Matthew 25:31-46
Well, today is one many of you have been waiting for—the most asked question we received for this series on “Questions Thinking People Ask About the Bible and Christian Faith.” What do you think about hell?
I get that, in some ways. When I was a kid, particularly when I was a teenager, we talked a lot about hell in church and in youth group. I remember getting tracts and seeing movies about the horrors of hell, and if you didn’t want to wind up there you had better make sure you were prayed up, which meant that whenever you had any doubts you had better get down to that altar and make sure again, and again, and again. Oh, and you’d better get your friends “saved,” too, or you might be responsible for them winding up in hell.
You may have grown up with this, too. Evangelism, in fact, was all about hell avoidance. Every conversation started with this: “If you were to die tonight, do you know where your soul would spend eternity?” It’s a question that would certainly get your attention.
The older I got and the more I studied, however, I began to wonder whether that was the right question. I mean, does life really all boil down to what bin you go in when you die? Should fear of eternal damnation be the primary reason a person becomes a Christian? Of course, that brought up questions from the opposite side of the equation, too. Is it right, on the other hand, to believe in a kind of universalism, where hell is completely irrelevant and everybody goes to heaven? I have known Christians on both extremes.
Problem is, however, that a lot of what we think about hell and eternal punishment is gleaned from tradition more than the Scriptures. The pictures we conjur up about a fiery pit with multiple levels and red devils with horns and pitchforks come more from the dark images of the Middle Ages and Dante than from Scripture. That’s not to say, however, that hell isn’t a reality. It’s just that we have to understand it within the context of the whole biblical worldview and the purposes of God.
So, as I often do, I want to take you back to the beginning, back to creation. The creation story tells us that humans were the crowning glory of creation because they bear the image of God. No other part of creation gets this designation. We are created in God’s image, to reflect God in our character, our love for others, and even in our work; caring for God’s good creation. All of humanity is created in God’s image.
To be truly human, then, is to be in full relationship with God and in full relationship with others, relationships that mirror God’s relational care. To be truly human is not to be, as Plato said, a dualistic separation of body and soul, but to be whole person…an embodied person living out the image of God in God’s good creation. The unique capacity of humanity that separates us from the animals is not, as is traditionally thought, the presence of a soul—but rather to be in the image of God and to able to relate to God.
The Bible tells us that, by chapter 3 of Genesis, humans began to distort that image and turn inward, missing the mark, veering off target. Instead of choosing to bear the image of the God who created them out of love, they chose to try and become gods themselves. They began to worship the creatures they were, rather than their creator. They made themselves into idols, and humans have been idolizing people and things every since.
That’s how the Bible defines “sin” – it’s the willful act of choosing to be and to do that which is not the image of God. To sin, in other words, is to be less than human…less than what we were created to be. The Greek word for sin is borrowed from archery and it literally means to “miss the mark.” Sin is that which takes us away from the mark, the image of God. And when we’re bound up by sin, we tend to see others as less than human, too. We can see people as objects to be exploited, and we treat them accordingly, rather than seeing them in the image of God.
The rest of the story of the Bible is thus the story of God’s mission to restore humanity to his image, to break the effects of sin. God carries out this mission through a people that he chooses and shapes—a people called Israel—but even they are constantly tempted to rebel against God, to worship idols, and to treat others as being less than human. They are a broken people, like we are, and cannot muster the capacity to recapture the image of God on their own. So God takes the extraordinary step of becoming human himself in the peson of Jesus Christ—a second Adam, as Paul calls him. Jesus is the perfect image of God, and calls people to follow his example, not only to become fully human themselves but to treat others as fully human as well.
Jesus demonstrates that by spending most of his time with people who were considered by most to be less than human: people on the fringes, people who didn’t really matter. He ate with tax collectors, whom people hated because they cheated and exploited the population, treating them as revenue streams. He ate meals with prostitutes, who were used as objects of pleasure by men. He touched lepers, who lived outside the community because their diseases made them less than human. He spent most of his time with people who weren’t people at all in that culture.
Why did he do it? To demonstrate that they, too, were made in the image of God. He offered them forgiveness of their sins, not condemnation. He made the unclean clean again simply by touching them. He treated them as being fully human, and once they understood that they were created in the image of God, many of them were transformed by that knowledge.
Now, one of the things you will notice, if you’re willing to look, is that when Jesus talked about God’s ultimate judgment, God’s wrath, God’s justice, it was not most often aimed at these people—the ones who were broken, and seen as less than human. No, when Jesus talked about God’s judgment, it was usually aimed very pointedly at those who thought they were superior and treated others as being less than human. God’s judgment was reserved, in other words, for people who ought to know better.
Look at today’s passage from Matthew 25. Who are the ones who enter the kingdom? The ones who had compassion on those whom others had seen as being less than human. The condemnation, judgment, “hell” if you will, is for those who refuse to see other humans as being created in the image of God, people loved by God and valuable to God. We can’t just sit and ponder Jesus, we have to follow him.
Now, this is a far cry from what many of us in our traditions have come to believe. Most of us were taught that avoiding hell, getting out from under God’s wrath, was the result of simply having the right beliefs. If I only prayed the right prayer and asked Jesus into my heart, then I’ll be saved from hell no matter what I do. Too bad for those other people, who don’t have the right beliefs. They’re going to fry. To hell with them.
My friends, the Protestant Reformation brought many great things to us, but this way of thinking isn’t one of them. In an effort to counter the emphasis on deeds for salvation in the Catholic tradition, the Reformers pushed the pendulum too far the other way and insisted on “faith alone” as the requirement for salvation. What that morphed into, however, was the idea that faith was just cognitive assent—ascribing to the right doctrines, getting your mind right about Jesus.
One of the favorite verses the Reformers used was Ephesians 2:8-9. You know this one: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Yes, we are only saved by God’s grace, God’s unmerited favor. Yes, belief is important. We cannot earn God’s favor, but that never means that we are see faith, our response to God, as being passive.
Look at the next verse, verse 10: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life!”
We were created in the image of God, in the image of Christ, for good works—to not only be fully human, but to bring others toward full humanity through acts of compassion and justice, just like Jesus! Christian faith is a way of life, not merely a good idea! Many will say “Lord, Lord,” says Jesus in Matthew 25. Many will claim that they had all the right beliefs lined up. But Jesus says, “I don’t know you…because you didn’t care about the people created in God’s image. You failed to be fully human.”
So many Christians are sure that they know who’s going to hell and who isn’t. They are fixated on hell because they want to make sure that other people are getting what they deserve. But Jesus’ teaching on God’s judgment was never designed to give us a window on the fate of others. Instead, it is always a mirror that we hold up to ourselves. Are we becoming fully human? Are we treating others as people created in the image of God, no matter what kind of people they are? Do we treat others with compassion, or contempt? We will be judged on that basis, not simply on what creeds we muttered.
You know, we can be so self-righteous, we people who cry, “Lord, Lord!” We’ve got it all figured out. We can categorize people into different groups so well, stick a label on them, and declare them bound for hell. I have people ask me all the time why it is that people in this culture are rejecting Christianity in droves. Well, to me the answer is pretty simple. It’s us. When you treat people as less than human, when you slap a label on them, when you only care about how they line up compared to you…why would they want to know anything about the Christ you supposedly represent? You want to reach people for Christ? Start acting like him! What’s that mean? It means we’re less concerned about what bin everyone goes in at death, and we start engaging the reality of Jesus’ life—the Jesus who even forgave those who nailed him to the cross, the ultimate dehumanizing act of history.
The image of God as one who is hell-bent on sending people to their doom simply isn’t the biblical one. Paul says this in 1 Timothy 2—“God our Savior…desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” What is the truth? “For there is one God, there is also one mediator between God and humankind. Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” Christ became fully human and gave himself for…everyone.
Does that mean that there is no hell? No, I think the Bible makes it clear that there are some who will choose to be outside of God’s kingdom. Sin is dehumanizing, it pulls us further and further away from the image of God we were meant to be. Sin is also a conscious choice—a choice to reject God’s image and create an image for ourselves. Given that reality, and given the biblical witness, I think it’s certainly true to say that some people will become so dehumanized by sin that they are really no longer human. If that’s the case, hell, whatever it looks like, is the ultimate result.
One of my professors in seminary, Jerry Walls, wrote a book about hell titled. “Hell, the Logic of Damnation.” In that book he proposes that even if you could show people a video tape of what life apart from God, life so dehumanized so as not to bear God’s image, looks like, some people would very likely still choose it, exercising their choice to reject God to the last. The Bible is somewhat vague on what their ultimate eternal destination looks like. Jesus most often used the word “gehenna” to describe it, which was the smoldering garbage dump outside Jerusalem, but even then the description isn’t detalied.
We may get glimpses of what hell looks like, however, just as we see glimpses of heaven. As I have said many times, the Bible speaks of the ultimate marriage between heaven and earth—on earth as it is in heaven is the goal Jesus taught us to pray for.
But in the present, too, we see the other reality—the reality of hell on earth. We see places where human-ness has been almost entirely eradicated. We saw it in the holocaust. We see it in the genocide of places like Darfur. We see it the bloody spectre of war. We see it in places of crushing poverty. We see it our prisons. We see it in seemingly less dark places, like our computer screens and TVs, where human bodies are exposed as objects for our entertainment. We see places where people have very nearly ceased being human and act like sub-human monsters. If we really want to know what hell is like, we don’t have to go very far.
And yet, even in these places of ultimate dehumanization and ultimate despair, places of violence and death, God does not seem to have completely given up. And if God hasn’t given up, then neither should we.
Mike was my roommate in seminary, and I like him instantly. We studied together, played softball together, and had long theological discussions into the night as we read books and worked on papers. He graduated the year before me, and went to a little United Methodist Church in Beaumont, Texas, before joining the Navy as a chaplain. We kept in touch a little, you know how it is, enough for me to learn that he had met a beautiful young lady and they had married, and soon had two little boys, and I learned that he had gotten out of the Navy and was pastoring a small church in a little town in eastern Texas. I didn’t hear from him for awhile after that.
Until, one day I got an email from another seminary colleague who said, “Did you hear about Mike?” Mike was in jail…he had beaten his wife to death in the church parsonage with the leg of a table, while their two little boys slept in the next room.
I can’t tell you how I felt hearing that news. My friend was a murderer—a violent killer. I had not seen this coming. No one did. I had no categories for it. I read the news reports, which were all over even the national news (anytime a minister does something heinous, you can be sure it will be everywhere). He plead guilty, but before he was to be sentenced he tried to kill himself, but was unsuccessful—“unfortunately,” said the local paper. He was sentenced to 55 years in a Texas state penitentiary.
What do you do with that? It’s hard to imagine a more brutal, dehumanizing crime, and the devastation it caused not only in those families but in the local church and everywhere else.
And yet, as terrible as this was, and as much as Mike deserved the consequences of his actions (some said that he got off “easy”), I simply couldn’t stop thinking about him and wondering what had gone wrong. Every time I tried to put it aside, I couldn’t. It was like God was prodding me, and I know what it’s like to be prodded! I had to believe that something very dark had happened to him, but that the person he was hadn’t completely gone.
I wrote to the district superintendent and bishop of his conference to see where he was being held, but got no response. I sent a letter to where I thought he was, and it came back unopened.
A couple of months ago, I decided to try again—eight years after he was put in jail. Two weeks later, I got a response from Mike, written on a typewriter, which is all they’re allowed to use. He told me that I was the first pastor to contact him, other than one of our mutual seminary friends. He told me about the tears he shed when we saw the letter, because he had felt completely abandoned by everyone.
Mike is deeply, devastatingly sorry for what he did. We’ve been corresponding back and forth, and he has yet to tell me what was going on inside of him that day that caused him to perpetrate such violence. Maybe, in time he will, but I imagine that it’s hard to define such evil. He tells me about the hell that is prison, but soft pedals it for me, I’m sure. He is very aware that he is getting what he deserves.
I, on the other hand, have had to come to grips with the fact that I am the friend of a murderer. I’m still trying to figure that out.
But one thing I do know is that God is in the midst of that prison. God has not forgotten Mike, and made sure that I didn’t either. Even in the midst of horror, God is working to rebuild his humanity, and I’m pretty sure God wants me to be part of that process. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t feel at all comfortable to be in this place, but I believe it’s part of what God is up to—pushing back hell little by little by restoring the image of God.
All of this reminds me of that little poem by C.T. Studd. The one that goes:
"Some wish to live within the sound of Church or Chapel bell;
I want to run a Rescue Shop within a yard of hell."
I know this probably isn’t the answer some of you were looking for when you wanted to know about hell and who goes there. But maybe instead of focusing our attention on hell, we ought to focus our lives on helping others and helping ourselves to recognize what it means to fully human people, created in the image of God…
Especially if we’re doing it within a yard of hell.
