TUESDAY, March 24
Mark 9:42-50

And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. — Mark 9:47-48

When I was a kid in the Baptist church, we heard a lot about hell, and I can assure you that it kept me on the straight and narrow. Visiting preachers would deliver sermons on hell, and we learned all about the long list of things that might lead us into the lake of unquenchable fire. We even saw very low-budget scary films and slideshows about it, and I truly believed that they were scientifically accurate representations of a real flaming place with people wailing and gnashing their teeth just like in the movie.

Jesus talks a lot about hell in this passage, but what is he saying? He tells us that unless we rid ourselves of things that are destructive to us or others, we will “go to hell.” The original Greek for the word hell in this passage, and at least seven other places in the Gospels, is Gehenna (γέεννα). Gehenna was an actual place outside Jerusalem, which has variously been described as a constantly burning garbage dump, a place of unclean burial for outcasts or a place of pagan child sacrifice.

Was Jesus using Gehenna as an example of what hell is like, or was he using it as a metaphor for the hell we experience in our lives when we choose the path of harm and destruction? What the actual, empirical truth is, we have no idea. Theologians and scholars have pondered the concept of hell over the centuries, and no one has ever figured it out. Nobody has ever been there to bring back a report. Jesus is speaking of something here that is beyond our comprehension. We do not know what this hell is, but we can comprehend the idea of ridding ourselves of destructive things. We know that following God will help us avoid hell, whether it’s in our own lives or takes some other form.