Go To Gehenna!
2021년 9월 26일Go To Gehenna!
<Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time>
What is hell like? Chances are you think hell as having lakes of fire, where condemned souls are eternally poked by devils with their pitchforks. But this image comes more from Hollywood than from the Bible. In his “Divine Comedy”, Dante Alighieri describes Nine Circles of torment and torture for various sins. In the Ninth Circle there is a lake, not of fire but of ice in which Satan is entrapped from the waist down, the flapping of his bat-like wings keeps the lake perpetually frozen. Satan is portrayed as having three heads, each head chewing on the bodies of one of the three great traitors: Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Casar, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus. Very imaginative but again, not biblical.
When Jesus warned about hell he didn’t need Hollywood. He simply pointed to the city dump of Jerusalem. Gehenna was an open pit where people threw their garbage to burn and where the corpses of criminals were thrown to rot. The burning flame was indeed eternal and the maggots and worms never died. You can just imagine the smell! Jesus warns us to avoid sin or risk being thrown into Gehenna and burned like trash. He doesn’t do this to scare us but to emphasize how serious sin is. At its core, sin is an insult to God. It’s like a child screaming “I hate you” to its parents. Or like a child receiving a gift and then intentionally breaking it and throwing it in the garbage. Our dilemma is this: how can we reconcile our image of God as all-loving and all-forgiving with this image of God casting his children into the fires of Gehenna? Maybe God doesn’t put anyone in hell; we put ourselves there. Maybe hell is realizing how much pain and suffering we caused others. Today is the time to repent, before it’s too late. May none of us go to Gehenna!