Sermon
Sunday 21 August 2011
1 Corinthians 3:9b-17; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
What is Hell? What is Purgatory?
What is Hell?
The Westminster Confession of Faith is the subordinate standard of authority in the Church of Scotland. It says of hell that:
the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power.
Some people seem to have delighted in imagining these torments: I’ll never forget reading for the first time, on a quiet evening in Aberfoyle, the sermon on hell found in James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The priest explains to the schoolboys that the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and ever with unspeakable fury,
with the result that:
the blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming.
Today, most treatments of hell emphasise not the torments of fire so much as the destruction from the presence of God: hell as eternal separation from God. This may or may not involve some form of existence: for it is argued by some that if we are completely separated from God and his creative power, we cease to be. In a novel by John Updike, a character asked his minister, Revd Eccles, if he believes in Hell:
Yes, he says, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God.
– Well then we’re all more or less in it.
– I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call… inner darkness.
Where do these ideas come from? In outline, they are in the Bible.
The word used in the New Testament is Gehenna, from the Valley of Hinnom, an area just outside Jerusalem where children were sacrificed, which became a rubbish heap. In time the name referred to the place of punishment for sinners after death. The main image for hell and for divine punishment generally used in the Bible is fire, but there are other images: darkness, death, destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord.
The main source of our imagery, which may surprise us, is the teaching of Jesus. Far from meek and mild stories, many of his parables include references to a place of unquenchable fire, reserved for those who resist the coming kingdom, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. The parable of the wheat and the tares (or darnel or weeds) is only one example. Jesus clearly challenged his listeners with the possible consequences of sin and evil.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation also abounds in hellish imagery, such as a lake of fire, and envisages a separation between those named or not named in the book of life.
By contrast, the writings of Paul and John, while conscious of God’s judgment and the importance for everybody in choosing to follow Christ, be saved and receive eternal life, have little of Jesus’ imagery for hell. If anything for Paul, judgment for the unrighteous leads to their death, their destruction, their annihilation rather than unquenchable torment. Indeed, there are hints in his letters that ultimately all creation, everything in heaven and on earth will be saved and be part of Christ’s unity.
So what should be think about hell?
Certainly, I have sympathy with those who are troubled with it. Could a wholly good and loving God allow some people, part of his creation, to be punished for their sin eternally? One former Moderator of the General Assembly, Andrew McLellan, put it this way: God would be a monster if he were prepared to consign his creatures, however wicked, to a punishment from which there would never, ever, be any possibility of escape.
These scruples are exacerbated by the very hellishness of much of life. Our inner darkness. A Cambodian wrote a heart-rending memoir of living under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. He writes about how the Buddhist monks taught him about punishment in the next world. But this was this world. The food in hell was maggots instead of rice… We knew all about the tree of iron spikes, the red-hot platform, the pan of boiling oil… There was no next world. There was nothing left to happen in it. (Someth May, Cambodian Witness)
If these things, when done by humans, are evil, can they be part of God’s loving power in hell?
If that question doesn’t trouble us, it should.
Yet we should not simply be blithe. Scripture consistently describes the importance of our moral lives. God respects the freedom he has given us. Sin matters. Christ died on the cross because humanity had veered so far from goodness, from love. And the Bible, especially when it records the teaching of Jesus, holds out the possibility, as the Catholic Church puts it: of remaining separate for ever by our own free choice from God, in whom alone human beings can possess the life and happiness for which we are created and for which we long. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1033, 1035)
It is a state, a place, without love.
What is Purgatory?
While hell is a part of the doctrine of nearly all Christian churches, Purgatory has a rather narrower constituency. Belief in Purgatory was renounced by the Protestant Reformers, and to this day it remains essentially a Roman Catholic belief. So let us hear how it is defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect. (1030-1)
Let’s tease out why it is necessary. In the sacramental understanding of the Catholic Church, people may well have been forgiven their sin by God, but they still have to fulfil penance. This involves making reparations for the wrong they have done, and making amendments to themselves, that is, becoming better so that they don’t do the same thing again. For sin may be forgiven but it still leaves a stain on the soul, a coarsening and clouding of our character. This damaged soul cannot stand before the unveiled light of the presence of God; it needs to be purified until it is ready. This happens by the action of God: there is nothing the soul in Purgatory can do to quicken the process.
Now there is no explicit mention of Purgatory in the Bible. But there is a strong belief in the purifying power of God’s love and justice, often expressed as a refiner’s fire. When Paul writes to the Corinthians, he is concerned about false teaching affecting the church: and goes on to say that the day of judgment dawns in fire, and the fire will test the worth of each person’s work. If anyone’s building survives, he will be rewarded; if it burns down, he will have to bear the loss; yet he will escape with his life, though only by passing through the fire.
Passing through fire sounds fairly unpleasant, and so Catholic practice has long been to try and shorten the time souls spend in Purgatory. To that end, Catholics pray for the dead, and say masses for particular dead, in the belief that that will shorten the soul’s time in Purgatory. Indeed St Monans Church was built by David II so that, after his death, masses would be said regularly for his soul. In fact, one of the principal causes of the Reformation was the selling of indulgences: people would give the church money in order that their loved ones’ time in Purgatory would be shortened.
There’s a strange Little Museum of Purgatory in Rome which offers a fascinating sidelight on this. It contains relics which purport to show souls in Purgatory communicating with people in this world, to implore them to pray harder and say more masses and give more money, so that their purgatorial pains be lessened. These relics are finger-prints, hand-prints and burn-marks which appeared on clothes and prayer-books of the living.
As I said, the Reformation resisted the belief in Purgatory and all the practices associated with it: calling it superstition, corrupt, not in scripture, and neglecting the saving work of Christ. Here’s a rhyme by the Scotswoman Elizabeth Melville from 1606:
The brain of man most surely did invent
That purging place, he answer’d me again;
For greediness together they consent
To say that souls in torment may remain
Till gold and goods relieve them of their pain.
Did the brain of man invent Purgatory? If so, it developed over hundreds of years out of the faith and religious life of the people. What’s clear is that the church’s doctrine of Purgatory is much more definite than the meagre hints in scripture. In the Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante, Purgatory has become a mountain with two terraces, a gate, and 7 cornices or ledges for different levels of sinful souls.
And on the issue of Hell, both Catholics and Protestants have seemed to know an amazing level of detail of the heat and nature of the fire, the pain of the damned, and the pleasure the saved take in seeing the damned in the fires.
There is, in other words, an architectural quality to some theological speculation which seems a long way from understanding God as love, as grace, as kindness, as the giver of peace.
Scripture is more modest in envisaging the last things. Perhaps we should be too. But our modesty can also come with confidence:
that God is loving, that Jesus lived and died for us and our salvation, that grace is offered to us in Jesus Christ, whatever we’ve done, that the friendship we have with God in this life will not end with death, but will be transformed.
