Language and Metaphor, Part 2 (Hell and the Gates of Hell)

This is the second part in my 3 part musings on Language and Metaphor in the Bible.

PART 2 – Hell and the Gates of Hell

Jesus and Paul were both experts at using culturally relevant metaphor to make a deeper point.  For example, many believe that when Jesus said it was easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom Heaven, that he was talking of a narrow gate in the city walls where camels bearing many riches would not be able to pass – that to enter that gate they needed to strip themselves of their over-abundance.  This makes a lot of sense, as it seems unlikely Jesus is actually talking about the impossibility of someone with wealth going to Heaven.  It seems much more likely he is saying that worries of wealth are heavy burdens that prevent us from experiencing the “shalom” of God.

As Jesus spoke of Gehenna (unhelpfully translated as “hell” in many translations), the great stinking, burning rubbish dump outside the city walls, once a site of child sacrifices to Molech and place where wild dogs would fight over scraps of food and gnash their teeth at each other, his listeners would have had no doubt that he was describing a filthy place that no-one wanted to live in.  This was outside the city wall – a place of safety, community and belonging.  He wasn't talking about Dante's hell, an image that came centuries later, but has infiltrated our imaginations.

The scandal of Jesus was him saying “It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell (Gehenna), where the fire never goes out.”   Why is this a scandal?  The religious view of the day was that deformity and illness were some kind of punishment from God.  Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born this way?  People with illness and deformity were excluded, hence the scandal of Jesus the Rabbi dining with sinners, touching the unclean, healing crippled hands on the Sabbath and declaring a paralysed man’s sins forgiven in front of outraged Pharisees.  And here, Jesus proclaims that the maimed and deformed can find life WITH their physical deformity and that those who are “whole” might not live full lives in the Kingdom of God’s “shalom” but find themselves living on the smouldering rubbish dump outside those city walls.

Another fascinating detail is within the story of turning over the temple tables.  If we look at Matthew 21:14, we see a tiny, overlooked verse: “The blind and lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.”  Access to the temple was highly regulated.  Outsiders, women, priests.  All had limits to their access.  All had to be ritually purified.  The money changers were selling the required sacrifices to allow people to be good enough to approach.  In the chaos of Jesus turning over the tables, look who approaches him... the outcasts.  Right into the temple itself.  And to whom is this letter being written?  By Matthew, the former Jewish tax collector, to a mostly Jewish audience.  A detail that Mark and Luke omit, whereas Matthew knew the scandal his Jewish audience would have noticed – Jesus, welcoming blind and lame into the temple itself!

And yet today, the 21st Century reader will read this passage and hear this to be about destinations - Heaven and Hell, and self punishment and even mutilation to avoid eternal punishment.  Once more, are we missing huge significance of the teachings of Jesus by not entering into the 1st Century world of his listeners?

I once heard a great talk about the Gates of Hell when Jesus was speaking to Peter in Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16: 13-18).  In that location was a temple of Pan with a cave known as Pan’s Grotto – which pagans believed led to the underworld.  As Jesus was in that area, he tells Peter that the gates of hades will not overcome his church.  Another metaphor, based on the very real, known and significant cave in that region that would have been considered a gateway to hades by the pagans.

Again, how much do we miss, mistranslate and misunderstand when we fail to see the world in which the scriptures were written?  How much of our theology of God is built on culturally sensitive concepts and metaphor?

For me, this is a big warning to take care when I try to fathom the unfathomable God of love, reading God-breathed scripture.

You can read Part 1 (Fear of God) here: https://musingmonk.blogspot.com/2020/05/language-and-metaphor-part-1-fear-of-god.html

You can read Part 3 (Salvation and Repentance) here: https://musingmonk.blogspot.com/2020/05/language-and-metaphor-part-3-salvation.html