Turning our thoughts to heaven and hell
Mark 9:41-50
Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever causes one of these
little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great
millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. If your
hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life
maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire. And
if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off. It is better for you to enter into
life crippled than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna. And if your eye
causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better for you to enter into the Kingdom of
God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna, where their worm
does not die, and the fire is not quenched.
Do you spend
much time thinking about hell? For that matter, how much time do you think
about heaven? These are such heavy matters that, when we do bother to think
about them, we try to make light of them; we joke about them. Here are a few
classics of heavenly humor. Question: how do you make holy water? Answer: you
boil the hell out of it. Question: what do you get when you cross a lawyer with
a demon from hell? Answer: you get another lawyer. (I can tell lawyer jokes
because I’m a canon lawyer.) Okay, just one more. In heaven, the cooks are
French, the policemen are English, the mechanics are German, the lovers are
Italian, and the bankers are Swiss. But in hell, the cooks are English, the
policemen are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and the
bankers are Italians. Sometimes, the only way our finite minds can grapple with
the infinite realities of heaven and hell is to find a little humor in them.
In the
gospel today, however, Jesus does not think hell is any laughing matter. In
fact, Jesus says very strikingly and very soberly, “If your hand causes you to
sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two
hands go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fine.” In other words, our bodily
well-being should be sacrificed for the sake of our spiritual well-being.
Sometimes we have to forego the finite in order to grab hold of the infinite.
Scott Hahn once said that Jesus made more statements about hell than all the
other New Testament writers combined. You see, Jesus spent a lot of his time
teaching people about both heaven and hell – after all, we’ll spend a lot more
time there than we will on earth – and neither heaven nor hell tickled Jesus’
funny bone.
My friends,
let me invite you to make heaven and hell more a permanent part of your
thinking and praying and conversations. Instead of talking about politics and
the play-offs, try to imagine what heaven and hell might be like. Read the
Bible, especially the last book of Revelation. I highly recommend Scott Hahn’s
book “The Lamb’s Supper” as a good overview of the book of Revelation. Pick up
the Catechism of the Catholic Church and read what we Catholics believe about
our eternal destiny. I personally learned a lot by studying Pope Saint John
Paul II’s “theology of the body.” The pope’s explanations not only changed how
I look at heaven, but also how I live on earth, and how I try to love other
people while I’m here. I gotta tell ya, it shook me down to my shoelaces. The
amount of time we will spend in heaven (or in hell) will make the time we spend
on earth seem like a fraction of a second. And yet most people only spend a
fraction of a second thinking about eternity.
C. S. Lewis
said, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and
ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to
go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the
offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (Lewis, “The
Weight of Glory” essay). Folks, don’t be so easily pleased by the mud pies
earth has to offer.
Praised be
Jesus Christ!
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