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Showing posts from October, 2012

Where the hell is "hell"?

In Sunday's Gospel reading from Mark 9:38-48, our beloved Lord uses that horrifying 4-letter word "hell" over and over again. By talking about cutting off body parts and being thrown into an "unquenchable fire," our minds are full of every terrifying horror movie ever produced mixed in with our own nightmares of whatever "hell" is. The problem is that Jesus NEVER used the "hell." The word that gets translated as "hell" is "Gehenna," which was literally the garbage dump in Jerusalem. Guess what they did with their garbage in Jesus' time - they BURNED it. With a never ending source of fuel, Gehenna was constantly on fire (and probably smelled awful too!). Our concept of "hell" - fire, devils and pitchforks - is from Milton's epic Paradise Lost, not the Bible. Our own understanding of the biblical text is co-opted because of the connotations the word "hell" has for us. As a result, the po