Many of us Christians pick up the Bible in our right hand, then pick up our rose-tinted spectacles in the left. We are thus enabled to read straight past all the 'awkward verses' that those without spectacles would stop dead at. Preachers are fortunately able to obtain extra strong prescription rose-lenses which enables them to actually study the Bible without noticing those "awkward verses'.
But for Christians who consider the Bible to be a God given set of writings to be taken seriously, this is a problem. If just once, you dare to remove the spectacles, then you will go through a series of mind-states. Beginning with shock and offence, you'll progress to panic and confusion, followed by humility and prayer, then comes the Holy Spirit's help. It is not an easy path.
Try reading Matthew's gospel without the glasses!
It starts off well enough - in Jesus' sermon on the mount', he talks about the kind of characteristics that lead towards God - poverty, sadness, meekness, a longing to be good, mercy, purity, a determination to make peace. He talks about the resultant persecution, pain, insults, and slander that results. Finally, he says, persistance and integrity ensures that those around will understand what God is actually like, and praise him.
Jesus then raises the bar on the Law and the Prophets. The life God wants does not just avoid the act of murder, but declines ever to think hateful thoughts; the problem is not adultery, but even looking with lust. He gives examples of what it means to be a peacemaker - allowing a violent person to hit you without resistance; when someone takes your shirt, giving him your coat; doing extra hours for the person who is forcing you to work. And doing all this not out of a sense of duty, but because you actually love these horrible people who treat you as an enemy. This is unconditional love and forgiveness worked out in day-to-day relationships.
Then comes the kicker - if you do, Jesus says, you'll be sons of your Father.
So we conclude that God is like that. In fact, in all Jesus life and behaviour, it is crystal clear that, if Jesus is really the image of the invisible God, if he really is God incarnate, then God the Father is full of grace, love and tenderness, full of humility, sensitivity and care. Angered by hypocrisy, deeply moved by death, woeful at rejection, but forever and always forgiving.
But then, as if to give us a hint of the horror to come, we have ...
What has happened to unconditional forgiveness? Does this not stand in direct contradiction to what Jesus has just been saying?
Jesus has much much more to say on this uncomfortable topic. Later Matthew recounts some of Jesus' stories ... you know them, but your spectacles may have obscured the endings!
Matthew 13 - ... (the wheat and the weeds) everything that causes sin, and all who do evil ... get thrown into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 13 - ... (the fish in the net) ... the angels come ... separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 18 - ... (the unforgiving servant) In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
Matthew 21 - ... (the tenants in the vineyard) He will bring those wretches to a wretched end," (the listeners) replied, "and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.
Matthew 22 - ... (the wedding banquet) Then the king told the attendants, "Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are invited, but few are chosen'.
Matthew 24 - ... (the bad manager who beats servants when the master delays) He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 25 - ... (the one-talent servant) ... throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 25 - ... (the sheep and goats) ... Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
Many of these parables were directed at the scribes and pharisees - those archetypal 'hypocrites'. Jesus direct criticism was always directed at hypocrites.
The danger of giving me moral awareness, is that I will use it, not to guide my own behaviour, but to tread down others. I may use it selectively, to position myself in some moral pecking order. And this will lead to pride, feeding a constant misconception of what I am like. I am trapped.
But here is the point - in that continuity of failure, all the time I am embracing my own pride, forgiveness is not what I need. I don't need forgiving, I need changing! Freedom from self-deceipt is what I need. So that is what God addresses.
This is why Jesus seems so tough on hypocrites. But don't imagine for a second that just because he called them 'whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones', that he didn't LOVE them. He knows what they need - to be shocked out of their complacency.
All those stories end with the faithless, the unbelieving, the hypocrites consigned to something pretty bad - variously called outer darkness, or fiery furness. These parables don't spell out what this place is, and we always have to remember - they are parables.
Let me shock you - some parts of them are patently not true. For example, we can be pretty sure that God did not send his Son, all the while thinking, 'They will respect my son'. So we must always be prepared to allow the peripheral details to be there just for dramatic impact.
However, the unpleasantness of the destination is not a peripheral detail!
So while those whose actions don't stack up, wind up somewhere pretty nasty, that by no means provides grounds for thinking in terms of a Hell involving never-ending torture.
The unforgiving servant of Matthew 18 was to be let out, once he'd paid back all he owed. Though in his case, he did owe so much, that the payback period must have been long. More pointedly, Jesus explicitely states in Matthew 24 in a post-parable explanation, that the bad manager is in a place where those whose sin is greater, receive more severe punishment, and those whose sin is less, receive less severe punishment.
In the parables, the only implication that this torture is unending is drawn from the mis-translation of the word aion, found in the Matthew 25 phrase "eternal fire'. Modern translations have replaced the word "everlasting' with the word "eternal', but that is still popularly believed to go on forever.
That won't do, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, detailed study of the word aion gives no indication that it should mean "unending'. Aion is actually a pretty weird and fascinating word, but that's another story.
Secondly, what profit does unending torment bring? It does not serve restitution, if the pay-back is never enough. Neither does is serve justice, if the penalty is never equal to the crime. It cannot serve correction, if finally, the corrected individual is stuck in the torture chamber.
Thirdly, how good is heaven going to be for 3% of humanity, if the remaining 97% (who, incidentally are loved by, and precious to the 3%) are still weeping and gnashing teeth with no hope of release.
On the other hand, what if we regard the outer darkness as a place of finite penalty, correction and restitution? What changes if the one inflicting pain is a surgeon rather than a psychopath? Then the certainty of unconditional love and forgiveness remains.
And recall Jesus words on the cross, spoken about those very individuals who, in real life, dragged the son out and murdered him, 'Forgive them, Father, they don't know what they are doing.'
