There was a time when you heard a lot about Hell. Jonathan Edwards, who preached not far from here a couple of centuries ago, famously gave a sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” And in my youth, I can recall parish mission preachers (especially Jesuits) going on and on about the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, in vivid detail.
But today it seems we rarely hear about Hell anymore. Perhaps it’s because we’ve become so accustomed to comfort and security that we find it difficult to imagine eternal consequences.
We speak easily of God’s love—and rightly so—but seldom about his justice.
But there’s an awkward fact that’s hard to ignore. Jesus spoke about Hell than anyone else in the Sacred Scriptures. More than Peter or Paul or John or me or Father Paul…Jesus spoke a lot
about hell. So maybe we ought to do the same.
Now the people of Jesus’ time knew what he was talking about when he warned them about being cast into a “fiery furnace" where there would be "wailing and grinding of teeth.” They
thought about the three men in the fiery furnace of the Book of Daniel or about Gehenna, the dark valley outside Jerusalem, where in ancient days children were sacrificed to idols and where Jeremiah foretold the coming wrath of God.
But the real Hell is not just a place of fire. It’s far worse. The real Hell is a place where all love has been rejected—a place of eternal separation from God. Eternal separation from love, a
place of perpetual darkness and fear, apart from any inkling of being loved or cared for and without the possibility of loving anyone else.
It's such a horrific thought because deep down we know that we were made for love—to be loved and to love. Which is why the horror of being excluded from a God who is love is almost unimaginable.
And yet we can choose to go there.
Did you ever hear the story of the man who hated hearing the children playing outside his kitchen window, so he nailed boards across it. Then he grew tired of the neighbors talking on the sidewalk, so he boarded up the front windows too. The man mowing his lawn annoyed him. The people across the driveway irritated him. One by one, every window in the house disappeared behind wooden boards.
And before you knew it, he was sitting alone in a cold, dark, silent house, cursing the darkness and blaming God for his misery.
And every once in a while he would hear a gentle knock at the door. “It is I" the one who stands at the door and knocks would say “Let me in, and I'll help you open the windows.”
But opening the door meant admitting he needed someone else. So he just shouted back, “Leave me alone.”
And there he sat—cursing God in a bleak darkness of his own making. It is what St. Augustine described as “the soul curved in on itself,” or, in the words of C. S. Lewis, "The doors of hell are locked from the inside.”
No, hell is not simply a place; it is a choice given to us by a God who loves us too much to force us to love him back. A God who has given us the freedom to choose light and love and truth, or to choose darkness and hate and the triumph of absolute selfishness.
In other words, we have the power to choose heaven, and the power to go to hell.
