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       Chapter 3 WILL GOD PUNISH YOU?

      Death was not God’s doing.

      Wisdom 1:13

      From time to time you hear people say that the problem with the Church now is that nobody believes in sin any more. It has all become a sickly soup of love and forgiveness. What about the wrath of God? What about the fires of hell and of purgatory? Surely, if you do bad, you are punished, and if you do good, you are rewarded. Justice, love and peace are all very well, but the world also contains oppression, hate and violence. We do wrong either to ourselves, or to each other.

      Such people have a point. If the Gospel is all about things going right, and people full of Christian charity and nothing else, then it has very little to do with any of us. The tendency to think that God forgives everything really, in the end, is to an extent connected with wish-fulfilment, the desire to live in a perfect world, undisturbed. But, on the other hand, it seems strange, to say the least, that the God who is love might condemn anyone he has made to eternal and final suffering in punishment for offences which, in the perspective of infinite goodness, are maybe not that big.

      Not so fast

      On this question, Jesus has a very unwelcome thing to say. His view is almost impossible to explain away; though, of course, that has not stopped people from trying. When you read it, you can see the temptation to marshal the technology of literary and historical criticism to prove that Jesus did not actually say it. But I think his statement, grim as it looks, has much to tell us about the full richness of the Good News. It is worth taking it on the chin, and examining ourselves and our reaction to it. Here it is, from St Mark’s account:

      I tell you solemnly, all men’s sins will be forgiven, and all their blasphemies; but let anyone blaspheme against the Holy Spirit and he will never have forgiveness; he is guilty of an eternal sin.

      Mark 3:28–30

      Mark tells us that Jesus said this because some scribes were attributing his miracles to demonic possession. The statement might almost confirm their suspicions. There is, according to Jesus, a special reserved sin that will not be forgiven, no matter how sorry you are, and how much you repent. Worried? You should be. For it seems that after baptism, and a sacramental life of eucharist and reconciliation, you can finally and truly blow it. Murders, genocides, can all be forgiven; but let anyone speak against the Holy Spirit, and he, or she, is lost for ever. God is more touchy about his honour than about the lives of his children.

      At least, however, we can be assured that the Christian tradition does contain some tough and uncompromising claims about sin and punishment. It may also be clear from your own reaction to the text why hell, damnation and sin have so dropped out of the contemporary religious vocabulary. Perhaps, for example, you are the rare person who reads the above saying with warm feelings of approval and agreement. Presumably you do not feel it applies to you! Maybe you think Jesus has said this to try and spur us into repentance and a safely good life, in case we fall into the dreadful pit. So, are we meant to live Christian lives motivated by fear of punishment alone, and a scrupulous, ritualistic fetish for moral cleanliness? This may be true, though I hope not! It is certainly not the Gospel as expounded in the old Penny Catechism:

      God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next.

      Question 2

      The ‘s’ word

      If you really know God, you know that he is God, not The Godfather. St Benedict, in his Rule for Monks, describes coming to know God as a growth from servile fear to the love of sons and daughters, the perfect love that casts out fear. For him, it is a growth in humility. This virtue has two parts. The first is the recognition of weakness and sin within us. The second is the realization that goodness and beauty is there too. Each part is useless without the other. On its own, the first is false modesty, or unctuous hypocrisy. The second without the first is conceit, a comforting internal deafness to what we do not want to know.

      Both parts together involve living in the truth, the exclusion of false gloom or over-optimism. It is also the only way to understand how Jesus’ preaching of the gospel of repentance is good news to us.

      If we say we have no sin in us, we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth; but if we acknowledge our sins, then God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and purify us from everything that is wrong.

      1 John 1:8–9

      For a Christian, talk of sin is immediately the acknowledgement of grace and forgiveness because ‘what proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8). On the other hand, talk of God’s love makes no sense without at least some sense of our darker side, the things in us that he wants to heal and change so that he can truly share with us love for love. Hence, fear of punishment cannot be the fundamental motivation for a mature Christian. But there is another way of taking Jesus’ words about an eternal sin with immediate approval. If you look around the world, there is plenty going on that should surely be unforgivable. It does not seem right that the likes of Hitler or Stalin should jump any queues into heaven ahead of, say, those millions who were killed trying to stop the evils perpetrated by them. If God waves a wand or puts a blind over his eyes with truly wicked people, and sees Christ instead of them and so lets them into eternal bliss, then this makes his love for you and me, who struggle on and do as little harm as we can, rather unreal. Salvation becomes like a debased coinage, without value because it has no cost. It must be correct, then, that a person can put him or herself beyond the possibility of forgiveness. It is like a relationship fractured to the degree that ‘I’m sorry’ can no longer heal.

      So who gets it?

      But, if you are inclined to agree with this, be careful. Jesus has another uncomfortable truth to tell us:

      Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, ‘I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector

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