As Christians, we are committed to the belief that there will be a last day and a final judgement. At some definite moment, this world will be brought to its consummation, and Christ will come again in his glory. As Jeremiah says: “See the days are coming – it is the Lord who speaks – when I am going to fulfil the promise I made to the House of Israel”.
So are these the last days? Is our own age destined to be the final one? Is God preparing his ultimate act through the human chaos of our own times? In one sense, the answer has to be “yes”. Every day, every hour, that passes brings us nearer to the completion of history. We will be nearer to the last judgement this evening than we are this morning. The Scriptures tell us to read the signs of the times, and, it may well be, that the concentration of inhumanity and cruelty unleashed in our own generation does indicate the ultimate showdown between good and evil. It would be a brave person who denied that the judgement is close. We do not yet know. We must wait to see.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Traditionally, the weeks leading up to Christmas are the time to think of the Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. In what he said to his disciples, Jesus made it clear that no-one will know the day or the hour of his Second Coming. In the last book of the Bible, St John has a vision of what will happen on that final day. In his Apocalypse, the images are vivid and they are clearly imprinted on the Christian imagination. Whether the reality will be anything like that, we cannot tell – but what is not open to question is the certainty of judgement. Jesus is utterly clear about that. There will come a moment when each of us will come face to face with God and, for the first time, we shall see our life’s actions, our choices, our stewardship of the resources committed to us, everything we have become. The record will be there, and, finally, we shall have to answer for what we are, and what we are not.
But surely none of us has anything to fear from judgement? The nature of God is love, and the pettiness of our sins will be lost in the immensity of his concern for us? In the final analysis, our weakness is as nothing compared with the divine generosity. While we would like this to be so, it is clear that Jesus not only accepted the inevitability of judgement, but the possibility of hell as well.
Throughout our human journey, God seeks our co-operation. At every turn, he comes to meet us yearning for us to say “Yes” to him. But, by the very nature of creation, God refuses to clone his children – we are programmed for total freedom, and that means that the Creator had made an irrevocable decision to accept the choices his creatures make. The consequence of this essential and unlimited freedom must be that even God’s love may not constrain some to say other than “no” in their final decision. Having turned away consistently from grace on this earth, we cannot say with absolute certainty that some – perhaps even ourselves – will not persist in their wrong choices, Jesus talked of the “sin against the Holy Spirit”, that ultimate, unbreakable, pride which even God’s warmth cannot melt.
So should we believe in the existence of hell? We would be re-writing the Gospel if we did not at least allow for the possibility that Hell can be a reality. God will never condemn us – but in our personal sovereignty, we have enough space to condemn ourselves. When Pope John Paul was asked whether he believed in Hell he replied that as someone brought up, literally, in the shadow of Auschwitz, he could not but believe that there were some actions so terrible that their perpetrators could cut themselves off from God into eternity. Not that the outcome can ever be certain – but that the possibility must exist.
Living as we do in such a secular environment, it is all too easy to adopt a “take it, or leave it” attitude to Christianity. Religion can become a hobby – a way of spending a reassuring hour on a Sunday, as innocuous as the golf club or the cinema. The Gospel can be taken for granted – tamed by familiarity. But the Kingdom of God, as revealed by Jesus, is a matter of life or death, a double-edged sword hanging over us. Christian faith is about making crucial choices. It is about leading a moral life which is consistent with the revealed will of God – it is about holiness - about becoming those who share the mind of Christ.
On this Advent Sunday, Jesus is saying to each of us: “Watch yourselves, or your hearts will be coarsened with the cares of life. Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man”.
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