Suicide ~ Fr. Thomas Hopko

Hardly a week or two go by when I don’t get a phone call or an email or a note about the issue of suicide, hearing about people who take their own lives. There is a sense in which we can really say that suicide in the Western world, particularly in America, is really almost an epidemic proportion, especially among young people. I read recently that among young people the first greatest cause of death is automobile accidents, and those are often drug-related or alcohol-related. So you have alcohol-, drug-related deaths also having to do with automobile accidents. Then the second one is suicide, that when the young person simply takes her life or his life.
These two are interrelated, because some of the studies show that drug-related and alcohol-related deaths and automobile accident deaths are connected very often to a death-wish, a desire simply to be dead, that the pain of life becomes unbearable, the desires are not fulfilled, the person feels like a loser, there’s a great cause of depression around, anxiety around. Sometimes when you don’t have the actual phenomenon of death, of killing oneself physically, you have other things that can really be related also to a self-loathing that is connected with a desire for self-destruction. For example, you have the practice of cutting. Many people—too many people—young people cut themselves; they’ll get a sharp object and cut themselves. Sometimes they’ll burn themselves, just because of hatred of themselves.
Then there are other ways of killing yourself than actually physically taking your life. Persons can kill themselves when they just give up, give in, give themselves over to a completely total carnal, angry, depressed, despondent life, and as a matter of fact what they are really doing is killing themselves, hating themselves and killing themselves.
But what we want to reflect on now, just for a very few minutes, would be the issue of suicide—actually taking one’s life. Here we have also some distinctions that can be made, because we have now in our society, Western society, physician-assisted suicide, where people decide to kill themselves. Normally it’s the case of physician-assisted suicide is when a person is in terrible suffering and they cannot stand the pain and anxiety of it, the fear of being a burden to other people or spending lots of money or things like this, or simply a sense that their so-called “productive” life is over, they can no longer play the piano or play golf or read poetry or go on vacations or travel, so they might just as well be dead and then not be a burden to the people around them. So the decision is simply made to take one’s own life. They can do it by themselves or assisted by a doctor, a physician, that will help them to take their life.
The euthanasia movement also is very similar to that, where the person doesn’t take their own life, but they ask someone else to take their life and to no longer exist in this world.
Some of that is out of despair, but some of that is out of a strange understanding that the soul is immortal and will go to some heavenly, holy, happy place anyway—well, perhaps not holy, but certainly happy—and that a person can then enjoy everlasting life freed from all the terrors and tortures and pains and sufferings of this world. I think that Islam, of course, has that particular phenomenon, because you have all of these suicide bombers. Every day on the news you hear about some young boy or girl, usually young, both men and women, who simply kill themselves. They kill themselves for a cause. They blow themselves up, with the desire to blow up other people with them.
Sometimes that’s done with the express conviction that they are a martyr for a cause, and that God will bless them for killing themselves and that he will take them into paradise. The popular saying is that if you’re a young man you get 40 virgins in the kingdom of God if you blow yourself up against the infidel or against the heretical Muslim brother who is destroying Islam and not following the Prophet and so on. But we do have that phenomenon of suicide: suicide bombers, suicide terrorists. So that is in our face every single day in American society if we watch the news. That is there also.
So we have many forms, many reasons, many ways in which the phenomenon of suicide is now impacting our life big-time, very—how can you say?—common. But that idea, let me repeat it, about “If I die, I get freed from the sufferings of this world, but I’m guaranteed some kind of life without suffering.” It’s kind of like Platonism: your soul leaves your body and then your soul, which is immortal, goes to some kind of a place where it’s happy forever and contemplates the world of ideas.
In the state of Massachusetts, for example, the Euthanasia Society Movement, the physician-assisted suicide movement, is called the Hemlock Society, because as you may know Socrates drinks the hemlock in [the] Apology for the death of Socrates that Plato wrote. The idea that a noble person will be happy to die and be even ready to die—of course, according to Plato, you weren’t supposed to kill yourself. Other people were supposed to kill you. But you were supposed to be ready to die, or to drink the hemlock, be ready to die in that sense, in a very peaceful, joyful, noble way because you’re going to go to a better place anyway. So this common idea that no matter how you live on earth, no matter what you do, when you die you go to “a better place,” and how often people say that: “Oh, she’s in a better place now. He’s in a better place now.” Even when people kill themselves, you’ll hear people saying, “Well, you know, Joe or Judy was so unhappy anyway, but now they’re at rest and they’re at peace,” or whatever. Among some people there’s this idea that there’s a happy eternity even if you kill yourself.
Without getting into—and we can’t, obviously, get into all the various reasons why and how people kill themselves, take their own lives, I have been asked—people have written to me about this and asked me to respond about it: How do people, especially Christian, believing people, how do we relate to those who have taken their own life? How do we understand it? How do deal with it? What is actually done? And then, even questions have been asked to me recently, not only about suicide, but about death generally, particularly about those who take their own life: are they somehow still alive in God and can they know what’s going on on earth? In other words, can we relate to those who have died from suicide? How do we understand our relation now to the people who have taken their own lives, and how to we understand their relationship to us?
I would just like to list a few points here that I am convinced are absolutely the Christian teaching. I really believe that what I’m going to say right now is the ancient Orthodox Christian teaching relative to suicide. First of all, we must say that Christians are absolutely opposed to suicide. We Christians believe that no matter how bad our life is, no matter how depressed, no matter how painful, no matter how suffering, we have no right to consciously, freely, purposefully take our own life or ask somebody else to take our life for us or get assisted in simply causing our own self to die. Christian teaching always has been that trampling down death by death and suffering in this world has a supernatural purpose. It has a meaning.
Simone Weil, a wonderful writer, was a Jewish woman who became a Christian, believed in the Gospel, believed in Christ, but never was baptized and actually died at a very young age, in her 30s, as a Jew, in the Nazi period. This Simone Weil had a wonderful sentence where she said, “The essential element of the Christian conviction, the essential beauty, the ultimate truth of the Christian tradition, is that suffering and affliction is not to be explained or to be justified. It has no justification or explanation within the categories of this world. It’s just something alien, and if you don’t believe in anything beyond this world, then you might just as well kill yourself; kill other people, too.” As Dostoyevsky said, “If there is no God and there is no judgment, everything’s possible. What difference does it make if you kill yourself, kill anybody else or anything else? It just doesn’t matter. It has no meaning. It’s senseless.”
But the Christian faith, as Simone Weil says, is that we do not have a supernatural explanation or reasoning for suffering, but we do certainly have a supernatural use, that we believe that the affliction in this world is a necessary element in entering into the kingdom of God. “It’s by many afflictions that we enter into the kingdom,” Holy Scripture says. “Before I was afflicted, I went astray,” the psalm says. We do not idolize or idealize or deify suffering, but Christians really believe that suffering is a part of this life, an essential part of this life. How could you not really hold that view if your main center of your whole conviction is that Christ crucified is the center of everything? The suffering and the passion and the death of Christ is everything. It’s the way we approach reality. It’s how we understand the very center of meaning of life in this corrupted world, namely, that we will have to suffer and that we will have to die and that we will have to go through affliction and through pain.
But we believe that that affliction and pain that we go through, which is a mystery how it happens to any given person, why some people have it and other people don’t—we’ve talked about that on the radio before, and I’m sure we’ll do it again—still there is a great mystery of the human life, the interaction between human freedom and divine providence, and how God providentially uses all of our human activities and behaviors including our lack of control over the universe, like with fires and earthquakes and tsunamis and things like that, as well as the evils that people do to each other: when people torture each other and they kill each other in wars and bomb each other and destroy each other. Christians have to face that squarely and say that’s part of the providential plan of God.
Certainly it would be a Christian teaching that believing in God, trusting in God, loving God with all one’s mind, soul, heart, and strength, loving one’s neighbor as one’s very self including one enemy, in the midst of horrendous suffering is the main Christian testimony to Christian faith. The martyr, the one who suffers martyrdom—that’s what Christians are called to: testimony, martyria. And the quintessential Christian, at least in the ancient world, was the martyr. That’s even how the veneration of saints began, because Christians began venerating those who died with Jesus and for Jesus and for truth and for their brother and for righteousness’ sake.
So suffering and death for the sake of truth, for the sake of righteousness, not killing anybody and first of all not killing your own self, but maybe being killed by others, and ultimately dying even when we’re not killed by others: here, of course, Christians would say even if we’re not killed by others or killed in some spectacular way like a car accident or an earthquake, we will die in any case. We will face disease. So the Christian teaching would be how we suffer, like, say, if we get cancer: how we suffer with that, how we relate to God, how we relate to the people who care for us, how we relate to our brothers and sisters, how we transform that suffering into a victory by our faith in God.
Because every Christian is called by faith and grace to trample down death by death. Every Christian is called by faith and grace to suffer together with Jesus. Every Christian is called by faith and grace to take up their cross and to follow him. Every Christian only enters the kingdom as Christ did: through affliction and patient endurance of all sufferings in this world.
We Christians say that suffering is not to be… Of course, we try to minimize and eliminate suffering as much as we can, especially for other people. When other people are in pain, we try to reduce their pain. We try to help them; we don’t try to harm them. We certainly don’t inflict pain on anybody. But when pain and suffering come to us by whatever means, as Christians, we are commanded to endure that suffering with total trust in God and absolute forgiveness to the people around us and gratitude and joy for life. We really believe that the greatest witness we can make to God almighty and to his Son Jesus Christ is by patient endurance in suffering. By suffering with peace, by suffering “painless, blameless, peaceful,” as we pray in church. And “painless” would not necessarily mean physically painless, but without the agonizing pain of our emotional life and our rejection against God and our kicking against our destiny and all that kind of thing.
Certainly Christians really understand suffering as part of the whole deal, even a central part. We see suffering brought on by human sin, by our loss of control of the universe, our loss of control over our own bodies, our being victimized by the sins of the world and the sins of other people, and corrupted by our relationship with other people’s diseases. We can be born with genetic diseases: no fault of our own, but how we endure that, how we glorify God through that, how we relate to that—that is the ultimate, quintessential Christian witness. Therefore, it is the Christian teaching that we would never kill anybody to put them out of their misery, like you would an animal with a broken leg or something, but we would certainly never do that ourselves.
However, the Christian teaching would also be that there are people who just can’t do it, that there are people who not only are too weak and not faithful enough and not strong enough to endure whatever sufferings they have to go through, but there’s the mental suffering. There’s the emotional suffering. There’s the suffering of anxiety and despondency and depression and self-loathing and just the inability to endure life itself. Sometimes even this is put on people by others also.
For example, suppose a person is struggling with same-sex attraction, that they have a homosexual orientation, and suppose they feel like a freak and a queer, and everybody’s condemning them and saying they’re going to burn in hell and they’re sodomites and this and that. Well, you can understand how a person like that might go out and kill themselves. They feel condemned by God, condemned by their parents, condemned by society, condemned by everybody, laughed at, ridiculed, and we know darn well that a lot of homosexual people are. I mean, Hitler killed them all in the gas chambers, and in America we have terrible crimes, hate crimes, against homosexual people.
There’s a high rate of suicide among homosexual people, especially young people, who don’t feel the love of God and the love of their neighbor and care and compassion for them. So nowadays, practically in dealing with same-sex attraction, people feel that they have two choices: one is to come out and to celebrate the same-sex attraction and say there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it and it’s marvelous and wonderful and a gift of God, and the other is to hate themselves, to loathe themselves, and to kill themselves, or other people would hate them and loathe them and kill them. Well, those aren’t the choices. Those aren’t the Christian choices.
But we do have to realize that there are some people who are so ill and so crushed by the world that you can understand, according to the logic of this world, why they would kill themselves. In my own pastoral life, I dealt with suicides several times. I can just tell you right now two stories where certainly that was the case. One was an instance of a young woman in her 30s who was my parishioner in one of my parishes when I was a parish priest. She tried to kill herself three times before I became the pastor of the church, and I knew about that. After a while, I found out. The sad thing is that her family was kind of hiding her at home and she never came to church and I hardly even knew she existed until I went to bless the house and discovered this woman there.
She was a beautiful 30-year-old woman, very nice woman, but she was obviously mentally ill. She would periodically want to take her life. Then, once, when it happened she was successful. Once she shot herself through the chest three times, missed every vital organ, and did not die. I remember as a young priest being totally ill-equipped and overcome by having to visit this young woman in the hospital who had just shot herself. She went to a mall, bought a gun, went home, and shot herself. But she survived. But then she was put in a mental hospital.
Then one Sunday when her family brought her home, they went to church, left her home; when they came back home, they called me up. I get a call when I walked in my house after Liturgy, saying, “Father, Father, come over! Our sister”—it was the lady’s sister; let’s call her “Lucy”; that wasn’t her name—“Lucy has taken her life!” So I went there and the woman was hanging. I had to proceed to call police and coroners and whatever else.
But she wrote a suicide note quoting the beatitudes: “Remember me, O Lord, when you come into your kingdom.” Then she wrote that she wanted to be with her mother, that her mother had died and she wanted to be with her mother, and she thought that by taking her life she would go and be with her mother. Flannery O’Connor has a story about that, of a little boy who wants to be with his mother, and they tell him that his mother is up in heaven, and he gets a telescope and looks, tries to find her. Then one day they go up into the attic where his telescope is, and they find him dead. He took his own life because he wanted to be with his mother. That was exactly the case with this mentally ill young woman: she wanted to be with her mother.
Then when I investigated further, I could understand, humanly speaking, what the pathos was between this girl and her mother. I won’t go into it on the radio, but all I can say is it was a very complicated story which had to do with her mother and her mother’s behavior and her father and the next-door neighbor-man and all kinds of stuff. There was a very difficult, very convoluted, very unhappy situation of this girl’s mother. I can just simply say that perhaps one or two of her children were from her neighbor and not from her very bad husband that she had who was an alcoholic and beat her and so on. So it was a terrible, terrible story. In any case, you could see why this person would be moved to take her own life, and even to do so with a prayer, even quoting the beatitudes.
Another instance that I had in another one of my parishes was where there was a mentally ill woman who was very, very devoted to her husband and was with her husband and couldn’t do anything practically without her husband. And then her husband died, and then she was left alone, and her kids were far away from home and didn’t seem to care about her much. Sixteen days after her husband’s funeral, she took her own life. I also found her hanging. I went to visit her to help her to straighten out her affairs. The house was locked, the phone wouldn’t answer, I called the police. The police turned their head in the opposite direction while I broke through the cellar door, because they didn’t want to see me breaking and entering, and then I got myself into the house and found her dead.
You can see why a person can be so messed up, so wounded, so bruised, so whatever, why they would take their own life, and that kind of madness probably could even be ascribed to suicide bombers in the Islamic world today. People are just gone crazy, and the demons rage and they conquer, they win, which leads some people to take their own lives.
Here I think we have to then make another point, a very important point in my opinion, and that is that none of us have any right or competence to judge the eternal destiny of anyone under any circumstances, including even a person who takes their own life. It is not—I want to say this again—a Christian teaching as far as I understand Eastern Orthodox ancient Christianity that people who commit suicide are necessarily condemned to hell. You cannot say that.
You cannot say that about anybody, because we don’t have the right to judge anything. God judges everyone. God knows why people do what they do. God alone reads the hearts of people. God alone will exercise mercy and judgment as he sees fit. And it is the Christian teaching that God has mercy on absolutely everybody. God does not withhold his mercy from anyone; that’s the Gospel. That’s the Christian Gospel. The Christian Gospel is that God has mercy on everyone no matter what. He has mercy on sodomites. He has mercy on suicides. He has mercy on Jews. He has mercy on Gentiles. He has mercy on every possible kind of sinner. God shows mercy on everyone, and through the blood of Christ, everyone is forgiven. That would be the Gospel.
The Gospel would also be that judgment is based on whether or not we accept the mercy of God. We don’t know who accepts the mercy of God. We do teach—it is a Christian teaching—that the final judgment of a person is when they stand before God, whether or not they accept the divine mercy, whether or not they repent of their sin. So we would say that everyone has a chance to convert in death. They have a chance to convert when they see the risen and glorified Christ. They have a chance, ultimately, finally, to fall down before him and say, “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” and not to reject him and not to reject their own life. So I’m very convinced, personally, that we have no right to say and pronounce judgment on anybody. We have no right to say that this person is lost and has gone to hell.
Sometimes the Church Fathers do that in certain cases. For example, you read in the lives of saints about heretics who finally die and persecutors, and the saint says they’re going to get what’s going to come [to] them from God and so on. Sometimes I think that’s pedagogical so that we would learn and not be sinners ourselves and behave accordingly, but I really don’t think that we have the right to make a kind of dogmatic, theological judgment that any human being can pronounce judgment on anybody else. The Lord Jesus Christ can do that. He said about Judas, “Better that that man was never born. Better that he never came into the world.” But even there, that’s Jesus Christ speaking; that’s not you or me. And maybe the Lord Jesus Christ wants to teach all of us—certainly he does—that we can be lost. We can not repent. Judas, after all, went out and hanged himself. Sometimes people think that’s a proof that if you hang yourself, like these two women I just mentioned, then you’re certainly going to burn in hell forever—but who knows the motivation?
In Dostoyevsky novels, you have guys like Stavrogin in the novel The Possessed, Demons, who cold-bloodedly killed himself. They played with a little boy with a ball, they have a nice lunch, and then they go and kill themselves—out of pure defiance against God, because they don’t want God and they don’t want light. Well, you could say, abstractly, yes, such a person will burn in hell forever, but even then it’s not for us to say that. It’s only for God to say that.
So we cannot say who is saved and who isn’t. I mean, there can be bishops and priests who serve Liturgy every day, and they may find themselves in hell. Jesus says that in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, “Many will come to me and say, ‘We did miracles in your name. We cast out demons in your name. We prophesied in your name. We spoke on Ancient Faith Radio in your name. We listened to Ancient Faith Radio in your name. We went to Divine Liturgy in your name. We did all this,’ ” and he’ll say, “Depart from me, you evil-doer. I do not know you.” Because our hearts could be corrupted. We could be proud, vain, judgmental, not really loving, not really merciful.
Only God knows all that, so we have no right to pronounce any judgments, none whatsoever: neither on ourselves nor on anybody else, and that’s why we Orthodox Christians would never hold: “I know I’m going to heaven. I know that I have my square yard of space in the promised land. I know that I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior and therefore I am saved.” That is baloney! That is just plain baloney. Or it’s half baloney, because we could say, “Yeah, as far as God is concerned, I am saved,” but as far as God is concerned, everybody is saved. As far as God is concerned, even a sodomite and a suicide could repent and be saved—but that’s up to God. God alone knows that. I don’t know that, but I can never dare to say who is saved and who is not saved, including my own self.
All the saints bear witness to this. The holiest saints, when they were dying, like Sisoes in the desert, said, “Pray for me, brother. I have not yet begun to repent. Pray that God would have mercy on my soul. Pray that God would forgive my life.” This is our attitude to God. We don’t presume anything. Oh, we presume the goodness and mercy of God, but we do not presume that we have accepted it, that we really have accepted it and believed it, ebcause if we did, then we would love God with all our mind, soul, heart, and strength, we would love our neighbor including our worst enemy as ourselves, we would never judge anybody for anything, and we would be a perfectly holy, deified man. Well, I’m not one, and I don’t think you are, either. Therefore we have no right to judge anything. Nothing. And the saints do not do that. They do not do that.
Having said that, that God alone judges, then the question can be raised and must be raised: If that’s the case, why is it that historically, canonically in the Orthodox Church, we do not perform the regular funeral service on a person who has committed suicide? Why was it the practice that a suicide person was not buried with the rite of the Church? The same way that a person who [apostatized], or a person who never came to church—for example, we have people who never come to church; then they die and they’re brought in church and are given the funeral of the Church as if they were communicants, as if they were believers. This is a total blasphemy.
Once I had a family in one of my churches, and their father died, and they wanted me to do the funeral. I said, “Well, I’ll come to the funeral home and I’ll read some psalms, and I’ll do a prayer, and I’ll bury your father.” They said, “No, no! We want a church funeral! We want to bring him in church!” And I said to them, “But you know darn well that your dad was an atheist, and a belligerant atheist.” Their dad used to walk by the front of our church, spit on the lawn, and say, “Neya Boha! There is no God!” he used to say in [the] Slavic language. “There’s no God!” and spit, and make fun of the man who was cutting the lawn of the church: “Why you do such stupid things? There’s no God.”
Then the guy drops dead, and the kids want to bring him in church, probably because they want to put on a show or they want people to think or they hope that God will bless them, and when I said to them, “I can’t bring your dad into church.” I asked them, “Suppose your dad woke up in the middle of the funeral and saw me standing there with vestments and a [censer] and a cross over him and an icon screen in front of him.” They said, “Oh, we wouldn’t want to think of that, Father. He’d get up and scream and curse and run out of the church.” I said, “Then why do you want to bring him in? Let’s be honest. Let’s respect his actual life. Let’s respect his words, his deeds, and let God judge him.”
They said, “Oh, you think he’s going to burn in hell!” I said, “No, I don’t know if he’s going to burn in hell or not. Only God knows why he went by the church, spit, and said, ‘There is no God.’ I don’t know why. God alone knows. God’ll judge him.” But then I tried to make the point to them that Church services, sacraments, are for people who express faith, who are there freely, voluntar­ily, who believe it, so that when you say the prayer over them, you’re not lying to God. When you say, “Give rest, O Lord, to the soul of your servant,” well, the person should be a servant of God. When you say, “O thou who lovest Christ,” in a prayer, then it’d better be a person who at least appeared to love Christ. If you say, “You have received the broken body and spilled blood,” and you read that at the funeral service, then it’s got to be a person who actually did it and who loved it and who believed in it, however sinful they may be, but they still professed faith. They were members.
This is the canonical point. The canonical point is this: the Church only exercises jurisdiction over those who profess to be its members, and those outside, they don’t judge at all; we don’t judge at all. In fact, the Apostle Paul put a man out of the Corinthian community—read the Corinthian letters, especially I Corinthians. A guy was sleeping with his father’s wife. They put him out of the community, but St. Paul didn’t say, “And we condemn him to hell.” St. Paul didn’t say that. He said, “We deliver him to Satan for a while so that in the end his soul perhaps might be saved.” And it did turn out, actually, that that man did repent, and then St. Paul said that they ought to receive him back in repentance.
In any case, excommunication from the Church is not a punishment or a pronouncement of eternal damnation. If the bishops and priests have to put someone out of communion, they are not even putting the person out of communion. They are simply pronouncing the fact that the person has put themselves out of communion, that they are no longer in communion, because you can’t be in communion if you don’t believe what the Church teaches. If you’re a heretic, you put yourself out of communion. A heretic is not just a mistaken person; it’s a person who professedly teaches against the teachings of the Church and claims that this is the truth. Well, anybody who does that can’t have the sacraments of the Church, and that’s even how the churches became divided.
The churches became divided when one church said about another church, “You’re not following the Gospel. You’re not faithful to God. You’re not keeping the faith.” You’ve got to keep the faith, and there is a faith. There is an objective faith. There’s the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and there is the apostolic faith. There is the faith of the Gospel. There isn’t any other gospel. So the rites and sacraments of the Church are for those who believe these things, struggle to do them, and repent in tears when they fail. That’s what a Church member is, so the sacraments of the Church, including a funeral, are for those people.
What about the suicide? The teaching here, I think, would be pretty clear. If a person takes his or her own life, it means that by that very act they have put themselves out of the communion of the Church and have to deal with God directly. In other words, the Church doesn’t have jurisdiction over that person any more, because a suicide is, definitely, a demonic act. It’s a sinful act. Now, the person may not be very culpable. The person may be emotionally distraught. The person may be mentally ill. The person may be just too weak. The one person who wrote the beatitudes, she had holy Communion about two weeks before she died, and when I gave her holy Communion, she took it very nicely and said that she wanted it. She wasn’t against God or anything; she was just all messed up.
I could make certain judgments about her, and in fact in the instances of the two women I mentioned, we did bring them to the church building and we did have a funeral service, but the funeral service was modified. If you follow technically the book, the book for the Orthodox priest would say for a suicide or anybody else that you don’t know their state before God, you put on your stole and you sing, “Holy God, holy Mighty, holy Immortal,” you do the Trisagion, and you sing, “With the souls of the righteous,” and you sing, “Memory eternal,” and you put them in the ground, but you don’t have the full service as you would.
That’s what the rule is now. My opinion—and here I’m going to give you my opinion—is that the Orthodox Church should draw up a service for suicides. Besides having a prayer service for the weeping and the grieving—I’ve done that in my life, that the families of people who have taken their own lives, we had special services for the family, asking God to assuage their grief and to dry their tears and to express faith and trust in God that maybe in ways known to God himself that person might be saved, to pray for their salvation and so on—but we cannot assume that they are condemned forever to hell. That is not our opinion.
That is the meaning behind the canonical practice of not doing the regular funeral service for a suicide or for other people who are clearly out of the Church. The reason for not doing the services: they have put themselves out of communion with the Church by their act, and that act has to be honored. But only God can analyze it or evaluate it. Only God will know what to do with that person. But it would be very good and very helpful, I feel, that if we had a service in the service book, more elaborate than we have now—which now it simply says the Trisagion and burial; that’s all it says—but suppose we added a few psalms.
Suppose we added some appropriate readings from holy Scripture. Suppose the prayers actually said, “Have mercy, O Lord, on your creature who has taken her own life. Have mercy, O Lord, on your creature who has taken his own life. Be merciful, we beg you to show mercy on this person in ways known to yourself, O God. If it be possible according to the multitude of your mercy, have mercy and save the soul of this servant who has committed suicide.” And put it right up front. Say it openly. Don’t play games. Then I think God would bless that and honor that, and it would be really very nice if, I don’t know, the Standing Conference of Bishops in America or somebody could put together a service that the priests would be directed to use in case of suicides, which would simply recognize that a suicide has taken place and that the person has taken their own life and that objectively this is a sinful act, it is missing the mark, it is not what people ought to do, but that we could still ask God’s mercy and still give some comfort to the grieving family who are filled with probably guilt themselves that they didn’t treat this person properly or whatever else.
Even in the instances of suicides I’ve been involved with, the families often are very guilty. In the case where the young woman took her life while her sister and brother-in-law were in church, they probably said, “Why did we go to church? We should have stayed home with her. We shouldn’t have left her alone. Oh, we’re guilty; we’re guilty.” On that particular suicide, I’ll never forget. I was totally crushed, because I knew this person, because I’d visited her many times, at the hospital and at home. In fact, I even arranged for her to be put into the hospital because her family didn’t want to do it. I said, “You’ve got to do it.” But in any case, I was there, totally crushed, and the doctor, a wonderful doctor—I think he was a Roman Catholic man; he had a German name—he came to me and he said, “Father, can I talk to you?” I think he was a Roman Catholic. I said, “Sure.” He said, “You’re a young guy. You’re a young fellow,” he said to me. I was 25, I think.
He said, “This is going to happen to you a lot, so I want to tell you something right now, Father. You’re not responsible for this. You can pray, you can come, you can do what you do, but people do what they’re going to do, and when people are determined to take their own lives, sooner or later, they’re going to do it, if that’s what their mindset is. And you can try to protect, you can try to defend, you can try to preach, you can try to convert, but you’re not God.” He said, “You’d better learn that right now, because you’re young: You’re a priest, but you’re not God.” That’s what he told me. I’ll never forget this man; I love him. And he gave me a great lesson in life. He said, “But your task is still to do everything you can, and your task is to pray to God for everyone’s soul, and your task is to help the grieving people to handle these horrible things that happen in this fallen world. But you’re not God. Always remember that: you’re not God. You’re God’s servant, but you’re not God.”
So we do have the practice—and in the Orthodox Church there was even the practice of not burying the suicides in the consecrated ground. That was a practice, too. Unbaptized babies, people who weren’t communicants: they had a special part of the cemetery. My own opinion is that that’s probably not that necessary. God knows what ground is which ground, and you can bless it and not bless it, and if you can bless a well and a cow, you can certainly bless a burial place for a person who commits suicide. You don’t withhold blessings and prayers for those people, but you do not pronounce judgment and you do not pronounce a Church service as if they were believers, as if everything was just fine, because it’s not fine. It’s not good, and that has to be recognized.
But I want to make it very clear: my conviction is that the withholding of a regular Church funeral and a regular Church burial for a suicide—or for anyone else who was outside the Church, for that matter—is not a condemnation. It’s not that the Church judges them to hell. It’s not because the Church believes that they are eternally lost and damned. That is not the teaching. I’m convinced of it. That is not the teaching. The teaching is: we have no jurisdiction to act. The Church deals with those inside. That’s what St. Paul said in the Corinthian letter: God judges those outside; we have to pronounce a certain judgment on ourselves inside.
In fact, in II Corinthians, he says about six times in the last chapter: Test yourself, try yourself: are you a believer? Are you following God? Are you keeping the faith? We have to do that all the time in our life, and try not to fall away, try not to [apostatize], try not to sin. But when you have an egregious sin that’s pretty obvious, a sinful act like suicide or like leaving the communion of the Church or something once you’ve been in it, then that’s God’s business. That’s not the Church’s business any more.
So the refusal of the service and the sacraments of the Church and the refusal of the burial was not a pronouncement that the person’s going to hell. Not at all. It was a, in fact, very humble statement of saying: We can’t do anything here because this person has in fact done an act that has separated them from the communion of the Church. Even though this one woman, I said, had holy Communion two weeks before, but still the fact that she hanged herself says now God has to deal with her; the Church can’t deal with her any more. And certainly it cannot deal with her as if she were a good, faithful communicant of the Church, because that act shows that she was in the power of evil, that the devil won somehow in her life. The devil was victorious, but God can defeat the devil.
We have to see, in a sense, the humility of the Church. The Church is humble. The Church doesn’t pronounce judgment. The Church only deals with its own. When people are not its own, the Church does not pronounce judgment. For example, sometimes people say to me, “Fr. Tom, what do you think about the liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church?” or “What do you think about what the Episcopalians are doing, or the Lutherans, or anybody—[Swedenborgians] or Jews or [Muslims] or whatever?” I think our answer has to be: That’s not my business. That’s God’s business. My business is to be faithful to the Gospel as I understand it, and within the Church, minister to people who also accept and claim to believe in that Gospel, and that we do it according to the Scriptures and the sacraments and the services and the saints and the councils of the holy Church, that we try to keep the faith of the Church, the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, the faith that we keep and the faith that we celebrate in our sacraments, and the faith that our saints lived by. That we have responsibility for, but anything else we don’t have responsibility for.
The minute a person commits suicide, we don’t have responsibility for that person. They’re in the hands of God, and it would be really good if we had a nice service, in church, that we could use in cases of suicide that would clearly make that point. We have it already, but it’s very minimal: Trisagion and burial. That’s what we have now.
One more point, a little point: One of the people who wrote to me asked, “What about relationship with the dead?” Well, that’s another topic, but I would say just for now, just to say a sentence: yeah, we do believe that all the dead are in the hands of God, including suicides. We believe that they are raised by the Christ who has harrowed Hades and destroyed Sheol and raised the dead already. The dead, the graves are already… Christ has already descended into death. Death is no more. Christ God is risen, as we sing in church. So we believe that all the dead are in the hands of God, and we do believe that they are aware, they are conscious, they are alive, and those who have done good and done the mercy of God and repent of their sins will be with Christ, and those who have not will be torturing themselves and trying to kill themselves forever. There’s a sense in which eternal hell is an attempt at eternal suicide that you can’t pull off.
I knew one guy who wanted to kill himself, “But it’s not fair,” he said, “that God keeps us alive. I really want to be non-existent. I want to be dead. And who is God to keep me alive?” I said, “Well, God is God. Why don’t you surrender to life? Then maybe you could be okay,” I said to this guy at Columbia University once in New York. I said, “Why do you want to be completely annihilated. He said, “Because I do.” He was a defiant rebel against life itself. But God will know what to do with him. I don’t know whether he ever killed himself or not. I didn’t know him; he came to a talk I gave, and he was not a member of the Church. I don’t even know what his spiritual, theological life was.
In any case, it’s God’s business. It’s God’s business, and we believe, ultimately, and trust in the mercy of God. And that mercy is given to everybody, and they just have to accept it. Some people may reject it, and hell is the eternal rejection of life. It’s like an unending suicide—that’s hell. Whereas everlasting life is like an unending resurrection, an unending entrance into life, an unending affirmation of life.
But in this world, it’s very confused. We cannot pronounce judgment. Only the Lord pronounces judgment. Our only task is to be faithful to the Gospel as we understand it and not to lie about it. So if a person takes their life, we don’t want to lie about it. They’ve done it, so we commend them to God, we pray for their soul, we recognize the demonic, sinful character of the act, but we know that God himself will deal with that person and we won’t. But we also can know that that person is alive in God right now, one way or the other, so we can still pray for them, we can relate to them, we can ask God to have mercy on them, and perhaps even we can straighten out some of the problems that we had with them, because with God it’s never too late. We could enter into a relationship with the departed even now, even though they’re departed this life, but we’ll talk about that some other time.
But about suicide, it is a demonic act. Christians are forbidden to take their own lives, but when a person does take their own life, the Church has to recognize that as a fact, but still hope and trust somehow in the inscrutable, unsearchable mercy of God.

Thanks to Source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/suicide

Part of Angels and Demons ~ Fr. Thomas Hopko

...And then of course, we can think about that statement in the Letter to the Ephesians, which is so important to quote when we’re thinking about angels and demons. And that is where the Apostle Paul is writing in the last chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians:

Finally, he says, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of the present darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand in the evil day, and having done all things to stand.

And of course that evil day is that day of judgment and the day of tribulation that we’re in. So St. Paul continues:

Stand, therefore, having girded your loins with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace. Beside all these things, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

This is how we are understanding ourselves. In this cosmic battle with the evil spirits, with the powers, the principalities, the world rulers of the present darkness, the spiritual host of wickedness in heavenly places, and the evil one himself, this is what our struggle is.
Now, if we want to know if all this is true. If you want to know, is this really so? Is this, not just, mythology or fantasy or something like that? Then, we are told by the Scriptures and by the saints how we can find out if it’s true. What we are told is this:

If you want to know if it’s true, just try to keep the commandments of God. If you want to know whether or not this is true, just try to pray. If you want to know whether or not this is true, just try to love your enemy and to bless those who curse you and to pray for those who abuse you. If you want to know if it’s true, just try to keep the commandments, the Ten Commandments of the Old Covenant, Try not to lie, not to cheat, not to bear false witness, not to commit adultery, not to fornicate, not to get involved in porneia. If you want to know if it’s true, just try to honor other people and to give honor as due, honoring your parents first of all, honoring your father and your mother. Try to live at peace with everyone.

And then according to the Scriptures and the saints, we’ll know darn well whether this is true or not. Because we’ll realize that when we try to do these things—when we try to be Godly, when we try to obey God, when we try to keep his commandments, when we try to follow the teachings of Christ, when we try to be pure in heart and poor in spirit, when we try to be merciful and peacemaking and when we try to be meek, when we try to keep the teachings of the Sermon on the Mountain—then every demon in Hell rises up to attack us.
One of the Holy Fathers said: “If you want to know if the demons exist, just try to pray.” Try to focus and pray. He says: “Cause when a person stands up to pray, every dark and evil power in Hell tries to get him not to pray.” And they’ll always lie. They’ll always accuse. They’ll say: “Oh you don’t need to do this. There’s no God anyway. You’re a good person anyway.” And then when you sin, they say: “You’re an evil person. You’re going to burn in Hell. You’re going to be with us. Ha! Ha! We got you!”
They always tell the opposite. They always accuse. They always attack, and they never shut up. They’re always blabbing at us, every minute. We’ve got to learn how to live not paying attention to them. But they’re there, and stupidly they never give up. They keep trying to get us to the end. And of course, the old saying also is: “Why are there no devils in the cities? Why are they all out in the desert?” Well, they’re after the monks; they’re after the nuns. The devil has already got the people who follow their own evil will.
And according to the saints, many people follow their own evil will, and in fact, they’re following the devil. Cause we’re either following our own evil will with the devil or fighting against evil and trying to do good with the Holy Spirit. There’s no middle path. If we’re not with the Holy Spirit, then we’re with the evil spirits. But if you want to know if those evil spirits exist, just try to do good. And when you try to do good, you’ll have an experiential conviction of how those crazy, demonic powers try to get you. And they’ll try to get you every possible way.
And we can say, well on one hand, that invisible warfare is very treacherous. It’s very subtle. But on the other hand, it’s very simple too. The Holy Fathers say, the evil spirits are subtle, and they are seducing, and they are hiding, but once you get to know their tactics, you realize how transparently stupid they are and how they keep trying the same thing and doing the same thing and rebelling against the goodness and the beauty and the glory of God.

thanks to source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/angels_and_demons

on The Wrath of God part II ~ Fr. Thomas Hopko

transcript:

We reflected upon the wrath of God, and we said that the wrath of God is a reality, that the scripture is very clear that God gets angry with us, His wrath is upon us, He is not pleased with us, and He expresses that wrath upon us for the sake of our salvation, for the sake of our good. We said that the wrath of God proceeds from His very love, that God is love, that God loves us, and when you love someone and they do stupid things and foolish things and act wickedly, then it is very appropriate to be angry.
So we have in Scripture, again and again—anyone who would read the Bible cannot fail to see—the wrath of God. In fact, there are two words for it that are used in Scripture. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, you have two Greek words, one is orgi and the other is thymos.
Orgi simply means anger, or wrath. Thymos is a word that translates as wrath or anger, but actually, in Platonic literature, that was a quality of human beings called the irascible, the zealous, the fiery, that there is a kind of fiery element, a thymos that is within human beings, and in the Scripture this is applied to God himself, that God has this kind of fiery, we might even say, impassioned, relationship to us that is expressed in wrath, or in anger, or in delight, or in pleasure. These things are spoken about in the bible and they are spoken about very realistically.
Some of the folks who have emailed me about what I had to say about the wrath of God on the radio found some objections to it, particularly in some of the Church Fathers, where you have the teaching that anger and wrath do not really belong to Divinity, as such, that God is perfect, that God is unmoved, that God is impassable, that God cannot be acted upon, and that certainly within the Divinity itself, these kind of qualities have no meaning whatsoever. In fact, they simply do not exist. There is a sense in which that is definitely true, and I think that if we took the Bible and how the Church Fathers interpret the Bible, we would see that within Divinity itself, within the Godhead, within the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is no anger, there is no wrath, there is no passion, there are no emotions in a human sense.
But we have to be very careful here, because there is one sense, where folks would say that none of these things exist in God and they are not real for God at all, and they are not even real when God seems to show them to us. They base their idea on a Platonistic or Hellenistic view that a static, impassable, unchangeable, uncaused, pure being is perfection, and is perfection even for God, so that God then, is supreme being, that God is perfectly One, that God is unmoved, that God is impassable, and that comes from the Hellenistic tradition, reflecting philosophically on things, and coming to the conclusion that the perfect being would be immutable, impassable, unchanging, perfectly one, and this led to some very bad results for Christianity.
Namely, it led some people to claim that in the Trinity itself, in the Godhead itself, there is only the one God, and even Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are somehow ways of speaking about the one God who is perfectly one in Himself, that there is only relationship in God, but that the unity of God is so perfectly one that, even St. Augustine said in his book, De Trinitate that we only speak of three persons in the Godhead conventionally. We only speak about that because of the ways revelation speaks to us, but that God, in Himself, is not Trinity at all, He is perfectly one, and that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three modal expressions of the one God who is perfectly, arithmetically one, and so on.
Another bad result of this Hellenistic tradition was to just take all the elements of creation and to take being as opposed to becoming, unity as opposed to multiplicity, unchanging as opposed to change, immutable as opposed to mutable, and then saying God is the being, the one, the unchangeable, the immutable, the impassable, and that is divine perfection.
According to Christianity, following the Bible, that is just plain not true. The Christian view, and it had to be worked out over centuries, and perhaps it was only completely worked out in the 13^th century, 1300 years after Jesus, in the great controversy of St. Gregory Palamas with the West about the reality of the divine energies and the divine actions, which St. Gregory and his confreres, and the Councils that are accepted by the Orthodox Church as true and universally received and accepted, is that the actions and the operations of God toward us are as divine and are as real as anything we can possibly say.
When the Bible speaks about God being angry or being wrathful, or being delighted in us, or grieving over us, or taking pleasure in us, those are realities, when it says that God shows and reveals His glory, His power, His wisdom, His truth, His might, His goodness, His beauty. Those are realities, those are true things. They are not just analogies, they are not just metaphors. They are saying something really true, and the saints have experienced these things. The saints have experienced the love of God, the power of God, the beauty of God. Saints have even experienced the wrath of God. They have experienced God’s chastening upon them. So the claim is that these are real, and that they are as divine as whatever God is in His own divine realm, in His own divine existence and being.
And the tradition of the Church, following the Bible, that speaks about the holiness of God, the incomparability of God, the God who is totally different from anything in heaven and on earth, they would say, and certainly St. Gregory Palamas would say this, I’ve said this on the radio before, that if you say God is, or God is being, even that is somehow not true in relationship to God in God’s self. God reveals Himself to us as existing, but existence is a category that does not, strictly speaking, apply to divinity as such. God is beyond being, He is beyond existence, He is beyond being and becoming, He is beyond change and non-change, He is beyond mutable and immutable.  You cannot say he is immutable and not mutable.  You cannot say he is being and not becoming. God is none of those things. He is completely beyond them all.
You could ask the question, “How can you say this, how do you know this?” The answer would be, “We know this because God has revealed himself to us. God has shown Himself to us. He has acted in our world, and we know His divine actions, and we know these actions are really divine.”
But when we experience these actions, for example, when we experience God’s wrath, or when we know God’s beauty, or when we come to commune in God’s wisdom, and God’s knowledge, and even God’s power, we know that our very experience makes us confess that we know that these are the ways that God reveals himself to us which are truly divine, they are accommodated to us, they are made adequate to us, but they lead us into the conclusion that God Himself, in Himself, is beyond all of these things, that He is none of those things.
Probably, in the tradition of Christianity, one of the most memorable sentences that I can think of in my readings over the last 50 years or so, is a statement of St. Maximus the Confessor. I am sure that St. Maximus would have agreed totally with St. John Chrysostom’s liturgy that we serve in church, that God is ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, but God is also ever-existing and always the same, in the sense that He is not changing, and one day becoming one way, and one day becoming another, and being fickle, but that when you notice incomprehensible, unknowable, inconceivable God, what you know is that God is beyond everything. St. Maximus said, “When it comes to divinity, the best that we can do, the ultimate that we can do is to say that God is supra-non-knowable.” He is even beyond non-knowing. He is not only beyond knowing, He is beyond non-knowing. He is supra-non-knowable, and he can only be supra-non-known. You cannot know God, but you can supra-non-know God.
In other words, you could have this contact with God, this astonishment and awe and wonder, where you say God is even beyond unknowing. He is beyond knowing and unknowing both. God is the supra-non-knowable who can be supra-non-known through an act, as Maximus said, of supra-non-knowing, supra-non-knowledge. That is a quality human beings are capable of, that is, experiencing God. This was beautifully formulated by Dr. Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. All of the fathers would say, we know these things because we experience God, and it is really God that we are experiencing. When we claim to know God by experience, by vision, by reality, for example, in Palamism, the uncreated light of God, we would say that uncreated light is really divine. It is not like human light at all, it is not like created light at all. We call it light, but it is beyond light, because we do not have the words to speak of it, but we would still insist that it is real. The Western tradition, that really was Platonistic, Hellenistic, like Anselm of Canterbury, even like Thomas Aquinas, like the Council of Trent, they said no, these things are not real, that God is uncaused, He is supreme being, He is beyond everything, He is beyond passibility, He is incomprehensible in Himself, but what we have to say about Him is that He is the unmoved mover. He is the uncaused cause. He is the pure unity. There is no plurality, there is no dynamism, there is no action at all in God that is real—you just cannot say that.
As Anselm interpreted, he said every time the bible speaks about wrath, or about anger, or about delight, or about beauty, or about glory, or about wisdom, this is only metaphor. These are just metaphors, these are just analogies, they do not really exist in reality. So, the Barlamites attack the Palamites in the 14^th century by saying, you guys are nuts. You cannot really experience God. You cannot claim that you really know the light, and the beauty, and the glory of God. That is impossible. God cannot do this because God cannot change. God cannot act in that way. He is pure act. He is actos puros, he is pure act. And all this multiplicity is just analogy, or you could possibly say, that is just different ways of speaking about what in reality is one and the same thing.
So, the immutable, impassable God is sometimes experienced by us as love, sometimes as anger, sometimes as beauty, sometimes as power. But these are only our different ways of speaking about something which in and of itself is one and exactly the same thing. They are not really different. The point would be, there is no differentiation in the Godhead at all. There is no action or movement in the Godhead at all, and when we say that there is, we are only speaking in a metaphorical or analogical way.
The Palamites, and Orthodoxy now, as the universal Church, says that is not true. We endorse Palamism and say that St. Gregory Palamas is a saint, and we endorse his interpretation of earlier church fathers, like Maximus, like Gregory the Theologian, and like Gregory of Nyssa, particularly, who was very Hellenistic. Gregory of Nyssa, whom someone who emailed quoted, speaks about God having no anger and no wrath, because He is impassable and Immutable, and anybody who knows theology, at least a little bit, would say, well sure, that is true. God in Himself is beyond all of these things.
You still have to affirm though, that when God acts toward creation and acts in creation, the creation that He made and wants to be in real communion with, He acts toward us in these ways and these ways are real, and they are really divine, and they really come from God, and they do not destroy the unity and the simplicity and the impassability of God. They do not. They are expressions of it, but real expressions of the living God, who is not a Platonistic idea, but is really an I am, is a living God, who acts and breathes and speaks, and the claim is, following the bible, the church fathers would say, ultimately, that these things are real.
A word about the Church Fathers. Not every Church Father says everything absolutely correctly. And a lot of the earlier Church Fathers had to be corrected by later church fathers. For example, when you read about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the earliest patristic literature, it sounds like they do not really believe in the Holy Trinity as being absolutely divine in exactly the same way. They speak of the Son as a lesser God, or a second God. All of that had to be corrected, and it took 400 years to correct it, and even then it was not totally corrected, because there was an argument again about how the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and the Son, and this goes on forever in some sense.
The story is never over, but at the same time, we have to know that that happens. St. Maximus the Confessor, whom we just mentioned, wrote a whole treatise called De Ambigua, On the Ambiguities. He was straightening out the ambiguities in St. Gregory the Theologian. And we know that Gregory the Theologian, himself, was straightening out the ambiguities in the teaching of Basil the Great.
So you have this mutual correction and growth and development in theology through the centuries, and there is a sense in which you could say, this issue of how God can be, on one hand, and in one aspect, in Himself, supra-non-knowable, completely beyond, absolutely transcendent, not like anything in heaven and on earth, that you can only be totally silent in front of, and only be in astonishment and wonder and you cannot speak, and if you would speak about it, as Gregory of Nyssa said, quoting Psalm 116, every man is a liar. What you are saying is just plain not true.
On the other hand, you have God in action, you have God revealing Himself, God showing Himself, God manifesting Himself, God relating to His creation, and He does so in many different forms and in many different ways, and in fact, even Gregory of Nyssa said, every day God appears different to us and in some sense, He really is. There is real multiplicity, real differentiation, and the Pseudo-Areopagite, St. Dionysius, in his Mystical Theology, would even say that there is real differentiation in the Godhead itself. On the one hand, God is beyond all change and is perfectly one, but the one is perfectly plural and the plurality is perfectly one. The many is real and the one is real, and in God those contradictions in created order are overcome, because God is not a creature and He is completely different.
We have to affirm both things. On one hand, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the great theologians of our time, quoting Cardinal Newman, a Roman Catholic, said, “Theology is a saying and an unsaying in a positive effect.” You say one thing, and then you negate it by saying something else, and both are true in different contexts.
It is almost like in modern science, when people ask, “Is electricity a wave, or is it a particle?” Well, it is both. Sometimes it is better to speak about it as a wave, and that is truer to what you are trying to talk about, and other times it is better to speak about it as a particle, because it is true to what you are trying to talk about. If you are trying to talk about God in God’s self, then you use all the super-duper-duper apophatic language. God is beyond everything transcendent, unknowable, inconceivable, ineffable, supra-non-knowable, and that is true. But when God acts, God speaks, God creates, God relates to creation, then you have to say that He really acts in such a away that His actions are real. God really does get angry. God really does forgive. God really does show mercy.
On the one hand, the Bible will say, God has spoken, He will not change His mind, and on the other hand, you see God interacting with people like Hezekiah, where He told him he was going to die, and then He repents of it, and he does not die. Or Jonah, when He tells him to prophecy against the Ninevites, and then He forgives them. That is how a living God acts. We would say, in and of Himself, in Himself, none of this is contradictory.
Of course, what we would really say when we know God through Jesus Christ and in God’s revelation, is that the wrath of God and the anger of God is an anger and wrath that is appropriate to God. It is an anger and wrath that comes out of love, that comes out of truth, that comes out of care for us, and concern that we would be chastened, that we would learn, that we would grow, that we would not be fools. So we would say, yes, there is a real wrath of God and you have to say that it is really and truly real, but you can never say that it is in any way sinful. God even says in the Psalm to human beings, “Be angry, but do not sin” (Psalm 4:4).
Well, that would be a good definition of God. He is angry, but He does not sin. He does not do evil. The anger of God is never evil. God is never evil. It is real. It is chastening. It is for our salvation. It is an expression of love. It is ultimately even overcome in the crucified Christ, whose righteousness removes the wrath of God upon creation, upon humanity. Christ brings a new humanity, a purified, righteous humanity to the world, that we can believe in, and by grace we can participate in. And even if we sin against it and repent, God will forgive us every single time for the sake of Jesus. But at the same time, this wrath of God is the wrath of love, and it is never, ever evil. It is never punitive. It is never cruel. It is never vindictive. It is certainly not sadistic.
I had a friend once who said to me, “You know, Father Tom, in my opinion there are only three possibilities: One is that there is no God and all this is just total nonsense, and everybody is killing each other all over the place, and we all end up cursed and dead and rotten in the tomb, and I can’t accept that. The world is too beautiful, I have a sense of meaning, I can imagine a perfect world, and I can’t believe that all this is just for nothing.” But then he said, “But another possibility is that this world is a play-thing of God, that God is, in fact, a sadist, He is cruel. He lets Tsunamis come and smash all kinds of people. He delights in brimstoning Sodom and Gomorrah. He plays around with people. He lets their kids die.”
I just saw two very moving films. One was about an Ethiopian Christian boy who was going to be killed, but the Ethiopian Jews were being saved by the Jews and taken to Israel, so the Christian mother makes her little boy go with the Jews and he has to pretend that he is a Jew so that he does not lose his life, and it is so sad, I mean when this boy leaves his mother, and he is weeping. 
And then there is another movie about a little boy in Poland who, while hiding under the bed or somewhere, sees Nazi soldiers come in and shoot dead his father and his mother and drag off his 15-year-old sister to rape her, and he has to live with that his whole life. Some people would look at that and say, like Ivan Karamazov, said, “To hell with this world. God is God, but this world is impossible, and if God really made it this way, He is just a sadist, He is cruel, and if He is organizing everything, if He is directing everything, how can you possibly believe in that kind of a God? It looks like nothing means anything, everything is stupid and we are all just suffering for no good reason, and God is making it all happen, if there is a God.”
But then my friend said, there is a third possibility, and that is that God had no choice. If he was going to have a human world, he had to have the suffering and therefore His anger had to come into it; he had to show his wrath toward sinners, and ultimately, he had to act to save the world through Jesus Christ, who takes upon Himself the sin of the world, and assuages the wrath of God by His total righteousness, even in the most horrible situation, when He is forsaken by God and man and hanging dead on the cross.
So either there is no God, or there is a monster God, or there is Christianity. That seems to be the three choices, and unless you are just some spiritualist and say, “Well, the material world and my body means nothing anyway, I have an immortal soul, and it is going to go off into…” and that is Hellenism, that is even Hinduism. It is even, in a sense, Buddhism.
But anybody who would affirm history, and would affirm the material world and would look out the window, like I am looking out now at the beautiful fall colors of the leaves of the trees, and could weep over this Jewish boy who saw his family killed and his sister dragged off, you have to say when you are looking at that, you cannot just believe that all this can happen and, and this little boy has an immortal soul and he will be happy in his soul, and what happened physically and materially to his poor sister and his family didn’t mean anything. That would be absolutely ridiculous.
So the answer is Christ crucified, still. But if you believe in Christ crucified, and therefore you get involved with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the God of Sodom and Gomorrah, the God of the Babylonian captivity, the God of the Bible, then you have to say that this God is the real God., and He is interacting with the real world.
And then his wrath, his anger, his mercy, all these are realities—his joy, his beauty—and we would even say as the Palamites say, that there is a multiplicity of divine actions and energies, all adequately shaped and formed to each individual person on earth, and to each moment in history, each second of time—are real. The experience of God in those conditions is real, and therefore the wrath of God, the anger of God, always an expression of God’s goodness and love and beauty and truth, is never cruel, vindictive, sinful or wicked in any way.
Still, that wrath is absolutely real. So what you have to do is affirm both things. You have to affirm the supra-transcendent God, who is not simply impassable, or undifferentiated, or perfectly one and perfectly unchanging, that would be Hellenism. But you have to affirm the God who is beyond all of those things, who is really supra-non-knowable, beyond them all, and then you have to say, when that God creates a world and reveals Himself to human creatures who have a mind, and who have freedom, and who can understand, and who can see truth, and who are made in the image and likeness of God, then you have to say that when we speak about God toward us, yes, we would say, God cannot be acted upon against His own will, that you cannot harm God, you cannot make God suffer.
But on the other hand, you have to say, in His love for us, God is pained, God is angry, God is sad, and these things are really real, and they have to be accepted as real. The saints who have experienced them, they confess that this is real. When we know God, we know that these things, in fact, are real, and they are true.
We could add one more point here, thinking again about the wrath of God, and insisting, again, that it is an expression of God as good, God as loving, God as ultimately merciful. We can see the wrath as appropriate to God’s love and even as an expression of His love because He cares about us, and even as a tool in His hands to purify us, but we have to see, ultimately, that it all has to be completely and totally solved, we have to be saved from that wrath, and we are, in the crucified Christ.
We can look again at Jesus, and it is very, very important that we do so. When we look at Jesus, we remember that according to the Christian faith, Jesus is revealing God to us in human form. He really is revealing God to us in human form. And here we want to insist again, and I would like to insist on, just because of some of the emails that I have just received, that we really have to take seriously the incarnation, and I am afraid that some of us do not. We are so insistent that Jesus Christ is a divine Logos and He is absolutely divine and that He is God, that we do not believe, really at the same time, that He is really human. And here, again, following the fathers, and especially Cyril of Alexandria and all of them after, we have to say that Jesus’ humanity is as real as His divinity and we have to affirm both. And Jesus really is human.
As some person wrote to me and said, “Well, I can quote some Church Fathers who said Jesus as God was omniscient and He knew everything, so when He didn’t know, it was only kat economia, according to the economy, or for pedagogical purposes, and so on. Well, I would say, be more careful in the reading of the Church Fathers, and read all of the Church Fathers, not just some, and read those who directly, consciously address this particular issue.
For example, Cyril of Alexandria, who himself had to be corrected, was very clear. He would say that, in as much as He is God, Jesus is supra-non-knowable, beyond everything, and His divinity is exactly that of the Father and Spirit, as Nicea and the early Fathers said, those before Cyril.
But Cyril insists on the reality of the incarnation, so that when the Logos becomes flesh and really becomes a human being, then He suffers, He dies even, the famous Theopaschite formula. He hungers, He thirsts, He weeps, He grieves, and He gets angry. He has all the human qualities, and humanity is limited. So He is a Jew and not a gentile, He is a man and not a woman. He lived in the first century, not the 21^st. He knew certain things and did not know other things. He did not know Russian, for example.
You could say, well, as God he knew, as man He didn’t. Well, if you want to say that, fine, and that is the way some of the earlier Fathers spoke, but that had to be explained a lot better, and it is not even explained well enough, in my opinion, to this present day, though people have tried to do that through the centuries.
But there is a truth there. The simplistic truth is, yes, if you are God you know everything, and if you are man, you don’t. And Jesus is both. So in some sense He is omniscient, and in another sense, He is not. And the Fathers would say, in the economia, he is not.
But he really is not. He really is limited. He really is circumscribable. He really is contained. He really is in the body. He really has a human soul. Gregory the theologian fought for that against the Apollinarians. He really has a human will and human freedom. Maximus the Confessor was mutilated for holding that teaching.
So the same way that when we speak about God, when we say certain things about how God is in God’s own self, in God’s own divine realm, and how God is in acts toward us, and both are real, we have to say the same thing about Jesus, that in as much as He is divine, we affirm certain things, and in as much as He is human, we affirm certain things, and we hold together the mystery, and it is a great mystery, but nevertheless it is a truth. And the truth of the matter is, if you really believe in the incarnation, and really believe that Jesus is a real man, and the Council of Chalcedon insists on this.
By the way, speaking about the Council of Chalcedon, following St. Cyril in the Council of Ephesus, the Nestorians’ whole problem was that, they being Hellenistic, said that God is unchanging, and therefore God cannot become a man, even. They denied the reality of the incarnation on the basis of the immutability and impassability of God. So they said, the immutable, impassable, unchanging God can unite Himself to a human person, namely Jesus of Nazareth, but He cannot really become the human person, Jesus of Nazareth. That was rejected as heresy, and it really was heresy because they tried to make a Church on that basis, it wasn’t just a mistake.
And here, by the way, having been accused lately of heresy myself, I would like to say something. You have to be careful if you call someone a heretic. A heretic is a pretty great person who divides the Church and makes up a false church and opposes the true church. That is a heretic. And I would say, I’m not a heretic, that is for sure. I may be dumb. I may be stupid, I may be wrong, I may be mistaken, I may be incorrect, I may not understand things properly, but I’m certainly not a heretic. But I have to try to articulate the mystery, too. And I may not do it right in every case. And neither did any of the Church Fathers, by the way. I don’t want to put myself in their category.
Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that in some of their articulations, they were incorrect, or as my professor Verhovskoy used to say, the holy fathers are not holy spirits, they could be incorrect at times. And the professor used to say, also, that sometimes they are correct, but they are one-sided. He liked that expression, you can be one-sided. What you say may be correct, but if you just affirm it, while not affirming other things, then you deform it.
And that is what people did about God. If they just affirmed that He is one, and uncaused, and unchanging, and immutable, and impassable, and do not also affirm that He can really reveal Himself, and really show Himself, in many diverse forms, like angry, grieving, sad, merciful, then you are affirming one thing, but you are destroying the truth of it, because you are not affirming the other thing that also has to be affirmed.
When we look at Jesus and we affirm that He is both God and man, and that He is revealing divinity through His humanity, when it comes to the issue of wrath, we see that Jesus got angry. There are several places in Holy Scripture where Jesus clearly got angry.
In St. Mark’s Gospel in the third chapter, Jesus is getting angry. This is what it says in St. Mark’s gospel. It said, “He,” Jesus, “entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand, and they watched Him to see whether He, Jesus, would heal him on the Sabbath day, so that they might accuse him” (Mark 3:1-2). You see, they wanted to accuse Jesus. That is very important. They didn’t really want to understand, they just wanted to accuse.
And I am afraid we have a lot of that today in the Church. We don’t really want to understand each other, we just want to accuse each other. I don’t know, we may listen to Ancient Faith Radio to find out what mistakes are being said by the speakers, because we have a tendency and a desire to accuse, rather than to understand—“Oh, that’s not of God, that’s just of the devil.”
But it said they wanted to accuse him. “And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come here.’ And he said to them, ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good, or to do harm, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent.” They couldn’t answer Jesus—they just remained silent.
“And He looked around at them,” and it says, “with anger.” And then it says that he, “grieved at their hardness of heart.”  (it says in Greek—grieving). So Jesus is angered, and he is grieving, at their hardness of heart. And then He says to the man, “stretch out your hand, and He heals him, and the Pharisees go out immediately, hold counsel with the Herodians against Jesus, how to destroy Him, how to put Him to death.” (Mark 3:3-6)
What we want to see here is that, it says He spoke with anger, met orgis, that He spoke, grieving. And we know that Jesus grieved, He wept. He wept over Jerusalem, He wept over Lazarus, He wept in the Gethsemane garden.
We will talk about that again on the radio, Jesus’ weeping. In fact, some mystical writer said once, “God became man in order to weep”—that God, in himself, is beyond weeping, but he himself, in creating a world that He loves, not only gets angry, but he weeps. And Jesus shows the weeping of God in his humanity. He shows the anger of God in His humanity.
And of course, we know how Jesus spoke against the Scribes and the Pharisees and the lawyers and the hypocrites in St. Matthew’s gospel. He says in St. Matthew, ten to twelve times, “Woe to you, woe to you, woe to you.” He calls them all kinds of names. He calls them whitewashed sepulchres and hypocrites and all kinds of terrible things and that could really mean that He was kind of hot. He had a thymos.  A thymos was a zeal, an irascible quality. The claim is that God, Himself, has that quality, vis-à-vis creation, there is nothing for God to be irascible or angry about within the three persons of the Divine Trinity, but there is plenty for Him to be angry and irascible and wrathful about relative to creation, especially because He loves us.
Then you have the quintessential example of Jesus’ anger when He takes a whip, goes into the temple, knocks over all the tables of the money-changers, and with His whip, chases them out and says, “This temple is supposed to be holy, a place of worshipping God, and you make it a place of business and commerce” (e.g. Matthew 21:12). So He got really angry.
We know that in Jesus’ anger He never sinned. He didn’t sin. He didn’t do anything wrong. And he wasn’t just beating up on people for fun. And he wasn’t doing it because he enjoyed sadistically causing them pain. And he certainly didn’t do it just to be punitive and to punish them. Why did he do it? He did it to teach. He did it to show. He did it to reveal God’s will. He did it so that we would be purified, so that we would learn, that we would change.
The wrath of God is an instrument in his hands for our salvation, for our good. That is how Christians would understand the wrath of God. And it is absolutely appropriate, it is absolutely necessary. If God did not get angry against wickedness, what kind of God would He be? We would even accuse a human being, if they saw horrible wickedness, if they saw soldiers killing a little boy’s parents and dragging off his sister to rape her, if you weren’t angry and if you weren’t sad, there would really be something wrong with you, it would just be impossible. And we feel that way in human reality, and so we understand the same thing relative to God.
But our issue for today is, is the wrath real? Is the anger real? And are the other actions of God described in holy scripture and experienced by saints, for example when Moses says that God’s anger was kindled against him—was that really real? Or was just something happening that Moses was imagining but wasn’t really coming from God? We would say, no. So what we want to affirm today is that all the actions of God, all the qualities of God that we know in His action toward us, that we know through Jesus, even through the humanity of Jesus, are applicable to God. So orgi and thymos, anger and wrath, really belong to God. They are a part of divinity.
Within the divinity they are never expressed, because there is no need for them to be expressed. What kind of anger or wrath would exist between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? But once God creates a world knowing that it would be evil and wicked, and knowing that you have all the horrible things that we have among humanity, then you can say that it is totally fitting, proper, and befitting the very nature of God, as far as we know God, that He would act this way.
So we could even say that the wrath of God is a reality and, of course, the final point always has to be, that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, who is really God, Himself, became a real, actual human being. And in his humanity, he revealed God and he expressed anger and wrath, and sadness, and all those things.
But we also want to say that Jesus of Nazareth, because of his righteousness, because he does not get God angry at him at all, because there is no reason whatsoever, for God, His father, to show any kind of wrath or anger toward Jesus in any way—just the opposite: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” it says in Scripture (Matthew 17:5). And God is well pleased in His Son, Jesus, because the Son takes upon Himself the sin of the world, and assuages divine wrath and redeems humanity and saves creation, so that in the end, in the age to come, we would definitely say the following:
The wrath of God is removed from all of humanity for the sake of Jesus, and for those who believe in that, and who love it, and who pray to God to have it be for them, they are saved and redeemed and God’s wrath is off them. And those who do not accept it, do not want it, in some sense, the wrath of God remains upon them. But even those people are forgiven and mercy is shown on them because of Jesus. And therefore, their torment, their suffering, is not from the wrath of God, as much as it is from the mercy of God, for it is from the wrath of God that God, Himself, wanted to overcome by His own mercy, you might say.
This is not contradiction within God, this is just the way reality is and the way the truth is, and God is truth. Christ is the truth. This is the truth. So what we want to affirm more than anything today, and there are plenty of things to affirm, but today we really want to affirm both things, that in Himself, in what God is we cannot even imagine, but when God reveals Himself to us, we know that what He is in Himself is beyond anything in the created order, but what we want to affirm, as well, is that when He relates to the created order, his actions toward us are real. And among those many, countless actions and operations and revelations of God toward creatures as a whole, and toward each individual human being, and even each bird, each rock, each everything in creation, each moment of time, that those actions of God are real, and among those actions, at certain times, is the expression of divine anger, and divine wrath.





from Thomas Hopko on The Wrath of God part II:

Source:
radio and transcript:
http://ww w.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_wrath_of_god_-_part_2

Quote by St. Maximus the Confessor ~ the supra-non-knowable God

St. Maximus said, “When it comes to divinity, the best that we can do, the ultimate that we can do is to say that God is supra-non-knowable.”


~ St. Maximus the Confessor


thanks to Source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_wrath_of_god_-_part_2

The Descent of Jesus into Hades ~ Fr. Thomas hopko (Hades and Hell contrasted)

Here Father Thomas Hopko describes the difference between Sheol/Hades and Gehenna/Hell



The Paschal icon, the icon of the victory of Christ, God’s Messiah, over death, the last enemy, in the Orthodox Church is an icon of the live, glorious Christ, in the realm of the dead, smashing the gates of Sheol, or of Hades, and releasing, and freeing, and pulling from the tombs, the whole of humanity, symbolized in the persons of Adam and Eve. In that icon, of course, there are the righteous of the Old Testament there in Sheol, those who were dead, who are delivered from the power of death by the dead Christ. When Christ tramples down death by death, He gives life to all of those in the tombs, all those who are among the dead.
There is some confusion among Christian believers, and even in some very technical, theological writings, even in recent years, about the significance, the meaning of what we would call the descent of Christ into Sheol, into Hades, into the realm of the dead. The confusion and the debate, the disputation, is about how is that to be understood? What does that really mean? What is being said there? What is happening? Of course, the Nicene Creed insists about the fact that Jesus was crucified and died and was buried. It said, “Who for us men and for our salvation came from heaven, and He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered.” That means He really suffered, it wasn’t fantasy, it wasn’t just a show, He didn’t just appear to be suffering, He really suffered. And He was buried. He was put into that sepulcher, which means He was really dead, and the Gospels are very clear about saying that He was really dead, that He was wrapped in the grave clothes, anointed by Joseph and Nicodemus.
In John’s Gospel, the women come to anoint the dead corpse. In John’s Gospel the point is really flaunted, the theological Gospel, whether or not He was dead. It speaks about breaking the legs of people to make sure they were dead, and then when they saw that He was really dead, they did not break His legs, to fulfill the prophecy that not a bone of His body shall be broken, but then they speared him, they take the spear and stick it in His side, from which comes forth the blood and the water that symbolizes the baptism and the Eucharist and the very life of the Church itself, the new Eve that is fashioned from the side of the new Adam when He is dead, hanging on the cross in the ecstasy of death.
So Christ really dies, and that is what the meaning of the icon is, and that is what the meaning of the expression, “descent into Sheol or Hades” means. Hades is the Greek term for the Hebrew word, Sheol, which simply means the realm of the dead. It means, not even realm, it means the condition of being dead. It is a way of speaking about the fact that the person is really dead. That is what it means. That is the meaning of it. It is sometimes put in terms of a place, and so even in the Paschal hymns we will sing, “In heaven and on earth and under the earth,” or the regions under the earth. The place of the dead was considered to be under the earth because they returned back to dust, they returned back to earth. They are taken from the earth, and their body corrupts, and they go back to earth.
So you have this kind of symbolical way of speaking about the condition of being dead. And so it can sound somehow like a place, like heaven would be a place, Sheol would be a place. But all the holy fathers, and many of the modern writers, for example Hierotheos Vlachos, the Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, a very famous, well-known writer of Orthodoxy, today many of his books are translated into English, he makes it clear that heaven and hell are not places. They are situations, they are conditions, they are spiritual realities in which we find ourselves. But one thing is for sure, to be physically dead is to be physically dead. And it is a dogma of the Eastern Orthodox Church that Jesus of Nazareth physically died, and He was buried, put into a cave as a dead man. That is just affirmed over and over again, that He really became a corpse, He was dead.
It is also affirmed that He was raised on the third day, that He did not see corruption, that the Holy One could not see corruption, that He did not remain dead and could not remain dead, as being the very life and the power of God, Himself. It was impossible that He would die, being the divine Son of God, but even in the incarnation, as a man, it was impossible that this Holy One should see corruption, and that He, even as a man, had the capability of keeping Himself alive in His communion with God the Father, that He could raise the dead, He had all the power of God. So His death was voluntary, His suffering was voluntary, the passion was voluntary, but it was real. When He dies, this is depicted and spoken about as a descent into Sheol, in other words, entering into the condition or the realm of being dead, that He really was among the dead. He was numbered, not only among the transgressors, but among the dead. He really died.
Some confusion is caused, particularly in English-speaking worlds, when this Hades or Sheol is translated and interpreted as “hell”—many of our English liturgical texts use the term: “He descended into hell,” and so on. It can be very confusing if you use this translation.
I believe, personally, that the word “hell” should not be used, for a very simple reason. It wasn’t hell. It was not Gehenna. In Scripture, you have the expression, Gehenna, which was a smoldering garbage heap outside of Jerusalem, where even the dead people were burned up, and somehow it was like a garbage heap of corruption and smoldering fire. But Sheol, Hades, is not Gehenna. And in fact, in a certain sense, it is not even a place of torment, because the teaching is that the righteous dead, like Moses, and the prophets. and John the Baptist, were not suffering in Sheol or Hades. They were certainly dead, but they were somehow also alive, because according to Scripture, according to the Bible, and here we have to be very careful that we do not slip into the realm of Platonistic philosophy in speaking about souls, the Bible does not know anything about disincarnate souls, but the Bible does teach us that a dead person who is righteous, before the coming of the Messiah, was in the hands of God, that the righteous were held in the hands of God. They were somehow preserved in the bosom of Abraham, and there was even some type of consciousness there, an expectation of liberation, so that the graves could be opened and the whole cosmos could be restored and everything could become Paradise again.
Even on the Russian Orthodox crosses, by the way, there is a little inscription at the foot of Jesus’ feet on the cross, in four Slavonic letters, M, L, R, and B, in Slavonic, which translated means, “The place of the skull (or Golgatha) has become Paradise.” So the bosom of Abraham had to be transformed into Paradise, into a living reality again, with interrelationship with all of creation—the sun, the moon, the stars, the birds and everything. In other words, even the righteous person was in the realm of the dead and had to be liberated by the Messiah in order to have real life, eternal life, real communion with God.
Another example would be that in the Old Testament, in the Psalms, if you were in Sheol you could not praise God. That is why it was so bad to be dead. The reason why it was so bad to be dead was, you could not sing Alleluia, because according to the Scriptures, and the conviction was also, if you are dead, you are not alive, and if you are not alive, you cannot be singing the praises of God, you cannot sing Alleluia. You are mute, you are dumb, your eyes are closed, you cannot see anything, you are in darkness, you are in Abaddon, some kind of forgetfulness.
But it was also the teaching, I believe this is accurate, that the wicked people who did not follow the commandments of God, who did not follow Moses, who did not love life, who perpetrated evil when they lived on the earth, they are in the depth of the Sheol, they are in Hades also, but they are already anticipating their torment. First of all, they are being tormented by their own evil. They are being tormented by themselves and their own lack of faith and their own refusal to follow God’s commandments. Then they are being tormented by the fact that they want to live and have carnal sensual pleasures and they cannot do that anymore. Then they are tormented by the fact that they are not in the hands of God, they are in the hands of the evil one, they are in the hands of the demons in the pit of Sheol. They are also tormented by the expectation that when the Messianic King comes, they are going to be raised, not for glory, but for judgment, for condemnation, so to speak. They are going to get what’s coming to them, to put it in modern language.
So the evil dead are anticipating already their unending agony by the presence of the truth and the light and the glory of God, and their suffering is going to be “apo tou prosopou tou kyriou” as Isaiah said, quoted by the apostle Peter in the book of Acts. They will suffer torment from the face of God, and not from separation from the face of God, but from the presence of the face of God. If you are evil and rooted in evil and you do not repent, the presence of light and life and truth and glory causes you terrible agony.
Before the coming of the Messiah, the wicked dead were already somehow anticipating that, and the righteous dead were anticipating the time when they would have full and complete and total communion with God and all of the good creation of God, when the Messianic King would free them.
We Christians believe, Orthodox Christians believe, that Christ is that Messianic King who frees us, and He frees us by dying. He liberates us. He ransoms us by the power of hell. He gave Himself, a ransom, to death, by which we were held captive, in order to release us, and that is what trampling down death by death means. So the icon of the so-called Descent Into Sheol shows that Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, really died, and He entered into the condition and experienced the condition of being dead, but by experiencing the condition of being dead, being life Himself, He destroys death. He tramples down death, He annihilates death. He liberates and ransoms and frees and buys back the people who are held captive by death, captive by the power of death that has come from sin. And so, the descent of Christ into Sheol means that He really died, but being life Himself, when life dies, He destroys death, and that is what the teaching is, and that is what the Paschal message, the good news of the Gospel, is.
If anyone would say, and honestly, I do think some Christians do claim this, some pretty big-name theologians, I believe, actually teach this, but I am afraid, speaking the truth in love, we try to do that, we would have to say that they are wrong if they claim that when Jesus died He experienced the torments of hell. He did not experience any torments of any hell when He died, and in some sense there even was not any hell. First of all, hell is the torment from the presence of the glory and the beauty and the truth of God for people who do not want it.
How could He who is life and truth and glory, Himself, suffer torment? Was He being tormented by the presence of Himself? It is completely senseless. It does not make any sense whatsoever, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, could suffer the torments of hell. No. But He could die. He could enter into the realm of the dead in order to destroy it. But even the righteous dead, like the prophets and Moses and John the Baptist, were not being tormented in Sheol. They were caught by death, but they were not being tormented. There was no punishment to them, there was no torment, no agony, because the torment and the agony of Gehenna, of hell, is the torment of clinging to evils and loving death more than life, and loving evil more than good, and loving darkness more than light. That is what torments you.
And that is why, I believe, we Orthodox Christians would claim that Christ’s presence, His Parousia, in the realm of the dead when He is crucified, and then at His coming at the end of the age in glory, when all the tombs will be opened, and by the way in the Gospel the claim is that when Jesus enters into the realm of the dead and dies and tramples down death by death, the righteous already somehow experience the resurrection. In Matthew’s Gospel it says very clearly that on the Pascha morning, the first day of the week, the day of the Lord’s resurrection, many of the saints arose and they were seen walking around the holy city of Jerusalem. This was in St. Matthew’s Gospel.
And we do not ever want to imagine the dead as disincarnate souls. Some of the great teachers of Christianity do that, even Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, Hierotheos, he does that. I must say honestly say I do not agree with him when he does that. The dead are simply completely and totally dead. And then when you are alive, you are completely and totally alive. And I believe that when Christ rose from the dead in His glorified body, He gave the glorified body to all those in the tombs immediately, that they enter into eternal life with Him. That is why when we glorify the saints we glorify them as completely and totally alive. When they appear to people they do not appear as disincarnate souls, they appear as people in their glorified bodies, with their risen bodies. They are clothed with the raised body of Jesus Christ. The relic of their physical body might still be in the tombs, and they are in the tombs until the last day when all the tombs will be empty and there will be no more cemeteries and no more death anymore at all. But the dead in Christ are already entering into that splendid glory of the age to come. That is how we relate to them and venerate them within the Orthodox Church.
But in any case, that topic may be for another time, but what we want to know for now is that Jesus did not suffer any agonies of hell when He died. In fact, He did not suffer separation from God. He was forsaken and abandoned by God into death, into the hands of evil, but God was always with Him, and He was always with God. He commended His life into the hands of God when He died, He said, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit,” and He gave up His spirit and He died. And as the Paschal Troparion, the hymn says during the canon, it says, “In the grave with the body, in Sheol with the soul, in as much as Thou art God in Paradise with the thief, on the throne with the Father and the Holy Spirit was Thou, boundless Christ, filling all things Thyself, uncircumscribed, uncontainable, infinite.”
So there is this mystery of the infinite, glorious God being circumscribed by flesh, and dying in the flesh, and God dies in the flesh, He really dies, and experiences death, but that experience of death is the destruction of death. It is the bringing of the power of God into Sheol to destroy death. God is with Him, raising the dead through His dead body. It is through Christ that the dead are raised, so I think that it is accurate to say, first of all, it is certainly accurate to say that Jesus did not go into hell. He went into Sheol, He went into Hades. That is not hell, that is not Gehenna. He never tasted of Gehenna. He never tasted of hell at all, and He brought heaven, He brought Paradise, to the righteous dead who were held in Sheol, in Hades, to captives. In other words, to those who were dead, to those who were, literally, dead.
He came to them, but we must remember that those who were literally dead were also still somehow alive in the hands of God, even before the Messiah came. When, for example, the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of Christ, tried to catch Him in his words by saying that according to the Levite low of Moses, if a man had a wife, and he died, his brother had to take her and raise up seed so she would have children. And then the Sadducees said to Jesus, “There was a woman, and her husband died, and then his brother died, and his other brother died, and his other brother died, so that this woman ultimately ended up having seven husbands.” And then they try to make a fool of Jesus, saying, “If there is a resurrection, whose wife will she be?” We could put it this way, “Who gets the girl?” If there is a resurrection, who gets the girl? They are trying to make a fool of Jesus. They are trying to make a fool of Him, asking such a question, in order to try to make the doctrine of the resurrection to be ridiculous. But Jesus answers them, “You know neither the Scripture, nor the power of God. The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage.” But those who are counted worthy to attain to that age, the age to come, the age of the risen Christ, which begins when Jesus enters into the realm of death to destroy it, who are worthy to enter into that age and to the resurrection from the dead, they neither are marrying nor are given in marriage. They cannot die anymore, because, it says in Luke, they are eisangeli, equal to the angels (Luke 20:36). In Mark and Matthew it says hos angeli, like angels (see Mark 12:25). We do not become angels. We become angel-like, but we are still human beings. And they are sons of God. And even the women have the condition of being sons of God, because they are raised with the only begotten Son of God, who is Jesus Christ, and have the relationship to God as Abba, Father, that He has. It says, “Showing themselves to become sons of the resurrection.”
But that the dead are raised, Jesus says in Luke’s Gospel, to the Sadducees, even Moses showed in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him. And then it says, some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well,” and they no longer dared ask Him any question.
So it seems to me, and you have to decide, but it seems to me that what Jesus is saying here is that the dead believers, the dead who follow the law, the dead who love God, yes, they are dead, and they have to be raised, and they are only raised by the Messiah, and they are only raised by the death of the Messiah. But they are already somehow in anticipation, children of the resurrection. They already belong to the resurrection that is planned for them from all eternity by God through Christ. That is why you even have the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. In fact, some commentators point out that Jesus does not say, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He says the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. They are not dead, but they are living. They are living in anticipation in the bosom of Abraham, awaiting the Messiah, and they are living forever when they are raised from the dead by Christ. So he says, “You do not even know what you are talking about, Sadducees.” In the Kingdom of God, yes, if a man has a wife, that is his wife forever, and if a woman had seven men as husbands, somehow that remains also forever. But there is no marrying or giving in marriage. We do not live as married couples, we live hos angeli, like angels.
We all become the bride of Christ, and we all relate to each other. We do not cease being who we are, because even the risen Christ, when He is raised, is still Jesus of Nazareth. In John’s Gospel, and in the Gospels generally, he even shows the continuity by showing the wounds in His hands. That causes some difficulty for some people, because they say, if He is raised into eternal life and is really healed, why is He still bearing the wounds? But I believe, personally, the reason for that is simply pedagogical and evangelical. In other words, the Gospel wants to insist that the risen Christ is not someone other than Jesus who was crucified.
And by the way, there are some Christians, even modern Christians, who say Jesus of Nazareth is one thing and the Christ is another. There is the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith and they are not the same person, they are not the same reality. But we Orthodox Christians say, oh no, Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and when He is raised He is revealed as the Christ, but it is Jesus who is the Christ, and it is the same one who was put to death and was crucified. That is certainly the witness of the canonical Scriptures of Orthodox Christianity.
What we want to see now, though, is this. The descent into Hades simply means He really died and destroyed death by dying and liberated all those who were held captive by death, and He gave Himself as a ransom to death, abandoned on the cross by the Father into death, but He was not abandoned in the sense that He was tormented by demons and that He was tormented by evils and that He tasted the agonies of hell, and that is part of His kenosis , that is part of His humiliation, that when He died He experienced what it is to be in hell. I believe for us Orthodox Christians that would be blasphemy to claim such a thing. It would just be crazy to claim such a thing. He really died, but he was never “in hell.” All the holy fathers and modern writers like Hierotheos Vlachos and others would claim, there is no place, it is a condition.
If we would define hell as separation from God, this is not biblical. I do not believe that is biblical at all, and in fact, it is important even to note that in some translations of the Scripture, like the Revised Standard Version, because they think of hell and the punishment as separation from God, they even put in the Bible the term separation from God, that they are afflicted by being separated from God. But the text of the Scripture does not speak about separation. It does not speak about separation at all.
For example, in the second letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, it says, “When the Lord Jesus comes in His Parousia from heaven at the end with His mighty angels and flaming fire,” that flaming fire is the fire of the Godhead. We Orthodox Christians do not believe in material hellfire. We do not believe that God is a Nebuchadnezzar, stoking up flames to burn sinners in. No, that is not our teaching. At the Parousia of Christ, the flame of the living God who is a consuming fire is joy and peace and refreshment and glory for those who believe Him and love Him, but it is torment and agony and Gehenna for those who do not. So you have the flaming fire, and He does inflict vengeance upon those who do not know God…” To not know God means to not know God by experience, not really love God. It does not mean to not know about God…“and upon those who do not obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In the Revised Standard Version it actually says, in English translation, “They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might.” That betrays a theology that thinks of hell as an exclusion from the presence of God. It is as if the evil people are being excluded from God and that is their punishment, and they say, “O Lord, please forgive us,” and the Lord says, “No, it is too late, go away.”
Well, that is not the teaching. The teaching is that when Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, identifies with sinners and takes upon Himself the sin of the world, He has mercy and forgives everybody. Absolutely everybody is forgiven. And those who do not enter because they have no wedding garment, it means they do not accept the forgiveness of Christ. They are forgiven, He offers them the wedding garment, but they do not want it. They prefer the outer darkness. They wish they could be inside at the wedding feast, but they still want to be outside and have their own way and not have the wedding garment.
But in any case, getting back to this text of the second letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, the first chapter, the ninth verse, what it really says in Greek is, “They shall suffer the punishment, or the torment, of eternal destruction.” The destruction is from the presence of God. The Greek term does not mean exclusion. And in fact, that same expression, “from the presence of God” is used in the Book of Acts, I believe it is the fourth chapter, where it says that those who are refreshed in the resurrection and experience the renewal, they also experience the renewal “from the face of the Lord.” So the just are experiencing glory and peace and beauty and bliss from the face of the Lord, the presence of the Lord, and the evil are experiencing torment and agony and punishment from the face of the same Lord, in the same reality. That is the teaching of Holy Scripture.
Jesus, Himself, is the very Lord from whose face the light and the glory of God shines. So the only people and creatures who experience hell, Gehenna, are those who experience the face of the Lord and hate it, and do not want it, and try to reject it, and try to flee from it. Then that face with that fire and that light becomes agony, and there is no way that Jesus experienced that agony. In fact, He is the cause of the agony. You might even say, according to the Scripture, the fire and the cause of the torment of the wicked is the very presence of Christ, Himself. That is the teaching.
So there is a sense in which you can say, there is no everlasting Gehenna until the resurrection of Christ and the judgment of the world. Until that comes, people are caught by death, they are in the condition of being dead. The righteous in anticipation are in the hands of God, somehow anticipating the glory to come, and the evil are in the pit, also in the hands of God, but they are experiencing torment from those hands, and torment from their hatred of God. Then when the Christ enters into the realm of the dead and smashes the gates of hell and raises everybody up, He raises up the whole of humanity, not just the righteous, He raises up the evil, too.
St. John says this in the fourth chapter of his Gospel. Those who have done good will come forth to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. The Lord even says, “Of Myself I can do nothing. As I see, I judge.” Sometimes it says, “As I hear I judge, and My judgment is just, because I am not seeking My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me.”
So we determine whether we are in hell or not by our own belief or unbelief, by our love of love, and our love of light, and our love of truth, and our love of glory, or by our hatred of it. That has nothing to do with Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, who died for us. When He descended into Sheol and Hades, it means simply that He died, and through death, trampled down death and raised the dead, all the dead, there is no one left in the tomb, as it says. In St. John Chrysostom’s sermon on Paschal night, he said, “No one is left in the tomb. Christ is risen and life reigns.” But if you hate that life, it is hell.  If you love it, it is Paradise.
So we should not say that Jesus descended into hell. We should say, accurately, that He entered into the realm of death, which in the Bible symbolism is called Sheol, or Hades, the Greek term, the realm of the dead, the condition of being dead. What the paschal icon shows us is that Jesus entered into the condition of being dead, but being the Son of God, the perfect human being, totally in communion with the Father and the divine Son, Himself, in human form, when He enters into the realm of death, death is trampled on. Death is destroyed, the gates of hell are smashed, and everyone is raised from the power of death—those who have done good, to the resurrection of everlasting life, and those who have done evil and cling to their evil without repentance, unto everlasting hell, Gehenna, being cast out by God because they desire to be cast out. They think they deserve to be in Paradise, but they will not enter through repentance, and therefore the presence of the risen Christ torments them.
This is what we believe, this is what we understand, this is what we see when we contemplate the Paschal icon. This is what we believe, that it has not to do with hell. Hell comes at the end. Hell comes in the rejection of the risen Christ. That is what it is. The evil reject Him in anticipation, while the righteous love Him in anticipation. So the resurrection of Christ for those who keep the commandments, or try to, and repent when they do not, is the gift of everlasting life. Those who reject it get what they, themselves, desire.


thanks to source:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades