Does God send us to Hell? Luke 16:19-31

One of the messages I learned as a youngster at Sunday School was if you are not good enough you could end up in Hell. I wanted to be good enough because Hell didn’t sound like a nice place. The teaching didn’t terrify me but it did make me aware there were consequences to our moral behaviour. Later I learned that if I trusted Jesus I would receive a ‘get out of hell’ card. Trust God, accept Jesus, believe the right things and all would be well. Sin, reject Jesus and when you die you’ll face eternal torment. I have to say I found that rather difficult to understand because Jesus just didn’t seem to be that sort of guy. I wondered what happened to all those people who had never heard of Jesus, and what was this believing in him about anyway. What stuck out for me was the amazing way he accepted people not rejected them and it just didn’t add up that he would consign vast numbers to eternal torment.

In the Hebrew Scriptures there isn’t an exact word for hell. They talk of Sheol which is a dark murky place beneath the earth’s surface where people go when they die. However, in our Hebrew Scriptures what happens after we die is of little consequence. It’s simply not a matter of concern. The people of the Old Testament stood in marked contrast to the Egyptians who had oppressed them and who built ornate tombs and pyramids for their dead. The Hebrew people seemed to have virtually no interest in what may follow this life. Funeral monuments and rituals were minimal. They were interested in now and the sort of life we lived now – whether we were dead or alive now.

In New Testament it’s not much different. Paul never uses the word hell. Jesus does twelve times. In Greek the language of New Testament, the word is Gehenna – Ge means valley, henna mean Hinnom. Gehenna – the valley of Hinnom was a valley just outside the city wall of Jerusalem. Actually I can say I’ve been to hell because I’ve been to the Valley of Hinnom. It’s not far from the only Presbyterian Church in Jerusalem, so after attending worship there a few years ago I took a walk to Gehenna – hell. It sits just below the old city wall and today is part of the urban sprawl of modern Jerusalem. But in Jesus’ time it was outside the city wall and in this notorious valley, Gehenna, was the city rubbish dump. People tossed their rubbish and waste into the valley. A fire burned there continuously and the sound of wild animals gnashing their teeth as they fought over scrapes of food was a real sound heard there. People also remembered that this was an evil and dark place where child sacrifice and other terrible practices had happened in days gone by- a place where the presence of their God had been utterly rejected.

In Matthew chapter 5 Jesus says anyone who calls someone else a worthless fool will be in danger of the fire of Gehenna or hell. He goes on to say that It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna or hell. In Matt.10 and Luke 12 he says “Be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body and throw you out to Gehenna or in hell”. In Matt.18 and Mark 9 he repeats an earlier thought saying, “It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of Gehenna or hell. In Matt.23 he accuses religious leaders of his day of leading people to be children of hell and that they themselves are heading for Gehenna or hell.
Gehenna – the town’s rubbish dump. Jesus seems to be saying that it’s possible to live a life that heads for the rubbish dump. It’s possible to waste your life, or to get so off track that your life is completely wasted and even worse to lead others to waste their lives too. And that for Jesus was a terrible sin. Wasted living that misses the opportunity God gives us to make a difference to the life of our world was something Jesus was really concerned about. We get one shot to play our part in the drama of creation and according to Jesus you don’t want to blow it.

There is another Greek word Hades which is also used for hell. It’s the Greek version of the Hebrew word Sheol – the murky place – where at least some of the spirits of the dead live. Again Jesus uses this word three or four times, and it’s also found in the book of Revelation. It’s the word used for hell in the story of Lazarus and the rich man.

I wonder what you make of the story we read this morning of Lazarus? The rich man ends up in Hades while Lazarus is with Abraham. I think it’s really important to remember that this is a symbolic story, but it is full of truth for us. The rich man has for years lived with the reality of the beggar Lazarus begging at his gate. I’m sure he’s passed by many times saying to himself, ‘lazy so and so, he should have got a decent job and worked hard like I have.’ I’m sure he’s tossed him some loose change to keep him happy, but the reality is that he looks down on this useless piece of disease ridden humanity. Lazarus dies and ends up with Abraham and the rich man dies and ends up in Hades. Hades isn’t always seen as a place of torment, but I have a hunch that Hades is a place where you get to reflect on your life, and I think this man is realizing that he should have done some reflecting while he was still alive. Instead of looking after himself and enjoying the fine wine and food, he now realizes he should of attended to his soul and his authenticity as a human being. He should have listened more for God in his life and lived as someone who was in touch with God and the what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. His life would have looked quite different if he had. But now it is too late, and it seems what was is now set in concrete. “Send Lazarus with some water to cool my burning mouth!” The rich man wants Lazarus to be his servant. The rich man still sees himself up here and Lazarus as some sort of lackey down there. It’s no wonder Abraham says there’s a chasm that can’t be crossed. The chasm is in the rich man’s heart. It hasn’t changed even in death. To his credit he wants to warn his family to get in touch with their soul and with God, but Abraham tells him that they have plenty of opportunity to do that. Again I have a hunch that under his breath he’s saying that simply putting the fear of Hades into their lives might change some of their behaviour but it won’t change their hearts.

That has to happen now, and it happens not primarily through the waving of a threat called hell, Hades, or Gehenna. Jesus is quite clear that how we live our lives and the choices we make are critical and these choices matter to God. We stand before God all the time, but we also look forward to a time when our lives will be reviewed and judged. For most of us there are strange mixtures of the worthwhile and the rubbish, the good and the bad. The rubbish will be consigned to Gehenna and the good will live on in the kingdom of heaven. I suspect there are instances when there is nothing of eternal value in a person’s life and the gift of life has been totally and utterly squandered, but I’ll leave the deciding of that to God. What is more important is the criteria for this sorting and judging It’s not about what we believe but it is about how we live and the state of our heart. Are we compassionate, are we using our gifts, are we bearers of love, do we encourage and enhance the lives of others, do we reach out across the fences to welcome the lonely, the sick, the poor, do we care about justice and building a world where people get a fair deal?

I’ve been to Hell, Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom, the rubbish dump of God. But I’ve also seen hell in other places. I walked through the checkpoint into the Gaza strip to be confronted by incredible cruelty and dehumanization inflicted by the policies of Israel and the corrupt politics of the Palestinian leadership. People living in needless poverty with open sewers and less than basic health care. People living with up to 80% unemployment. People held in captivity by economic policies and brute force. People most of whom like you and me simply want to have a good job raise a family and enjoy the gift of life. I’ve sat with a family who are so filled with bitterness towards each other that they can’t agree on how Mum should be buried, or talked to a cocaine addict who will do anything to get another fix. I’ve seen people so fixated by their own wants that no-one else seems to matter. I’ve seen what happens when people abandon all that is good and right and kind and humane.

God has given us freedom to choose and human beings continue to make terrible choices. So when people say they don’t believe in hell and they don’t like the word ‘sin’ I want to ask them to stop for a minute and consider what has gone wrong in our country when helpless little children are brutalized and murdered and people who know what happened remain silent. I want to ask why so many people commit suicide, or why we aren’t all a whole lot happier with this wonderful gift of life? I want to ask whether it’s right that people work in sweatshops for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, churning out cheap clothing so that the rich of the world can get good deals. I want to ask why there are so many dreadful climatic events happening in our world right now and whether it’s got anything to do with climate change and our way of living that pumps so much carbon into the atmosphere.

Some words are strong and strike a chord in us for a reason. We need those words – loaded, complex, and offensive because we need to be reminded that all is not well in our world. That’s what we find in Jesus’ teaching about hell – a mixture of images, and pictures, and metaphors that describe the consequences of rejecting God and our God given goodness, compassion, and humanity.

I don’t think of hell as a place but as a consequence of what happens when we reject God and discover the chaos and pain that rises up in our midst when we fail to live in a way that honours good religion and the sacredness of God given life. I think we would do well to keep this word in our vocabulary. I still however find it difficult to imagine God sending us to hell. It is we ourselves who choose to head down that road.

Dugald Wilson, 3 July 2011