Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. (Matthew 13:40-42)
You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (Matt. 23:33)
We spoke about the “mystery of iniquity” in the last lesson. This mystery also includes the reality of hell. How are we to make sense of “eternal punishment”?[1]
By considering in the last lesson the “eternal sin” (as our Lord put it), we’ve already brought some sense to it. An “eternal punishment” seems to be exactly what’s called for by “an eternal sin.”
But to go deeper, let’s actually consider the meaning of punishment itself.
Understanding Punishment
The Meaning of Hell
All that remains, then, is for God to allow the wicked to finally get what they have chosen. They’ve rejected God, and so now they are separated from Him, and this is hell’s chief punishment.[2] The Catechism defines hell as “The state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed, reserved for those who refuse by their own free choice to believe and be converted from sin, even to the end of their lives.”[3] In a profound sense, the punishment of hell is that the wicked would get what they want.
And because hell finally separates oppressors from the oppressed, we can also see that even hell manifests the faithfulness of God. In life, innocent people are oppressed and persecuted and killed, but in eternity God restores them to life and establishes a Kingdom for them. There, as the Scriptures say, “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” God gives the oppressors another place to dwell, because this Kingdom of peace would not be possible if the obstinate wicked are allowed to enter. And then, when they enter hell, the wicked bring their misery with them.
Even after examining these things more closely, there are still mysteries. But the purpose of these reflections is that we better understand the sobering reality that human beings, by their own fault, can fall into deep evil without any chance of recovery. God has no part in this evil, but seeks to deliver us from it, so long as that remains possible. Once it becomes impossible, the wicked are like demons — and do the scriptures ever give us any indication, at all, that the demons might be saved? No; all that’s left is that the Lord save others from them.
Knowing all this motivates us to do everything that we can to avoid this fate, and to help others do the same.
Trusting in God’s Goodness
These are hard truths. As such, they cannot be digested well without drawing near to God with abandonment and trust. Even in the face of the mystery of evil and hell, the mature disciple of Jesus has peace. Why? Because he knows in his deepest heart, from the Scriptures, from the Tradition of the Church, and also from experience, that God is good, and that all are embraced by God’s perfect love, even as His justice finally makes things right in the universe.
Believing this, the disciple also knows that God will bring a greater good out of all evil. As she considered the doctrine of hell, the Lord revealed to the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, “Behold and see, [by my] power, wisdom, and goodness I shall make well all that is not well, and you shall see it.” And she says, “In this he wants us to keep the faith and belief of the Holy Church.”[4]
Let us look forward with hope to this final consummation, where all things will be well — and “keep the faith and belief of Holy Church.”
In the last lesson, we’ll consider how continuing to reflect on the economy of salvation and the mystery of evil can stir us to action.
[1] And we also considered hell earlier in Dr. John Bergsma’s course, “The Fullness of Time”: Salvation in Jesus Christ. To repeat an important point made by Dr. Bergsma, it is Jesus Himself, in the Gospels, who teaches us most clearly about Hell. The teaching of the Church is based completely on the Lord’s teaching.
[2] CCC 1035. In this way we can see how it is that, as the Catechism also teaches, divine punishment is not “a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but [follows] from the very nature of sin” (CCC 1472).
[4] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Barry Windeatt (Oxford University Press, 2015), 40. See also CCC 313.