Overcoming Hell
For the last couple of weeks, hell has been on my mind quite often. I have been wondering why I got so fixated on it. It could be that the exercise of putting my thoughts out for the world to see is moving something inside me. Or, this year’s lenten journey is doing its thing in ways I have not yet realized. Regardless, I have been reflecting about it and wondering, why do we fear a place we have no proof of its existence?
In my book, A Human Catechism, I tell the story about how two of my good friends were murdered and tortured for hours by organized crime in Guatemala City. According to the evangelical ideology I learned, my friends went to hell after suffering for hours because they never “accepted Jesus as their personal lord and savior.” Hell was their punishment to purge for their sins in a never ending fire. The death of my friends made me struggle with my evangelical beliefs about hell. I began to wonder, how is it that God is willing to perpetrate the same violence (a. k. a. eternal torture) as those who murdered my friends?
This loss led me to take one of the first steps in searching for a different way to understand suffering, hell, and violence. It also led me to question the image of the god that I worshiped. As I question and inquire, I have taken a theological and exegetical (fancy word for reading the Bible) path that is shedding some light on how Jesus spoke about hell. This journey has opened my eyes to read the text through the eyes of my murdered friends and through the eyes of Jesus.
In the Gospels Jesus talks about hell using the word gehenna, which very likely refers to the Valley of Hinnom. This location was a place of shame. It was where the people of Israel practiced child sacrifice. Later in the history of the Jewish people, they used the valley as a dump where people threw away trash, dead animals, and the bodies of executed criminals. For that reason, when we see Jesus talking about hell he does so in concrete terms. It is not a theological statement. People knew the place he was referring to. It was real and tangible.
When people heard the word, they knew their violent history. They also knew the violence of their religion. In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah made reference to this place and the horrible things that the Hebrew people would experience as a result of human violence. Again, at the risk of overemphasizing, gehenna was a real place where real violence happened. For that reason, hell seems to be in the here and now for Jesus.
If this is true, humanity is responsible for creating hell with our violence, not God. Hell is a making of our own, and we build it flame by flame. We slowly add the logs of injustice, exclusion, and violence against those we consider impure, sinful, disposable, and unimportant. My friends fitted each one of these categories. They were kids from the slums who deserved nothing in the eyes of Guatemalan society. As a result, they experienced hell for what it may have felt like an eternity to them. That is why I have come to believe that there is no need for them to experience it all over again.
Reading scripture through the eyes of Jesus and digging a little bit deeper into the biblical context has been liberating to me. It has given me hope to see that violence and wrath are things that we humans do, not God. I have learned to let go of my anxieties about hell and became more of an evangelist, for lack of a better word. I have come to trust that believing in a God in whom there is no violence is truly good news for everybody. And, that is worth sharing. Because, if we dare to believe in a God who is in rivalry and violence against nothing, it is more likely that we will be more compassionate, loving, and peace-full. So, yes, hell is real because we make it in the here and now, but so it is an all loving, gracious, and life-giving God.