Why I preach welcome and mercy…

Someone asked me: “Father, why do you preach about being welcoming and merciful? I have never heard you preach about sin and hell!”

This is a question worth engaging with. I was reminded of a column I read by Fr Ronald Rolheiser OMI. He says that some believe that more people will come to Church if we preach about mortal sin, God’s wrath, and the danger of going to hell when we die.

He goes on to say:

What’s valid in this kind of reasoning is that preaching about mortal sin and hellfire can be effective. Threats work. I know. I grew up subjected to this kind of preaching and admit that it affected my behavior. But that effect was ambivalent: On the one side, it left me scared enough before God and life itself to fear ever straying very far morally or religiously. On the other side, it also left me religiously and emotionally crippled in some deep ways. Simply stated, it’s hard to be intimate friends with a God who frightens you.

So why not preach fear? Because it’s wrong, pure and simple. Brainwashing and physical intimidation are also effective, but they are antithetical to love. You don’t enter a love relationship because you feel afraid or threatened. You enter a love relationship because you feel drawn there by love.

More importantly, preaching divine threat dishonors the God in whom we believe. The God who Jesus incarnates and reveals is not a God who puts sincere, good-hearted people into hell against their will on the basis of some human or moral lapse which in our religious categories we deem to be a mortal sin. For example, I still hear this threat being preached in our churches: If you miss going to church on Sunday it’s a mortal sin and should you die without confessing it, you will go to hell.

What kind of God would underwrite this kind of a belief? What kind of God would not give sincere people a second chance, a third one, and seventy-seven times seven more chances if they remain sincere?  What kind of God would say to a repentant person in hell: “Sorry, but you knew the rules! You’re repentant now, but it’s too late. You had your chance!”

A healthy theology of God demands that we stop teaching that hell can be a nasty surprise waiting for an essentially good person. The God we believe in as Christians is infinite understanding, infinite compassion, and infinite forgiveness. God’s love surpasses our own and if we, in our better moments, can see the goodness of a human heart despite its lapses and weaknesses, how much more so will God see this.

The famous psychiatrist, Fritz Perls, was once asked by a young fundamentalist: “Have you been saved?’ His answer: “Saved? I’m still trying to figure out how to be spent!” We honor God not by living in fear lest we offend him, but in reverently spending the wonderful energy that God gives us. God is not a law to be obeyed, but a joyous energy within which to spend ourselves generatively.

That is why I preach welcome and mercy…

Fr. Russell Pollitt SJ