How many jokes and stories have we heard and told about “what happens when we die….” The pearly gates; St Peter, keeper of the keys; and my favorite, “Shush, they think they’re the only ones here.”
But ask yourself which you’d rather hear from Jesus when you stand (or kneel) before him. “Well done, good and faithful servant?” Or, Jesus answer, “You have said so,” recorded in St. Matthew’s Passion as His answer to Judas Iscariot’s question regarding the betrayer: “Surely it is not I, Rabbi.”
Self-incriminating to the core, Judas seals his hell-fate, or so we’re inclined to believe. Now the Church certainly believes in hell, and the Catechism warns the faithful of the “sad and lamentable reality of eternal death…also called “hell.” (CCC 1056) But never has the Church said definitively that a particular soul, Judas Iscariot, Adolph Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, or Sadaam Hussein, has been consigned to the devil’s domain.
Today, as we were driving back from visiting some soldiers who were headed into Iraq — and as the vast nothingness of the Kuwait desert stretched before us, I had a vision, of sorts. A vision what hell is like. (Now, I didn’t say Kuwait is like hell, and please don’t turn me in to the PC police.)
But if, as the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, often says, the kingdom God, heaven, is Jesus, and being in perfect and eternal communion with him, then hell must be the opposite: no Jesus, no communion, no community, utter and endless isolating loneliness. Now there is the vision: hell is being in a desert, always daylight and very hot and dry, no clouds, no sun, but unbearably bright (no dark, dingy, sulphur smokie, smelly dungeon as we sometimes think). Nothing. Just hot sand, no smells, no water, no lizards or snakes, no camels, no mirages, no breeze, no end, nothing over the horizon — but worst of all — NO PEOPLE. No community — forever, absolutely alone. Not even an occasional visit from the devil. He’s got more of the living to snag. You are off his radar, permanently. You’re not even a notch on his wicked devil’s red handle on his fiery pitchfork! Endless, colorless, desert, alone, for ever. That is hell.
So ask yourself again what it is you want to hear from Jesus when you meet him on your way to heaven. And then ask yourself, again, what you are doing about it — today.
The crucified and risen Lord is waiting to hear from you. “Surely, it is not I….”