Palm Sunday: Repentance and the Last Things.

Repentance and the Last Things.

Some unsavoury words from the Pope

Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed the Catholic teaching on sin and the existence of hell in a homily given on his visit to a Roman church, Sta. Felicita, on the fifth Sunday of Lent. Responses to this homily have been interesting to say the least. Traditionalists have lauded the restatement of these beliefs while to some liberal minded Catholics this was a retrograde and disturbing homily out of step with contemporary theology. The main issue seems to be about hell.

Biblical and historical images of hell as a ‘place’ of fire, brimstone, suffering (somehow physical) are engraved in our culture, art and imagery. We forget that they are only metaphors; attempts to express a belief in language and imagery of the time. The strange thing is that imagery and metaphor become concrete. Take a different example, no one believes literally that ‘my love is like a red, red rose, newly sprung in June’. We know it is metaphor, yet somehow we take the religious imagery of another time and culture as ‘real’. It gets in the way.

In his homily the Pope reaffirmed the reality of sin, judgment, hell and acknowledged that these were ‘not spoken about much in our time’. Amongst some theologians these are almost dirty words, so much is the contemporary emphasis on God’s accepting love and the influence of an individualistic society. It is as if a sense of sin has been replaced with a quasi-psychologised sense of inadequacy.

Benedict posed his statements about hell, sin and eternity in the context of God’s desire for our redemption. He said, ‘Christ came to tell us that he desires all of us in heaven and that hell, which isn’t spoken about much in our time, exists and is eternal for those who close their hearts to his love.’ On sin, he said, ‘if he (God) hates sin, it’s because he loves each person infinitely.’

Hell from God’s perspective

Perhaps this contentious homily is an opportunity to express this belief from a different perspective.

I don’t believe God ‘sends’ us to hell, nor is hell is a state in which God rejects the person. I believe that it is the exact opposite.

The Biblical images of God are not images of a dispassionate, detached, unfeeling being sitting up in his air-conditioned heaven like some remote quizmaster ticking off what we get right and what we get wrong. The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is passionate and passionately in love and involved with people and all creation.

Let’s look at our human experience of love. When one spouse is unfaithful to the other, the ‘wronged’ person is powerless to prevent their spouse from being unfaithful to and rejecting the love bond they have committed themselves to in their marriage. A parent is powerless to prevent their child going down the path of drug use or criminality.

In both examples, no matter how much the spouse or parent offers the possibility of support, encouragement, forgiveness and abiding love, unless the other turns from the path they have set themselves upon they are unable to ‘receive’ that forgiving, rebuilding, reconciling love. Over a time of many small infidelities, they have taken a path that leads to isolation and turning in on oneself and an inability to understand the consequences of their rejection on others. A genuine sense of community is lost.

So the one who offers the abiding, forgiving love in a sense is powerless because they can’t force the other to change. Until the wanderer spouse or child wants to return, it is in a very real sense that they are closed off from receiving that love. The love offered may never be rescinded. It may abide until death, always offering, waiting, longing, suffering, desiring the beloved wander to return.

To use another image, it is not unlike our current drought damaged soil that becomes unable to receive and absorb the water. Without soil care, the water just runs off.

If this is the heart of our human experience of love at its most abiding and forgiving, it is also a reflection of how God loves us – after all, we are the image and likeness of God.

When we choose to keep wandering and not turn to the love offered, we sit in darkness and the shadow of death – the very place Jesus would shine God’s light (cf. Lk 1:79 – the Benedictus).

Think of the unfaithful spouse, the broken child who, through many choices has ignored the love offered and remains shut out from that warmth. In the end, they choose the ego-isolation, loneliness and destruction of the relationship. And love is powerless – except to suffer and abide in hope, always ready to run out to meet the beloved as did the prodigal son’s father.

If we see hell, sin and repentance in this context, God is the one who suffers and grieves for the loss of the beloved but always waits, always offers, constantly seeks. In the end, given the non-coercive nature of love, there must be a ‘state’ that allows us to wander our own way from God and life and communion with those who love us.

However, in the really real end, God knows our hearts and perhaps eternally seeks us, even after we have made the rejection and as enough rain will make the dry impermeable soil permeable again, perhaps God’s persistence will turn the most closed of hearts. This is the God of Jesus.

A Sense of Sin

The Pope spoke about God hating sin ‘because he loves each person infinitely’. Sin gets in the way of returning love for love. In the Gospel of the day in which the Pope’s homily was set, Jesus says to the woman taken in adultery, ‘Go, sin no more.’ Jesus did not say, ‘There, there dear, it doesn’t matter.’ What we do does matter. It has consequences. In admonishing her to change her behaviour, Jesus both acknowledges the reality of her acts as well as the reality of forgiveness and change.

Profound sin does not ‘just happen’, neither does profound virtue. Both of them happen as a result of many, many acts, thoughts and directions over a lifetime that directs our love – either to self-in-isolation or self-in-communion. It is a lifetime journey in which both exist within us. Over time, one grows stronger.

A healthy sense of sin is a sense that the communion is violated to a greater or lesser degree, love is betrayed. It takes on a sense of responsibility for one’s actions rather than trying to justify them through some quasi-psychological inadequacy or by blaming someone else (from mother to the government) for one’s actions. (I am not talking here of genuine psychological or psychiatric issues.)

A healthy sense of sin a gift from God. It enables us to actually see our behaviour, thoughts and ideas in the context of our relationship with God and with our creation community. It is as if the unfaithful spouse can at long last see how his/her behaviour is destroying something good or when the wayward child stops, sees their destructive way and turns to family for help and a new start. Sin is inseparable from responsibility for one’s behaviour and repentance for the hurt and pain given.

Repentance – a Joyful Gift

Repentance is a great Lenten gift. It is about recognising this passionate, abiding love which is always there, seeing the ‘footprints’ of that love in every moment of our lives and in returning to our true home. It is recognising that we are indeed people who wander off in our own directions, that in big or small ways put selfishness before wholeness i.e. self-in-isolation or self-in-communion with all creation and God.

When a disloyal spouse returns to committed love, or a drug-clean child returns to family, the sign of repentance is gratitude (we used to call it reparation) that desires to give back to the one who has stood by in abiding love.

Repentance is about celebrating, rejoicing and starting again. That the love bond is again reciprocal and strong. It is about profoundly realising the consequences of our behaviour and gratefully and joyfully returning to the one who has shown us, helps us change, forgives and offers absolutely new life.

The Last Things

Traditionally the Church has taught that the last things for a person are death, judgment, heaven, hell. However, I do not believe these just happen when we die. They happen now with every judgment, choice and act we make. Heaven, that is communion, is now and hell, that is isolation is now. Repentance is that honest look we give ourselves and return to communion with God and all things. So repentance, like the prodigal son’s return is tearful, joyful and life giving for both the son and his father.

Holy Week, this most profound, solemn and joyful celebration of the liturgical year is upon us. Let’s repent of whatever turns us away from living consciously and reverently in the community of creation in God (hell) and turn with trust to the God of Jesus for healing, forgiveness and direction (heaven). Thus we die (death) to what drives us to isolation and live to what drives us to communion. In this way we allow the judgment of God to be active – Genesis (read in the Easter Vigil) has the great refrain, ‘God saw all that he had made, and God saw that it was very good.’ This asks us to grow in maturity and honest communion.

Some Questions

Is there a hell? Well, yes - a state in which love is continually rejected and the person turns in on themselves is profound isolation. The freedom of love cannot coerce.

What’s it like? Don’t know. All images are metaphor for the loneliness and pain of someone turned in upon themselves to the extent that divine, abiding love can no longer ‘permeate’ because the person can no longer turn outward to communion.

Is it eternal? This is difficult because of the whole idea of what is eternity. However, it would be fearfully difficult not to be changed by love continually offered. Eternity is a long time for God to ‘non-coercively pursue’ the lost beloved.

Finally, does God worry about hell? You bet. The whole Gospel delights in the sinner returning to life. In the end, I think it is God who grieves and suffers over someone in such a state of exclusion far more than we could imagine.

Easter

As we celebrate Holy Week and Easter, may we rejoice in the life-death-resurrection of Jesus in whom this passionate, abiding attachment of God to us is not just revealed, but shouted about – loudly and passionately.

PS

In The Last Battle, the last of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis tells a superb story of the difference between heaven and hell. The difference, in this story is that the people in hell can’t see the beauty and abundance with which they are surrounded.