“The Chasm Unfixed”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, November 23, 2025
Reading: Luke 16:19-31
“A great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so.” Some of Jesus’ most frightening words. The rich man in torment in hell and asks for just a bit of mercy and finds out there is none. In other places in the gospels, Jesus promises wailing and gnashing of teeth, that in torment the worm never dies, and the fire never goes out.
Time to lighten the mood a bit, so my favourite joke about hell. A man listening to a fire and brimstone preacher thinks he’s found a loophole. Raises his hand: you say there’s gnashing of teeth in hell? Yes sir. Well, what if you got no teeth, like me? The preacher thinks a moment, and responds, “Sir, teeth will be provided.”
If you’re new to Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, please forgive me, we don’t normally talk about hell. That’s why we’re doing it today, as a sort of discipline. Our ancient forebears discussed four last things this time of year at Advent—death, judgment, heaven, and ... you guessed it. So here we are. I bet if you search our archives, you won’t find non-ironic, live-fire mention of hell going back decades. Today, for a mainline liberal church, it is sort of like writing with one’s off hand or playing an instrument one never practices. If we don’t know the dance steps today but you’re an expert on hell, we’ll look especially foolish.
What do we actually teach about hell in the church, and why does it matter?
There are whole swaths of the Bible that go without mention of place. One of them is called the Old Testament, four-fifths of our Bible that we share with our Jewish forebears—not a mention of hell. St. Paul doesn’t have the best reputation with modern Christians, but guess what you won’t find in Paul? Neither fire nor brimstone. If you want to know about hell, guess where you go? To one Jesus of Nazareth. He talks about it a lot. So, if your view is that the Old Testament is mean and harsh or Paul is judgy and spikey, while Jesus is almost as nice as we Canadians are, maybe slow down and actually read the book. Consider the passage we just heard.
This is a parable about a rich man who gets his reward in this life and a poor man who gets his reward in the next. And true to form, Jesus reverses their earthly fates. In the afterlife, the poor man is received into Abraham’s bosom. The rich man goes to the other place. Interesting most of our heaven references and jokes are to Peter and pearly gates, Jesus’ are to Abraham. If Anti-Semites are interested in heaven they should take care—it’s a place where you’re embraced by the father of all monotheists, Abraham himself.
There’s a lot to like about this story, even if you’re allergic to hell. We get the poor man’s name: Lazarus. The rich man: unnamed. This reverses our expectation of who is worthy of naming. Money? Power? Yawn: you are hell bound. Poor? Mistreated? Dogs your only friend? Heaven-bound, Abraham-beloved. The rich man asks for Lazarus to be sent to help him, then to warn his still-living brothers. As they say in the black church: sir, Lazarus doesn’t do your bidding anymore. As frightening as hell talk is, I think this next point might be more frightening still: Abraham says your brothers “have Moses and the prophets, they should listen to them.” The rich man objects: they don’t read the Bible! But if someone rises from the dead, they’ll repent. Abraham responds... no they won’t. That’s all of human history right there.
One liberal Christian approach to hell is to demythologize it. I’ll show you what I mean. Our translation calls it Hades. Nobody’s afraid of Hades. That’s a Greek term about punishment after life. Jesus’ word in Greek is often Gehenna, which was literally a trash dump outside the old city of Jerusalem, where the fire never went out. There’s a contemporary version. He’s referring to a place that smells and burns. Tradition suggests human sacrifice happened in Gehenna. Hard to imagine a worse hell. Other cultures and religions have something like hell too, not just Islam but even those without a holy book, like Buddhists and others. Our ancestors knew about volcanos and magma in the earth’s core, seems like there’s angry fire down there. This is demythologizing—trying to render something intelligible on our terms.
Here’s why I don’t want to demythologize hell though. My work is to remythologize everything. To show the magic, the enchantment, the beauty coursing through every particle of creation. If other cultures share some notions of hell, that doesn’t make it untrue, might show it’s more true. I’ve known people who find teaching about hell spiritually helpful. A Salvation Army minister visited a young woman in jail, who landed there via a nasty heroin habit, and she preached simply, “It’s Jesus or hell dear.” And the girl said, hell? I’m there already. Let’s try something else. And walked out into new life. I don’t want to take that card out of the deck, that colour off the artist’s palate.
Sam Wells is a teacher I admire deeply. He points out something interesting. In Christian places around about 1850 everyone stopped worrying about hell. There was no meeting or memo, it didn’t fall out of the creed or the Bible. It just stopped mattering. For most of Christian history avoiding hell was a priority. Now suddenly it was no longer a motivator at all. None of you saw the topic today and thought ‘oh thank God now maybe I can avoid a fiery future.’ You treated it like a curiosity, right? Now, Sam observes, our churches and institutions are all built on avoiding hell. Their very purpose suddenly motivated no one. Is it any wonder people stopped going? Christianity became an immunization against a disease that turned out to be a myth. Now, churches were never meant to be hell-escaping, get-out-of-jail-free cards. They’re meant to be places from which Jesus blesses and heals neighbourhoods. We’ve got work to do.
Back to the parable. First thing to note: it’s a parable. When Jesus tells a story it’s not ever straightforward. It’s meant to knock us over, so we see the world differently. Rich guy? In trouble. Beggar with the dogs licking him? Blessed. Takes a lifetime to learn to see like Jesus. This is no roadmap for how to go to heaven or avoid hell. Being rich doesn’t ipso facto mean you’re hell bound (or we’re all out of luck in here); being poor doesn’t necessarily mean you’re glory bound. Later in the church’s life, a desert monk was asked by a demon “who are the sheep, and who are the goats?” The holy one replied, “the goats are people like me. Who the sheep are? God alone knows.” And the demon fled, wounded by such humility. Folks who reach for hell tend to think only their enemies are headed there. But Jesus commands us to love enemies, and he saves only the undeserving. If you’re not baffled by a parable of Jesus, start again.
Hell is an idea that sets artists’ imaginations to excess. One of you sent me this image from the ROM’s exhibit on Flemish painting. Some of our painters loved painting these hellscapes, people being tortured in every imaginable manner. Thing is, the Bible doesn’t do this. Doesn’t dwell on hell, go all masochistic. Its mentions are fleeting, never in depth, not at length. Wherever these lowland artists got their hellscapes from, it wasn’t from the Bible.
But the Bible does use the image of fire. What of that? Dante does not. The middle ages’ greatest imagination of the afterlife, Dante’s Divine Comedy, imagines the lowest layers of hell as ice, frosty remove from other people. Did it just get chilly in here?
Think with me of this image of fire. Glance at this image of Mary and child on your bulletin and your screen. In one obvious way, fire destroys. One of my teachers, Martin Marty, used to ask believers in hell to hold their hand over a candle just for a moment. Hurts, right? What glory would it bring to God if one of his creatures only burned forever? But we have other stories about fire. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the fiery furnace, in the book of Daniel, they and a mysterious fourth figure are preserved, the fourth looks like a God. Fire can make you glow, in a “This girl is on fire” kind of way, in a Steph Curry can’t miss fashion. The image on your cover is based on the story of the burning bush in Exodus. Moses sees a bush on fire that isn’t consumed. So too, the church has figured, Mary is full of the fiery presence of God but not destroyed. Fire doesn’t only incinerate. It also purifies. Metalworkers burn gold to remove impurities, drain out dross and make the precious more precious. Fire can cauterize a wound, kill germs, heal what would otherwise kill. That’s painful, but it's life. When Jesus takes his followers up a high mountain, he is transfigured before them, brighter than the sun. As the kids say nowadays, that’s fire.
Some of our stories wonder whether heaven and hell aren’t, in fact, the same place. One story has a feast set before all. Those in hell are starving with food right in front of them. Those in heaven dine merrily. The difference? Those in heaven know you can only serve others. Those in hell think you can only serve yourself, which is not how Jesus’ table works. And so they starve. What if the fire of hell is the same as the fire of heaven. It’s just burning dross away. Both are fire: the fiery presence of God removing our sins. CS Lewis imagines Aslan the lion tearing away the scales of a dragon with his claws. It hurts the dragon, as flesh is torn. But as the lion removes the scales, a little boy reappears, newmade. The mercy of God can feel like death, but it’s the only way to life.
I don’t want to do away with all talk of hell too quickly. One significant theologian says she needs hell. Otherwise, she’ll stay just as selfish a person as ever. A little threat, she thinks, is healthy for the spiritual life. A Roman Catholic theologian was informed he had to believe in hell—it’s part of church doctrine, from scripture to the creed to now. Okay, he said. I have to believe there’s a hell. But I don’t have to believe it’s populated. Some, wanting to sideline hell slightly, wanting to avoid manipulating people with it, suggest that hell finally makes for annihilation. What does fire do but destroy—if someone finally cannot accept God’s grace, maybe God turns them out, like a light. Here’s the thing: if God bothered to create something in the first place, won’t God recreate it? Another wise interpreter says this: there has to be a hell. Because otherwise, where would Hitler go? Pol Pot? Mao? Someone who otherwise gets away with abusing even just one little girl? That feels right to me. As evangelical theologians like to warn, don’t try to be more merciful than Jesus. And who is it who warns of hell more than anybody else? The man from Nazareth.
But here’s what else we also believe about Jesus, what else is in the creed: what is he up to between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? He’s dead as dead can be. Where do dead people go when there’s no way to heaven? When there’s a chasm fixed with no way between here and there? To the place with the people with the pointy sticks. So, Jesus is in hell. And what’s he, of all people, doing there, of all places? He’s doing what he always does: healing. Liberating. Freeing. Brightening our darkness with his light. In some parts of the church, they say no one could go to heaven until Jesus went to hell. He preaches up a revival there and liberates the place, crying out “Who’s with me?” and making a beeline with his rescued humanity toward heaven.
What is hell? Trying to live as though God is not love. And what’s God do with our rebellion? He Jui jitsus it into divine mercy. Run as far and as fast as you want from God, you’ll just find yourself running toward him. There is no escape. Jesus will go to the farthest depth of hell to save you and those you love and those you think don’t deserve it. That’s the gospel. There is no hell that Jesus won’t raid to bring life. Abraham might be right, as he speaks before Easter. There is a fixed chasm no one can cross. But Jesus’ cross bridges that chasm. His resurrection destroys the barrier between heaven and hell, and traffic only goes one way.
Here’s a prayer along these lines:
Loving God, if I love thee for hope of heaven, then deny me heaven; if I love thee for fear of hell, then give me hell; but if I love thee for thyself alone, then give me thyself alone. Amen.
Another ancient monk prayed this way, “Lord, if any are to be lost, let it only be me.” That’s a Jesus-shaped prayer. Giving oneself for the sake of others. And any hell on earth, from Gaza to South Sudan to any site of natural or man-made disaster, you can bet that before you pray for it, Christ is already there, bringing freedom. And his people if not already there will get there soon. That’s what we do.
There’s another story we tell about hell. About Jesus. About what he’s up to there. What’s he doing on Holy Saturday, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? Answer: he’s looking everywhere for his friend Judas. You find me alienation, and you’ll find Jesus there working for repair. We call that image of Christ liberating hell “the harrowing of hell.” It’s an old agricultural term: he digs it up. Anyone in hell is sitting in an open cell, the lock destroyed by Jesus’ resurrection.
So, what should church look like if our only goal isn’t to help people avoid hell? The goal of our parishes and institutions for a millennium or more? What if the goal is not to scare people out of hell but to have them and us meet Jesus and become a new people together? A people who bear witness to a skeptical world that there is a God of love who is making all things new? I don’t know. That’s what we’re working on finding out! There is a minor place for hell in our life together still, not a major one. Hell is trying to live without God. And whatever and wherever hell is, Jesus is ripping down its walls, smashing its locks, liberating slaves, that’s all he ever does. And so that’s all our church will do. While we pray, “Lord, if any are to be lost, let it only be me. Amen.”