This coming Sunday is casting terror into the hearts of preachers who follow the readings prescribed in the Revised Common Lectionary.

No one is terribly keen to tackle the verses in Matthew 10:24-39, especially verse 28 where Jesus instructs his followers,

28Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul;
rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
(Matthew 10:28)

This is a difficult verse. It is frequently interpreted as indicating that God sends souls to a place of eternal suffering called “hell” and that fear of this possibility ought to motivate us to live differently.

There is a certain logic to this fear argument. If you are a afraid of spiders and, while camping discover a spider in your sleeping bag, you will probably jump up screaming and rush out of your tent in a panic. However, imagine you are aware that there is a rather large grizzly bear outside your tent; I expect this awareness might cause you to overcome your fear of spiders and hunker down with the spider in your sleeping bag hoping the grizzly might go and choose the campers next door for his breakfast rather than you. Your grizzly fear will probably overcome your spider fear.

However, I am not sure this concept of God as grizzly bear scaring us into being good is worthy of the vision Jesus had of God. In fact this terrifying vision is almost immediately contradicted in Matthew 10:29,30 when Jesus speaks of God’s tender care for and value of even the tiniest, most insignificant dimension of creation. Jesus says,

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29-31)

The difficulty in Matthew 10:28 is with the word translated in the New Revised Standard Version as “hell.” The Greek word is gehenna. It occurs only four times in the Matthew’s gospel.

The Greek word gehenna is a transliteration of the two Hebrew words ge and hinnom; together these two words mean “Valley of Hinnom.” The Valley of Hinnom was an actual physical place below the south wall of the city of Jerusalem. It was used as the garbage dump for the city. By all accounts it was a dreadful, smelly, sickening place.

The earliest English translators of the Greek New Testament decided that Jesus must be using the word gehenna as a symbol for eternal punishment for lost souls after physical death. So they chose to translate the Greek place name gehenna using the English word “hell.” The translation of gehenna as “hell” may or may not be correct. There is no way to know for sure. The important thing is to keep in mind that the translation “hell” is an interpretation, of a physical image Jesus used to describe something.

It is as if I were to write a letter saying, “If you continue to be dishonest in your work you are going to end up in Wilkinson Road.” If you live on Vancouver Island, you would probably know that I was referring to an actual physical place with high walls, barbed wire, and bars on the windows. But 1,500 years from now, someone reading my letter might decide I was using Wilkinson Road as a metaphor for hell. Perhaps I was and perhaps I wasn’t, who could know for sure?

New Testament translators would have been more honest if they had allowed the image to stand as it is. What Jesus actually says is:

…fear the one who is able to destroy the soul in gehenna.

To make things even more complicated, it is not clear about whom Jesus is speaking when he refers to “the one who is able to destroy the soul in gehenna.” In the first half of this verse Jesus is referring to those he has mentioned in verses 16-23 who are persecuting followers of Jesus; they are able to kill the body but not the soul. But it is important to be honest about the second half of the verse.

Jesus does not say in verse 28, “fear God who is able to destroy both body and soul.” Nor does Jesus say, “fear Satan who is able to destroy both body and soul.” Jesus says, “fear the one who is able to destroy both body and soul.” Jesus does not identify who this “one” might be.

The one thing we can say for sure about this verse is that Jesus makes a distinction between body and soul. One is physical and visible, the other is invisible, hidden, covered up. There are those who can destroy the outer life of the body but have no power over the inner life of the soul. The one who can only destroy the body has no real power.

Like Jesus, we may be mocked, attacked, treated unjustly, deeply hurt, even killed, but ultimately the forces that harm us cannot destroy us. There is a power within our inner life which is greater, stronger, and more powerful than any force by which we will ever be attacked.

What we should fear is anyone who can destroy our inner life. Having our inner life destroyed is what causes us to be destroyed in gehenna. Gehenna is a place of suffering. Having our inner life destroyed is the cause of the deepest suffering we will ever experience.

We think we suffer because we don’t get our way. We think we suffer because life does not turn out the way we want it to. But the truth Jesus wants us to understand is that suffering/gehenna is a place to which we go because we allow our inner life to be destroyed.

One of the other places Jesus uses the word gehenna is in Matthew 5:22 where he says,

if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the gehenna of fire.

Allowing for the fact that Jesus did often use exaggerated expressions in his teaching it seems extreme to suggest that you will go to an eternity of punishment simply for calling your brother a fool.

In Matthew 5:22 the word Jesus uses for “fool” is moros, from which we get our English word “moron.” It is exactly the same word Jesus used in Matthew 23:17 to describe the scribes and the Pharisees when he said,

You blind fools!

So if calling someone “fool” is cause for eternal punishment, Jesus would seem to have taught in Matthew 5:22 that he himself deserved to endure an eternity of suffering and pain. This is ridiculous.

I suppose, it is possible, at least for Jesus, to use the word “fool” in reference to another person in a way that is an accurate description of reality. But, the way most of us use words like “fool” to refer to others usually has less to do with telling the truth than with a desire to inflict harm on the other person.

When we spend our lives trying to hurt others, who do you think we end up hurting the most?

When we resort to abusive language and attack other people, we are hurting ourselves. To call another person “fool” is actually to damage ourselves.

Who is the one who

is able to destroy the soul in gehenna?

I am the only one who has the power to “destroy my soul in ghenna”.

The only person I should fear is myself.I need to fear my ability to inflict harm on myself by the way I live in relationship to other people and to the world.

I need to fear that part of my being that does not trust God. I need to fear that part of my being that is always going contrary to God’s purposes. I need to fear that dimension of myself Paul calls “flesh” in Galatians 5:17 and which he says is actively working in opposition to the Spirit to keep me from being the person I truly long to be.

In the harsh words of Matthew 10:28, Jesus is warning his followers that their choices and their actions have consequences today. If I treat the people in my life with harshness and violence, I may well cause them pain; but I will also cause deep harm to myself and I will suffer. Whether this suffering is eternal, Jesus does not say. So, I will not speculate about a question I cannot answer.

I will stay with what I do experience to be true. And, what I experience to be true is that the stones I throw at you, always rebound in my life and cause suffering to my soul. Every moment of my day, in all my interactions with people and with creation, I am faced with the choice of suffering in gehenna or the life of trust in the God who has counted “even the hairs” of my head.