Jesus and Hell (or The World Turned Upside Down)
I was sitting at a family worship gathering about 13 years ago, surrounded by new-to-me-by-marriage family who gathered in a back corner of a hotel convention hallway on Sunday morning after a wedding to share scripture, a word from one of several preachers in the family, prayers for one another, and maybe a hymn.
As I waited with a bit of nervous energy because I’d not done family worship like this before, someone leaned over and pointed out a more distantly related family-member and said, “That’s so-and-so. He’s just recently been saved.”
I leaned in for a moment to be sure I had heard the introduction correctly, chose to nod with a look of deep understanding, and then leaned toward my husband on the other side of me and whispered, “Saved from what?”
I mean – I knew enough about the whispering person to know what they believed about the words they were saying.
Perhaps you have had a similar experience – walking alongside a community that seems to understand very clearly what the rules are about who is “in” and who is “out.” A community that believes very strongly that we endure hardships in this life because there is reward beyond this life. A community that believes we just have to put our heads down until we get there – and if we do the right things, say the right prayers, act the right way, follow the right rules, then we will be among the heavenly throng. A community that believes they know, definitively, what God loves and what God rejects – who are the sheep and who are the goats.
I wonder though, can we really know? Is it our work to know?
Today, the texts before us can help us to remember who God is…. And relative to that, I hope we then know who WE are not. It might help us to remember how God seeks us, and how Jesus walked this earth to be a living example of God’s vision of mercy and grace.
Let’s start with Jonah – because many of us “know” the Jonah story, right? Here’s the Cliff or Spark Notes version (depending on your generation): God asks Jonah to announce God’s judgement to the Ninevites. Jonah is resistant because he thinks the Ninevites need to be written off, he runs away from God’s direction, gets tossed off a boat, ends up in the belly of a whale, yada-yada-yada.
As several commentaries pointed out, Christian ed curriculum writers have sold us felt board versions of this story and the Veggie Tales franchise made MILLIONS. Often our focus in this story is on Jonah and on his protest and resistance to God’s call.
And on the whale. Let’s not forget the whale.
But God’s action is so very telling here. In spite of being horribly behaved people, the Ninevites are redeemed. When Jonah finally walks through the city announcing their ruin as God has asked him to, the Ninevites hear and they repent and God chooses NOT to smite them – the text actually says in 3: 10 “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”
God changed Gods’ mind.
So then, the text that we heard today is about Jonah’s reaction to God’s mind changing, to God’s compassion and mercy. Essentially, Jonah is pouting because God is not mad at the Ninevites anymore. Like full bore preschool pouting, and it sounds a bit like God is egging him on.
But Jonah has reason to really be angry with the Ninevites.
In the history of the region, Ninevites had treated the Hebrew people ruthlessly. And this text is written to highlight that tension. In a commentary by Dr. Roger Nam, he references these relief panels installed in the British Museum, depicting the siege of Lachish. There are “multiple images of Judeans being impaled, and stacks of Judeans heads (yes, disembodied heads) that were counted by Assyrian scribes, presumably for a pay per head policy with the soldiers. Archaeologists discovered this relief in Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh.”
And so..again, Jonah has some reasons to want God to punish the Ninevites.
But God changes God’s mind. God shows mercy.
And Jonah pouts. And God questions his pouting, and so Jonah stomps off. And God teases him, first having a bush grow up over him to provide shade but then also sending a worm to destroy the bush. He tops it off with hot sunshine and the piercing question:
“Should I not be concerned about Ninevah…?”
This is a really funny story if you let it be – a funny story about humans and our desire to be right and righteous and vindicated. And about a God who is really waiting with mercy for people to realize they need to change their ways and do the right thing.
And really, it is a funny backdrop for the tendency to proclaim with authority who it is that is “saved,” right?
We are in the midst of several weeks of learning about who Jesus was, how he interacted with people, and what his teachings were about as his ministry unfolded. This reach back into the Hebrew scripture helps to lay a groundwork for where Jesus is coming from as he teaches about what happens in an afterlife where people are judged.
Into a world where people in power wielded judgement about right and wrong behavior to separate those “in” from those “out,” Jesus suggests that only the Son of Man will do that. And the yardstick will be how well you loved, not necessarily how obedient you were to the rules monitored by the religious or political authorities.
Into a society where the religious elite were inclined to see wealth and power as a mark of God’s favor and to see poverty and struggle as a mark of God’s judgement, Jesus shows up to serve and bless the poor and the sick and the unclean and to praise those who do the same.
In a world where those in power are trying to proclaim how people stay in God’s good graces, Jesus shows up offering God’s grace to tax collectors, prostitutes, Samaritan’s, Syrophoenicians, the daughter of a Roman guard…
Jesus keeps turning the expectations on their ear.
So if we move beyond the text of Matthew that we heard today and finish the story, we hear this:
Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
As Brian McLaren puts it in our year-long study of We Make the Road by Walking, the purpose of Jesus’ harsh language of fire and brimstone was NOT to predict the destruction of the world, but like Jonah walking three days across Nineveh, Jesus is calling people to a different way of being and inviting them to turn back to God. “It’s purpose was to wake up complacent people, to warn them of the danger of their current path, and to challenge them to change…God’s intent was not to destroy but to save.”
In the-world-turned-upside-down message that Jesus brought, there was hope that might draw people past their fear - hope that indeed God is with us and indeed does gather the lost of the flock back into the pasture.
I want to end today with another scripture that frames a prayer offered by Derek Weber through Praying for Change: Daily Prayers for Anti-Racism offered by Discipleship Ministries of The United Methodist Church. The scripture is Acts 17: 1 – 7:
After Paul and Silas had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three sabbath days argued with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This is the Messiah, Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you.” Some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. But the Jews became jealous, and with the help of some ruffians in the marketplaces they formed a mob and set the city in an uproar. While they were searching for Paul and Silas to bring them out to the assembly, they attacked Jason’s house. When they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some believers before the city authorities, shouting, “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has entertained them as guests. They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus.”
Now Lord, hear our prayer:
The world doesn’t like change, God of transformation and growth.
Never has, from the very beginning. We want things to stay the way they are,
Or at least the way we imagine them to be.
Peel back the changes until we get back to . . . what?
Some imagined “greatness” that was built on oppression?
Some “innocent” time when we didn’t worry about the suffering of those not like us?
The world doesn’t like change, God of justice and emancipation.
Never has.
Which is why you came among us to turn the world upside down.
Which is why your church, from the very beginning was proclaiming a new reality
that turned all our hatreds on their heads.
Which is why the gospel was a threat, from its very inception,
to the status quo,
to the powers that be,
to the way things are.
And that gospel is still at work turning the world upside down.
Lord of upside-down and right-side up,
Let me be a part of that which turns the world
Upside-down.
Let me be one of those
who don’t fear
kin-dom change.
Amen.
(Derek C. Weber, January 2021)
May it be so…
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