A Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 8:23—9:3  1 Corinthians 1:10-13, 17  Matthew 4:12-23

Let’s begin with the simplest of questions, though—fair warning—sometimes these produce the most surprising of answers.

Where is hell? 

The ancients spoke of it as “the underworld,” though even they knew that it was not a place beneath our feet.

Another answer is found in Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedy “Doctor Faustus.” Indeed, the infamous magician is tutored on this very question by Mephistopheles, his demon mentor. 

At their first encounter in the learned doctor’s study, Faustus asks the demon, “How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?”

Mephistopheles immediately corrects the magician. Hell is not a place. It is a state of being. Put simply, hell is knowing the irrevocable loss of heaven. So, even though newly arrived in the magician’s study, Mephistopheles has not left hell. He cannot. He tells Faustus:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss? 
Wherever Mephistopheles might go, he remains in hell. 

Is this such a novel idea? Would someone who has lost the love of his or her life not say the same, that heaven itself has been lost? Hell is not a spot; it is a status.

St. Matthew speaks of two regions of the Holy Land as dwelling in darkness:

Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles,
the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light,
on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death
light has arisen (4:15-16).

Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah, who had lamented the geographical position of Zebulun and Naphtali. As northern border territories, they were the first to be conquered by Assyria. 

But when the fathers of the church pondered these lands of darkness, they set aside geography. Christ was the only coordinate that mattered. To dwell apart from him was to live in shadows. The deepest darkness is imposed by the mind, not the map.

The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light (4:16).

Commenting on this passage from St. Matthew, St. Chromatius (d. 406 AD) insisted that light is not one more thing within the world. It is how we access the world. Light is a medium, not an object, and the gift we call faith is the light of insight. Those who once dwelt in darkness, he wrote, now 

see not with bodily contemplation—for the light is invisible—but with the eyes of faith and in the mind’s eye.

The dawning of light is an essential Christian metaphor because the Gospels proclaim the advent of a person, not a program or a position. To encounter Christ is to know the love for which we were created. When true love enters life, it reorients, revalues everything. Peter and Andrew do not leave behind their nets because of an intellectual insight. No, they fall in love. 

To find love is to find oneself, to have a place in the world, one that is open to ever more abundant life. Yet sadly, the law written into our humanity says that love has its limits. All love comes to an end. 

The world is full of lovers and full of those who have lost love. Is that all that can be said? 

No, because the distinction between belief and nonbelief runs deeper than insight. The Gospel insists that the world itself has been lifted into love. Again, its essential proclamation is that of a person. Who is the Christ? He is love without limit. Believers have encountered a person, one who does not wait to be perceived. He comes to us, claims us. “Come after me,” he tells Peter and Andrew (Mt 4:19).

Love is an act, which is why belief stands just outside the shadows of unbelief. We must repeatedly give ourselves over to Christ, the ancient lover of our souls. Hence, the essential role of liturgy in the life of a Christian. Christ is always a shining light. We are the ones who must repeatedly decide to leave behind the darkness. 

Mephistopheles tells Doctor Faustus that this state of impermanence is itself passing, though the coming eternal permanence will not be geographical. It will be utterly personal. A time will come when the love who is Christ will be forever gained or lost.

Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortur’d and remain for ever:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven. 

We were created to choose. In the end, that is all. That is the ultimate meaning of human life: Either we open ourselves to the mystery we call God, or we irrevocably close ourselves to it. 

Faustus dies lamenting that his choice has become irrevocable. Would that something like purgatory, which by its nature is passing, were still possible. But that is the particular pain of hell: its permanence!

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d!
O, no end is limited to damned souls! 

Heaven and hell are both present, both at work, in the world. Even now, heaven can be scented by some, while others cannot escape the stench of hell. Love is the limit of the two. And both shall forever remain. But what will most surely come to an end is the divide between heaven and hell that runs through the middle of us all. 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.