ROMANS 8:8-11

Homily given by Fr. Dennis Koliński, SJC

St. Peter’s Church in Volo

9 March 2008

 In today’s responsorial psalm we heard, “With the Lord there is mercy and fullness of redemption.” Therefore, one aspect of Catholic teaching that is a stumbling block for many people, Catholics included, is the eternal damnation of the unrepentant, who die in a state of mortal sin. Many people have a hard time reconciling the fact that God is supposed to be all-good and all-loving but yet He condemns people to eternal punishment in hell with no hope of ever reversing the judgment. Instead of being a loving and merciful God, He becomes for them, mean and vengeful.

Some people use this argument as a justification for not following a faith that puts demands on their lives that they just don’t want to deal with. It’s an excuse to not believe. But in many cases, the difficulty that people have in understanding a seeming paradox in a God, who is supposed to be perfect in every way, is a legitimate concern. How do we reconcile God’s infinite mercy and goodness and love with condemnation?

We can talk about how justice demands punishment for the offense of sin because God is also just, but this argument doesn’t seem to satisfy modern man as it did in ages past when people accepted the fact that acts have consequences and that a person has to somehow pay for something evil that he did. Justice was an accepted part of life. People understood it. But not so today. Instead, people will often say that a severe punishment is “not fair” and that we should have more compassion.

Part of the answer to the question of condemnation can be found a few lines before the section that we heard today from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He wrote: “Brothers and sisters: Now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”[1] Despite the fact that Scripture is filled with references to God’s condemnation of the wicked, especially in the Old Testament, St. Paul’s statement points to the seeming contradiction of Christ’s refusal to condemn. In the famous account of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus asks the woman, after all of her accusers had dropped their stones and walked away, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” When she replied, “No one, sir,” Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.”[2] Jesus, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God Himself, clearly stated that He does not condemn! So, how do we reconcile this?

When a person dies unrepentant in a state of mortal sin—that is, in a state totally devoid of God’s supernatural life—he literally condemns himself to hell. By freely choosing to sin, he freely chose to turn his back on God. He freely chose to extinguish the supernatural flame within him. By his actions, he said, “I don’t want you, God.” And when a soul passes into eternity in such a state, he is no longer capable of changing his mind because the essence of eternity is a state of no change. Standing before God he will be totally unrepentant and will openly accuse himself. Because he had willingly chosen to live without God, he is even repulsed by God’s presence and flings himself into hell because he can’t bear the sight of the all-perfect good, which he freely chose to reject. The unrepentant sinner passes sentence on himself. He freely condemns himself. God “condemns” him only in as much as He ratifies the sentence, which the soul has passed on itself.

Today’s passage from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans began, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. What we didn’t hear were the two lines preceding that passage. “Those who live according to the flesh are concerned with the things of the flesh, … the concern of the flesh is death … the concern of the flesh is hostility toward God; it does not submit to the law of God, nor can it.”[3] The flesh that St. Paul writes of is sin and the death he writes of is the eternal death of hell. The soul that dies in a state of mortal sin dies in a state of hostility toward God. And St. Paul clearly tells us that “it does not submit to the law of God, nor can it.” It remains locked in that state for all eternity because it freely chose it.

St. John wrote: “People preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.”[4] That’s why unrepentant sinners hate the light of God and prefer the darkness of hell.

St. John also wrote, that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”[5]

Anyone, who has read the Theology of the Body, knows that John Paul II taught us that the body speaks a language. Each of our actions says something. And those acts, which we call mortal sins, say that we prefer ourselves over God, the flesh over the Spirit, darkness over light. It says that we aren’t interested in Him.

God does not unjustly condemn anyone. He is infinite mercy and goodness, but loves each one of us so much that He allows each of us to freely choose our own eternal destiny—even hell. He loves us so much that He chooses not to even interfere in our decision.

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”[6] All we have to do is love Him in return and we do this by keeping His commandments. In today’s gospel we heard Jesus say to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”[7] If this is what He promises us, is it really that difficult to do what He asks of us?