Yesterday I had a very intense conversation with a good friend about hell. Not the location but the state. You see my friend had fallen into hell, grasping to the last shred of evidence that she was worth it, yet just as willing to give in to the reality that she wasn’t. She could understand the idea that God loved her, but she couldn’t grasp the idea of loving herself. There was just too much evidence swirling in her brain, reminding her of her failures. It was one of the hard conversations that reminded me how self-destructive we can be. But it also reminded me that much of our conversations regarding hell are just so off the mark.
I firmly hold that the problem we’re all wrestling with is very simple. How could God love me when I’ve done that? But yesterday reminded me that we’re also wrestling with the idea of, “How could I love myself when I’ve done that?” It’s so easy to keep a ledger on ourselves, keeping track of each little tit and tittle that we’ve done, always ready to pull the book out and say, “Yep, you really blew that one!” We’re the judge, jury and executioner with relentless punity.
The problem I have with our historical understanding of hell is that although the verses exists on it, and Jesus does talk about it, the very idea of it seems to contradict the intent of God throughout the story. In other words, from a macro level, hell (in our current evangelical construct) contradicts the establishment of grace (both before time and at the cross). God spends thousands of years setting up the nation of Israel in order to reveal the validity of grace as how things operate. Why would God suddenly forget that grace at the moment of divine judgment?
In other words, could the problem be our doubt about grace? We just don’t buy it. Because if God actually acted in accordance with grace, everyone would get in. Not because there isn’t justice in grace, but because justice is defined by it. Real love is the capacity to overcome the negative judgment we make in the midst of the worst. Real love is the capacity to embody the belief of the true worth even to the enemy. And if grace is true, the heaven (or the Kingdom of God) would be filled with all the people we don’t really like. And from this side of life that could easily be seen as hell.
So what if the final judgment is not Jesus condemning the sheep and the goats to eternal separation, but instead Jesus giving humanity it’s wish. Jesus never judges the two. He simply separates them based on who they think they already are. And he uses their own evidence they’re holding onto. And in doing so, they miss what really defines them, which is God. They’re unwilling to let go of their ledger.
I’ve come to really believe that the problem isn’t an angry God, bent on establishing a punitive justice. That God is dead to me. I’ve come to see a God that is bent on establishing a deep sense of grace that makes me wildly uncomfortable. Because if grace is really true, if it’s really the defining structure of the universe, then I’ve got to let go of my own ledger.
