As irrigators guide water to their fields,

as archers aim arrows,

as carpenters carve wood,

the wise shape their lives.

- Buddha, Dhammapada 145

Today’s scripture lesson from Matthew 25:31-45 is, in my opinion, the proverbial “mixed bag” of good news and bad news. Rather than ignore the problematic aspectss, I want to confront them directly, in large part because the failure of the church to do so has contributed to a lot of needless pain and suffering. I also believe that it is only once we get past the difficulties inherent in this text that we will then be able to see and appreciate the positive, hopeful vision that lies within. But first, a little context.

When I was in high school some of my closest friends were involved in a youth group at a local Southern Baptist church. We would sometimes spend Sunday evenings together at this church attending the small youth group and the informal evening worship service. I was not too keen on the message I heard there which often had to do with how to get into heaven and avoid hell. The God I heard about in the sermons always seemed to be pretty angry. The pastor always seemed to be pretty legalistic and manipulative. And we, well, we were always supposed to be afraid. Even at seventeen years of age I knew that there was something wrong with this picture. Yet I wasn’t confident enough back then about what I believed in to challenge the teachings I was hearing.

One evening the pastor give a sermon about how God intended for women to be subservient to men and obedient to their husbands. This was actually a positive experience for me because I knew right then and there that he was dead wrong about this and it freed me to consider that if he was so wrong about one thing, something he felt so sure of, then he was quite possibly wrong about a lot of other things as well. I hadn’t learned about proof-texting yet, but I knew that he was taking selected scriptures out of context and making them say something that the biblical authors never intended them to say.

One of the problems with the belief in eternal damnation is that it leads to the inevitable claim of religious exclusivity: that one’s own path to God is the only one and all others lead to Hell. This then fuels a soul saving evangelism that so often has little concern for Biblical values of social justice and equality. It also creates a spirituality built around fear which in my opinion does great harm to so many in our society. And it certainly does not sound like Jesus.

Today’s lesson from Mathew is troubling in its portrayal of a final judgment in which humanity is divided up into two groups: one that gets an eternal reward and the other that gets eternal punishment. I can not imagine a God of love who would condone, let alone create, such a scenario.

In recent years more and more New Testament scholars have become convinced that the historical Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet and that the heaven and hell judgment sayings do not come from his mouth. Rather, they are a later invention crafted by communities in turmoil that were hoping for some divine intervention which would vindicate them and punish their enemies.

In the centuries that followed, the orthodox church used the idea of a judgmental God who will reward the good with Heaven and punish the bad with Hell as a way of keeping folks in line. Preachers were even encouraged to evoke as much fear as possible in their sermons in order to motivate the masses to repent and accept the dogma of the church. This is not good news.

Keith Wright, in his book, THE HELL JESUS NEVER INTENDED, writes,

Matthew 25:31-45