As a kid, I was afraid of God. Priests often preached about Jesus as the stern Judge who would condemn all sinners to the fires of hell. In some medieval
churches in my hometown Cologne, I saw huge paintings of this stern
Judge Jesus, and I became even more afraid. But one day, a day I cannot
forget, my mother pointed to the verses in John’s Gospel (John 12:44-50) we read today,
especially verse 47, which says, “If anyone hears my words and does not
observe them, I do not condemn him, for I did not come to condemn the
world but to save the world.”
With deep relief, I began to lose my
fear of Jesus. For it is not He who condemns us; we condemn ourselves
when we ignore God’s words, and worse, when we do the opposite of what
Christ and the Church teach.
Every year, I teach a course in Church
Doctrine and so come also to the frightening realities, for many people,
of death, judgment, purgatory, hell and heaven. I always quote to my
students a passage written by the Spanish Jesuit Luis Bermejo in his
book, Light Beyond Death. He affirms, first of all,
the existence of hell and then writes quite poetically, “Man’s freedom
is a sacred shrine where not even God dares to enter, and it is there,
in the solitude of that shrine, that man makes his final rebellion against God: man has created hell, with God as a loving onlooker but reluctant to
interfere in any way in the final act of man’s abusive self-determination. God looks on and
weeps because He loves, but it is man, not God, who has created hell.
At the end God is reluctantly forced to say, ‘Your will be done in hell
as it was on earth.’”
So, it is unrepented sin that separates
us from God and not the judgment of an angry God. C.S. Lewis, whom many
know from his Narnia Chronicles, expressed it this way, “Sin is saying
to God, ‘Leave me alone’ and hell is God finally saying to man, ‘You may have your wish.’”
REFLECTION QUESTION: Do you try to avoid sin out of fear or out of love of God?
