gymnastics, “Love could not bear that.”
On the whole, we have been slow to notice how God grows more and more
nonviolent through the Scriptures—or even how this evolution becomes
completely obvious in Jesus. Infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness are hard for
the human mind to even imagine, so most people seem to need a notion of hell
to maintain their logic of retribution, just punishment, and a just world, as they
understand it. God does not need hell, but we sure seem to. As both Jon
Sweeney and Julie Ferwerda*12 demonstrate rather convincingly in their
respective books, our common image of hell has much more to do with
mythological thinking, athletic contests, and punitive practice than with
anything representing God’s radicality and infinity.
Years ago, when I was a young priest speaking at a Catholic men’s prayer
breakfast in Cincinnati, I said, “What if the Gospel is actually offering us a win-
win scenario?” A well-dressed businessman came up to me at the break, and said
in a very patronizing tone while drumming his fingers on the podium, “Father,
Father! Win-win? That would not even be interesting!” Perhaps he was just
being consistent, as one whose entire worldview had been formed by sports,
business deals, and American politics, instead of the Gospel. But over the years,
I have come to see that he is the norm. The systems of this world are inherently
argumentative, competitive, dualistic, based on a scarcity model of God, mercy,
and grace. They confuse retribution—what is often little more than crass
vengeance—with the biblically evolved notions of healing, forgiveness, and
divine mercy.
The church was meant to be an alternative society in the grip of an altogether
different story line. Restorative justice is used in New Zealand as the primary
juvenile justice model, and the Catholic bishops of New Zealand have put out
very good statements on it. We see this alternative model of justice acted out in
scripture—famously in Jesus’s story of the Return of the Prodigal (Luke
15:11ff.), but almost always in the prophets (if we can first endure their tirades).
God’s justice makes things right at their very core, and divine love does not
achieve its ends by mere punishment or retribution.
Consider Habbakuk, whose short book develops with vivid messages of
judgment only to pivot at the very end to his “Great Nevertheless!” For three
chapters, Habbakuk reams out the Jewish people, then at the close has God say
in effect, “But I will love you even more until you come back to me!” We see
the same in Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones (Chapter 16) and in Jeremiah’s key
notion of the “new covenant” (Chapter 31:31ff.). God always outdoes the