Thirteenth of Year B - Heaven & Hell
June 2009
The Bible is very conscious of the influence of God in one’s daily life. If things went well for the Israelites it was because they were living according to the Law of God. If things were going badly it was because they had wandered from the way of the One True God. In short, on a daily basis, God helped them directly if they were good and punished them directly if they were bad. By and large they had little concept of reward or punishment in a life after death. Reward and punishment came from God here and now on a daily basis.
The Israelites could see how people who ignored the Law of God - the greedy, the selfish, dishonest people, those who mistreated others, adulterers, those who dishonoured their parents, those who ignored the needs of their neighbours etc. etc. generally ended up by being condemned and avoided by their neighbours or being arrested and punished by the authorities. This they attributed to God as punishment for sins. They believed that these sinners had received punishment for their sins, which was true and is true today also, but they also believed that this punishment was directly sent to them by an outraged God, which was not true.
For example today’s recession is the direct result of greed and selfishness and dishonesty - ignoring the law of God. But God did not send us this recession as punishment for our sins. We brought it on ourselves by our sinful actions.
But the Bible does not distinguish in this way between the well deserved results of our own sins and punishment coming directly from God.
Jesus of Nazareth had the same problem with his followers. They continually referred to sickness or human misfortune as being punishments from God for ones sins or even for the sins of ones parents. Jesus had to correct this misunderstanding of the nature of God, while at the same time urging personal repentance and conversion to avoid bringing trouble on oneself.
In the Old Testament they were quite ambivalent about life after death. Even for good people, life after death, if it existed, was envisaged as a cold, barren, lonely and uninviting existence in a place they called Sheol - best avoided for as long as possible.
So when the punishments lavished on sinners in Gehenna or Hell were discussed they were talking about the trouble people bring on themselves in this life, rather than in a hypothetical after life.
For the authors of the New Testament the Old Testament was the only Scripture. They were reared on and steeped in the Old Testament traditions. When they wrote the various books of the New Testament, between forty and seventy years after Jesus had returned to the Father, they were not consciously writing Scripture.
They carried on writing in the only tradition they knew - the Old Testament tradition.
So these Old Testament ways of writing and describing things passed on into the New Testament writings.
Next week I will continue with our investigation of Heaven and Hell.