedict explains in his book God and the World. The poet Dante Alighieri – whom the Pope called “the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea” – described the centre of hell as ice. His picture matches Christ’s, for cold iron can actually burn, exactly like fire.

“The images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted,” said Pope St. John Paul II. “They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”

God does not “declare the guilty guiltless”; he judges sin by his own justice and holiness. If we do not understand that, we cannot understand the wonder of his forgiveness or the amazing truth of the cross, where Christ revealed how God reconciles “justice and love.”

“Fear of the Lord” is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. “Let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge.  All the materials (video and print) are available online at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 11, “A Place for Science in the Catholic Faith,” will be available Nov. 15.