If we believe the vivid paintings of the middle ages, the pains of hell are very real! Take a good look at the west front of the Münster, and you will see all sorts of nasty things happening to people who have obviously been over-indulging in the seven "deadly" sins - pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth - including a fair share of church leaders and government officials! And this message is not confined to mediaeval Catholicism - protestant fundamentalist preachers preach similar news on their TV and radio channels!
In the gospels, the theme of judgement is never far away. "The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction," said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, "and those who enter by it are many." (Mat 7:13) Those who fail to feed the hungry and clothe the naked are told, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels." (Mat 25:41). And while John reports Jesus as saying "If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge them, for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world," he immediately follows this by saying that this person "has a judge - my word will be his judge on the last day." (Jn 12:47-8)
Many people find it hard to believe in hell. Their argument runs: If God is a God of love, then surely God does not want to condemn even the worst of sinners to everlasting torment. The counter argument runs: If God is a God of justice, we all deserve punishment. These two views reflect themselves in two ways of looking at the Cross and the Empty Tomb. God shared in our grief at our own shortcomings, and led us through death in this world to a changed life in the next. Or God in Jesus shouldered the punishment which was rightly due to us.
These two views tell only part of the story. It is important to remember that in the language Jesus spoke, "justice" had nothing to do with punishment, and more to do with mercy - the words for righteousness and friendship share the same root. God's righteousness certainly does not extend to roasting people in hell!
Until a few hundred years before Jesus' time, people had thought of the grave (sheol, in Hebrew, the pit) as a place where one lay forgotten. Only when people began to believe in a resurrection did they also start to wonder what might happen to those who were not to share in it. The word sheol in the Old Testament never implies torture or torment.
The New Testament tells the Good News of salvation. It is about promises, not threats - the promise that whoever puts faith in Jesus "will not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16) The contrast is between death and life, not between torture and delight! "The wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life." (Rom 6:23) (Wages, note, and not punishment!) Again, the choice is between rising to new life and not rising to new life, and hades, the Greek word used to translate sheol, simply means a grave. Jesus offers victory over death - "Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory?" (1 Cor 15:55), and it is death's gates which are flung wide by the coming of God's reign (Mat 16:18, Rev 20:13). Hope triumphs over hopelessness.
Hades is only once described as a place of torment - in the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus. But this is just a story, and the fire, just as much as Abraham's bosom, is there to add detail. We do not believe in Abraham's bosom, and we should not believe in perpetual torment either.
So where did the idea of the fire come from? The other word in the New Testament translated as "hell" is gehenna - and this was the name of the rubbish pit just outside Jerusalem, the Hinnom valley, where all forms of garbage were burned. But the fire is an agent of destruction, not of torture. What went to Gehenna was discarded, trashed, thrown away.
It is wrong to think of hell as a place of punishment. Even those who suffer, maybe, at the thought that they have wasted their lives, are within grasp of God's promise. And that promise is of a renewed and transformed life in God's own presence. So during Lent, let us prepare ourselves, and turn our thoughts firmly heavenwards, towards the final goal - the goal of the Resurrection.
HD