Hell isn't the place you think it is

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet…”

            This sounds familiar—a little retelling of Wedding at Cana perhaps?—except this time it’s something entirely different. Things get dark in a hurry. While Cana is an unapologetic reminder that God provides out of the abundance of grace—that Jesus is in the business of making the party last—this second parable is something different. Many are called, but few are chosen.

            Well, what on earth is this? What is grace if it is limited? Why does Jesus do this to us? He seems bent on leaving us both assured and perturbed. He tells us, “You are in!” and then “Are you sure you aren’t out?”

            What is this?

            Ultimately, I think the best way to rectify the inconsistency is to see these two parables as talking about two different things. The first (the wedding at Cana) is a parable of how the kingdom of heaven works—grace, as abundant as it is free. The second is also about grace, but it is telling us something about what it means to be human—that we choose to respond to God’s grace mostly be closing our ears and deciding we can do better on our own. This parable suggests that hell is a place of our own making.

A quote from Robert Farrar Capon: “Hell, ultimately, is not the place of punishment for sinners; sinners are not punished at all; they go straight to heaven just for saying yes to grace. Hell is simply the nowhere that is the only thing left for those who will not accept their acceptance by grace—who will not believe that at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, free for nothing, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world actually declared he never intended to count sins in the first place. What then do I make of, ‘Many are called but few are chosen’? Just this. The sad truth of our fallen condition is that we don’t want anything to do with a system of salvation that works by grace through faith.”

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            I come back to that Capon quote every time I read this scripture. When grace is made known to us, our first instinct is not joy but suspicion. What have I done to earn this? (we have been conditioned to ask). And when the answer comes back—nothing—our suspicions only grow. Pretty quickly, we become certain that because it is free, it isn’t true. It’s like those telemarketers, scam letters, and emails—all claiming you have won something you didn’t earn. We’re wired to treat grace like it’s that Nigerian prince’s email. It would be great, but it ain’t true.

            The only thing is: It is.

            “Hell is not a place for sinners,” says Capon. Hell is for those who will not trust God to take care of the things they cannot do on their own. In short, hell is for people who have decided they are God, and I bet hell looks very attractive to them. Hell is, in some ways, a failure of imagination. If we think about it at all, I suspect most of us imagine a place that is really scary and unattractive—fire, and torture, and all that. But maybe that’s not at all what hell is. Some of Jesus’ parables suggest it is that place of torture, and others suggest that hell is actually incredibly attractive, because it is exactly the kind of place where you feel comfortable enough to turn down God’s invitation to something better. Far from Dante’s Inferno, this image of hell is the kind of place you want—exactly what you want. And if that sounds like heaven, it’s oh so close. The distance between heaven and hell is the distance between what we want and what we need.

This is a distinction we are unlikely to discover on our own. This is why I preach. Not because I’m right and you all have a lot to learn from me in my wisdom (well, not only that), but because the only way we’re going to discover our motivations is to keep proclaiming the Gospel, which is the good news of the cross, which is foolishness—according to Paul in 1 Corinthians. It is foolish to believe in the power of grace, because it means turning down the comfort of what we want. It means taking everything we have asked for, upon receiving it, and saying, “Nah, I trust God more than I trust myself.” It is foolish. And we won’t do it.

That’s why this parable is especially challenging. I don’t think any of us really accept this invitation. And that’s why I come back to that line, “many are called but few are chosen” and I return to Capon’s interpretation, and I think he is absolutely right: We don’t want our salvation determined by grace, because that means that other (much worse) sinners are going to get exactly what we did. It’s that parable of the laborers in the field all over again—the one we read last week. Grace is unfair. And it’s hard to believe in, perhaps impossible, and we don’t trust it. So, few are chosen…

And, yet, grace is so paradoxical that even that is not the last word. The cross is coming, even for we-who-turn-on-grace. The cross, which seems like a thing only powerful enough to accept those willing to accept it themselves, may be more powerful still. We don’t know—we can’t, really. But we can trust in God’s grace to be sufficient when we are not. We can hold to the cross and deny ourselves. We can hope for what we need, distrusting of what we want. We can do this because of what is coming at the end of this season. Grace. Judgment. The two wrapped up in one. The cross. The party that we thought we were too cool to attend turns out to be the only one around.