A Love As Deep As Hell

The Lord Jesus, Son of God, did not open Heaven's Gates with His death. He opened them with His Life. His death revealed His Divine Life to people who had eyes but could not see and ears but could not hear. Their brutishness could not eclipse His Divinity. Their hatred could not block out His love. Their lust for death could not erase His life. Their stony hearts were their stumbling block, not His. His death merely disclosed what had been true all along: His deathless Love and that Love's immeasurable, redemptive power.

The people Israel were held harmless in Egypt with the descent of the angel of death not by nailing a dead, rotting lamb upon their door lintels. They were protected by the life force of that unblemished lamb's blood. This is what post-Exilic religion in the Zion Temple was trying to accomplish — the gift of life force, by releasing the spurting blood of a still living animal, to a God Who Is Life — an absurd proposition, declares God, as the prophet Hosea related:

What God desires is gnosis, that deep interchange of heart and mind. We do not err to say that Love is the one Divine property to be found on earth following the Fall of Mankind. And the Old Testament is nothing if it is not a testament of that long suffering love. For our Scriptures are not the story of a faithful people, but of a faithful God.

How can we begin to grasp this long, long story and (let us be truthful) this very strange love affair? Truly, it is beyond our comprehension. In human terms, perhaps we can imagine someone who has fallen in love. He tells His beloved that He will give her everything, even the moon and the stars. We know this state of mind and soul. We know that a man would burn down his whole world if he met his one, true love:

Yes, and He is the only One actually to give His beloved the world. And she is the only one in that world's history ever to have everything including His undying love, for this was the definition of Eden: everything .... and God. But one afternoon she wanders by the way. She meets another man. He tells her he can give her everything .... and more than everything, including the soul of her husband.

You see, God in His love has drawn a boundary. Let us call this boundary faithfulness. He has set a garden wall, which encloses the goodness and safety of their love.

But she is excited to hear of this more than everything. She is excited at the prospect of crossing this forbidden boundary. She wants to taste the forbidden fruit, which must be sweetest among all fruits, for it is been set apart from the others. And she betrays the only One Who will every truly love her.

Can we understand (in our human incapacity) that to love someone with all your heart and soul and then to be requited with betrayal changes everything? For once trust is lost, how can it ever really be restored? For once that promethean heat is quenched, how could it ever be relumed? Yes, love might continue; forgiveness might be proffered; we might say that love has gone to a deeper level, a level of self-sacrifice. But the same love? That same pristine, untainted, pure love? No, never the same.

Then she betrays him again .... and again and again and again. Yet He goes on loving her. If we can grasp the depth and scope of His unfailing love, then we begin to love God truly. And we begin our maturation in theosis, in the process of attaining to the full stature of Jesus Christ.

Yes, I am asking that we conceive all humankind to be God's beloved, for it is, and we are. The prophet Hosea, in his own spiritual growth, is invited to join God sharing in the anguish of this self-sacrificing love, marrying the faithless Gomer. But Gomer is no match for God's false-hearted beloved, humankind, whose betrayals number in the trillions and beyond over the course of human history.

A separation is effected. God's Kingdom is no longer open to His beloved. Where is she to dwell then? Where shall she go? Let us say that it is a place separated from God, which has been proposed as the formal definition of Hell. Over time, Hell expands unto a vast population, beyond counting. Many are unfaithful, but many are not. For God has inscribed His mind and heart and ways on every human soul. With the life of Abraham, a man is able to commune with God through the prism of this soul. With the life of Moses, God's ways are inscribed in stone for every human, however hard-hearted, to read.

So here is Hell: the just and the righteous together with the treacherous and depraved. In this sense, the place separated from God becomes both Heavenly and Hellish — an afterlife inhabited by the virtuous and the unvirtuous. Is this not the state of every separated couple? Can we say, in many cases, that the beloved continues to be virtuous, continues to "speak to" the Lover's true and aching heart .... yet continues to be fickle, undependable, and dangerous? By meditating on Hell as it was on the eve of God's Incarnation, we deepen our understanding of God's descent from Heaven down to earth .... and thence to Hell. For Hell was no more nor less than the afterlife of all the world.

The death of Jesus is no more than a revelation of what had been true all of His Life, which is His Divinity and its Energies. Multitudes beheld it: beheld His healing the sick and blind and lame, beheld His ruling the ungovernable winds and seas with a single command, beheld His raising the dead, beheld His feeding manna to the people in the wilderness. But many, in their impiousness, chose to ignore it, chose to harden their hearts against it. And the hardest heart of all, the heart of Satan, refused to see it. Or, let us say He underestimated it as he had overestimated his own power in leading rebellion in Heaven. "The evil one," to invoke a proverb, "always overplays his hand."

Here we come to the inner workings of our redemption by the Son of God: "to give His Life as a ransom for many" (Mk 10:25), to "lay down His Life for His friends" (Jn 15:13). It is Satan's interpretation of Jesus' life-and-equating-to-His-death which lies at the heart of the devil's bargain. He believes he is receiving Jesus' death just as Caiaphas and Annas and their party within the Sanhedrin believed that they too might obtain Jesus' death. But they had turned truth on its head, reversed it precisely: taking Jesus life (as it were) does not reveal His death; on the contrary, His death reveals His Life .... to those who did not have eyes to see it earlier.

He shatters the walls of Hell. He unhinges its high and ancient gates. And God opens His great heart to His beloved. We might call it a marriage of Heaven and Hell, but it is not that. It is a marriage of God with the godly. Yes, we humans continue to be unsteady. We continue to stray.

And this is always our part, our indispensible, crucial, and essential part: repentance, metanoia, having a real change of heart, a lasting change of heart: transformation unto a heart like His, becoming more and more like Him, seeing through His eyes .... or aspiring to this.

For He gave us Heaven and Earth, and then He descended into the bowels of Hell .... for us, all for His love, His ancient and unfailing love.

Let us commit to return this love. Let us be faithful in great things and small. Let us sacrifice, for this the element and essence of Divine Love. This is who we most truly are and what He created us to be.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.