Scripture: Jonah 4: 1-11; Luke 16: 19-31; Matthew 25:31-40
This is a great chapter dealing with some possible developments in Jewish thought against which Jesus was teaching. In many ways, as McLaren said, Jesus may not have been teaching about hell as much as he sought to “un-teach” the bad theology that was prevalent.
McLaren illustrates the degree to which the Persian and Greek version of the afterlife had impacted Jewish thinking, after having been exposed to it for hundreds of years, so that by the time of Jesus the heaven-bound were easily identified. “They were religiously knowledgeable and observant, socially respected, economically prosperous, and healthy in body...all signs of an upright life today that would be rewarded after death. The hell-bound were just as easily identified: uninformed about religious lore, careless about religious rules, socially suspect, economically poor, and physically sick or disabled...signs of a sinful and undisciplined life now that would be further punished later” (112).
In the Gospels we see on display time and again the attitude of the religious leaders toward anyone sick, economically depressed or suffering, that that meant they were sinners, separated from God, etc.
Jesus in his teaching and preaching reversed this. The heaven-bound were the marginalized, the very people the religious elite despised, deprived, avoided, excluded and condemned. The sinners, the sick, the outcasts, the nobodies were the ones invited to the heavenly banquet. And those who were condemned by Jesus were the religious elite, the rich, the well off. These religious leaders were hell bound, who made their converts twice as fit for hell as they themselves were.
For me, this thinking struck as accurate. This does not mean heaven and hell don’t exist, not at all, but he exposes how teaching had been misused. McLaren quoted how even the Pharisees in the era of the Zealots fighting against Rome in AD 67 used heaven as a promise for the warrior who fought and died in that holy war, similar to how this is used of the Muslim Jihad now, and how it was used for the Crusades of the 11th century. McLaren ends saying how Jesus sought to wake people up from their complacent paths to warn them to return to the grace of God, in a similar way as the people of Nineveh turned back at the preaching of Jonah, so that, “Neither a big fish or a great big fire gets the last word, but rather God’s great big love and grace” (114). Indeed Jesus was a “courageous, subversive and fascinating leader… pointing us to a radically different way of seeing god, life and being alive” (114).
Engage:
Share a story about a time someone confronted you with a mistake or fault and you didn’t respond well?
How do you respond to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus?
Look for people like Lazarus in the parable and refuse to imitate the rich man in your response to them.
In my life I have experienced immense evil of the demonic type. This type of evil, also experienced through people, has convinced me that evil is a real thing, personal, powerful and not something to trifle with. Jesus’ language about hell, while turning popular belief on its head also is language that says, there is something to this that is yet true. I believe that there is punishment, a Day of Judgment as the Old and New Testaments teach. I don’t know how long or what it is, exactly, nor how it works, but there is a means by which God will show recompense for gross evil -- the murder of innocents, the destruction of lives, the obliteration of hope, the annihilation of identity. God will judge. “‘Vengeance is Mine,’ declares the Lord.” I think that we are too quick to judge others and throw them into hell in our thinking, just as the people of Jesus’ day. Truly if Jesus is the judge and King of such matters, only He can do so rightly. Then that leaves us with the action of God in the book of Jonah -- sending his prophet to pronounce judgement in order to assist the people with entering repentance and grace and the love of God. Jonah hated this, as we sometimes do as well, but this is the character of God -- not wanting that any should perish but all come to repentance. So, for people, this is what God desires. And this is where we find our own calling to continue to preach and teach and call people to repentance and to meeting the Savior.