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Today's word is hell, or the underworld.
The underworld, first the underworld, then hell.
In Hebrew it is sheol, whereas, well, in
Greek it is Hades, and so the fact that we use
the word Hades let us understand that it is
not exactly our hell, but it is the underworld,
namely the place where the dead stay.
It is a quite common term, I mean in all...
yes, yes, I mean the idea that the dead are in a place
where they live a shady life feeding on Ash,
on fetid water and they only strive to
reach the blood of the living to retrieve a little bit of life
and sometimes we offer them this blood
and so they become jaunty, is a quite common idea
in the near East but also in the whole Mediterranean basin.
And anyway it is obvious that for example
the important thing to understand is that the
God of Israel is not the God of the underworld,
it is not the God of the dead.
So, being in the underworld implies a detachment from God.
In fact in Isaiah 38:18:
your praise; those who go down to the pit
cannot hope for your faithfulness. The living, the living
-they praise you, as I am doing today."
Once we are dead..
Once we are dead, we are out.
We are out.
This is the reason why in the beginning it is
because the God of Israel is a celestial God
and not an underworld God. The gods are divided
into three great categories: the celestial gods,
the terrestrial gods, the underworld gods, isn't it so?
The terrestrial gods?
The terrestrial gods are the gods of vegetation,
the underworld gods are the gods of the underground
and the celestial gods are the gods of the heavens.
The God of Israel is a celestial God.
A great God, a God from above, on the mountains,
in the sky, he rides the clouds, etc.
So the underworld is not his kingdom.
So, how do we go from this idea to
the idea of hell as we understand it?
Well, obviously, if somebody is detached from God
in the underworld, at a certain point you can ask yourself:
"But is it really true that God can not extend
his power on the underworld?"
The religion of Israel evolves by saying:
"No, God is the God of everything, so also of the underworld.
But if he is the God of the underworld,
he can also free from the underworld".
This is an interesting thing, it is said in the psalm 49:
"But God will redeem me from
the realm of the dead; he will surely
take me to himself."
So the Sheol is what Jesus says:
"God is not the God of the dead,
but of the living". So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacobs are
destined to resurrection. Because God defines himself
as the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacobs,
to Moses, but they have died in the times of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacobs, it means that they
are alive. So, actually, God is he who can free from
the underworld, so he is not a god of the underworld,
but he is a God who can free from the underworld.
So we have the issue of resurrection.
Yes, of course.
But who does he free from the underworld?
Those that are tied to him. So he frees from
the underworld those that deserve
to be free from the underworld.
Essentially those who have followed the law, this appears
in the late wisdom books of the old Testament.
So we get to the idea of hell?
We get to the idea of hell as he who chooses
something different from the affiliation with God.
The most explicit text is that of today's liturgy
about the bad rich and the poor Lazarus where
Abraham makes the following statement:
"Between us and they there is a great abyss:
those who want to come to you, they can't,
nor they can come to us"
So, why do we have this abyss? because those
that are there confined, have gone away from God.
How did they choose to go away from God?
By refusing charity. In fact it is on charity that
this thing has been decided, so hell, as we understand it
in the neo-testamentarian sense,
hell is a neo-testamentarian idea, which starts at
the end of the old Testament but which gets
perfected in the new Testament, is the fact that
man freely chooses to go against the love of
the revealed God.