style="font-size:15px;"> Have you ever sat with a woman while she talked about what it was like to be raped? How does a person describe what it’s like to hear a five-year-old boy whose father has just committed suicide ask: “When is daddy coming home?” How does a person describe that unique look, that ravaged, empty stare you find in the eyes of a cocaine addict?
I’ve seen what happens when people abandon all that is good and right and kind and humane.
Once I conducted a funeral for a man I’d never met. His children warned me when they asked me to do the service that I was getting into a mess and that the closer we got to the service itself, the uglier it was going to get.
This man was cruel and mean. To everybody around him. No one had anything positive to say about him. The pastor’s job, among other things, is to help family and friends properly honor the dead. This man made my job quite difficult.
I eventually realized what they meant by “ugly.” When he realized he was about to die, he had his will rewritten. He purposely left relatives out who were expecting something and gave that wealth to other family members he knew they despised. He had his will changed so that at his funeral there would be pain and anger. He wanted to make sure that he would be causing destruction in this life, even after he’d left it.
I tell these stories because it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that love, grace, and humanity can be rejected. From the most subtle rolling of the eyes to the most violent degradation of another human, we are terrifyingly free to do as we please.
God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it.
We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free.
We can use machetes if we want to.
So when people say they don’t believe in hell and they don’t like the word “sin,” my first response is to ask, “Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?”
Some words are strong for a reason. We need those words to be that intense, loaded, complex, and offensive, because they need to reflect the realities they describe.
And that’s what we find in Jesus’s teaching about hell—a volatile mixture of images, pictures, and metaphors that describe the very real experiences and consequences of rejecting our God-given goodness and humanity. Something we are all free to do, anytime, anywhere, with anyone.
He uses hyperbole often—telling people to gouge out their eyes and maim themselves rather than commit certain sins. It can all sound a bit over-the-top at times, leading us to question just what he’s so worked up about. Other times he sounds just plain violent.
But when you’ve sat with a wife who has just found out that her husband has been cheating on her for years, and you realize what it is going to do to their marriage and children and finances and friendships and future, and you see the concentric rings of pain that are going to emanate from this one man’s choices—in that moment Jesus’s warnings don’t seem that over-the-top or drastic; they seem perfectly spot-on.
Gouging out his eye may actually have been a better choice.
Some agony needs agonizing language.
Some destruction does make you think of fire.
Some betrayal actually feels like you’ve been burned.
Some injustices do cause things to heat up.
But it isn’t just the striking images that stand out in Jesus’s teaching about hell; it’s the surreal nature of the stories he tells.
Jesus talks in Luke 16 about a rich man who ignored a poor beggar named Lazarus who was outside his gate. They both die, and the rich man goes to Hades, while Lazarus is “carried” by angels to “Abraham’s side,” a Jewish way of talking about what we would call heaven.
The rich man then asks Abraham to have Lazarus get him some water, because he is “in agony in this fire.”
People in hell can communicate with people in bliss? The rich man is in the fire, and he can talk? He’s surviving?
Abraham tells him it’s not possible for Lazarus to bring him water. The rich man then asks that Lazarus be sent to warn his family of what’s in store for them. Abraham tells him that’s not necessary, because they already have that message in the scriptures. The man continues to plead with Abraham, insisting that if they could just hear from someone who came back from the dead, they would change their ways, to which Abraham replies, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”
And that’s the story.
Notice that the story ends with a reference to resurrection, something that was going to happen very soon with Jesus himself. This is crucial for understanding the story, because the story is about Jesus’s listeners at that moment. The story, for them, moves from then to now. Whatever the meaning was for Jesus’s first listeners, it was directly related to what he was doing right there in their midst.
Second, note what it is the man wants in hell: he wants Lazarus to get him water. When you get someone water, you’re serving them.
The rich man wants Lazarus to serve him.
In their previous life, the rich man saw himself as better than Lazarus, and now, in hell, the rich man still sees himself as above Lazarus. It’s no wonder Abraham says there’s a chasm that can’t be crossed. The chasm is the rich man’s heart! It hasn’t changed, even in death and torment and agony. He’s still clinging to the old hierarchy. He still thinks he’s better.
The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don’t mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favoritism.
To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood.
This story about the rich man and Lazarus was an incredibly sharp warning for Jesus’s audience, particularly the religious leaders who Luke tells us were listening, to rethink how they viewed the world, because there would be serious consequences for ignoring the Lazaruses outside their gates. To reject those Lazaruses was to reject God.
What a brilliant, surreal, poignant, subversive, loaded story.
And there’s more.
Jesus teaches again and again that the gospel is about a death that leads to life. It’s a pattern, a truth, a reality that comes from losing your life and then finding it. This rich man Jesus tells us about hasn’t yet figured that out. He’s still clinging to his ego, his status, his pride—he’s unable to let go of the world he’s constructed, which puts him on the top and Lazarus on the bottom, the world in which Lazarus is serving him.
He’s dead, but he hasn’t died.
He’s in Hades, but he still hasn’t died the kind of death that actually brings life.
He’s alive in death, but in profound torment, because he’s
