Rehabilitating Purgatory

Second Sunday of Advent, Year C
8 December 2024

Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 1:68-79
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

 

Many years ago my mother-in-law asked a priest at her church about purgatory. Her priest answered something like, “You still believe in purgatory? That’s just an old wives tale the church made up to scare people.”

Of course, Protestants like us have long dismissed the idea of purgatory. The primary reason for this dismissal was likely the work of indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel who had advertised his wares with the slogan, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs.” Tetzel had used the fear of purgatory to manipulate people into transferring their usually small means into the church’s wealth.

Martin Luther opposed the idea of purgatory as unbiblical and as undermining the doctrine of salvation by faith, grace, and Christ alone.¹ Luther rejected purgatory as a place where suffering constitutes payment for ones sins for the purpose of one’s salvation. Makes perfect sense to me.

And who wouldn’t agree that our salvation comes through Christ alone? But I wonder if purgatory could be understood as something other than payment for our sins. And if purgatory was no longer understood as payment for sins, purgatory may still have a place.

Let me explain.

I am not a fan of hell, not only because I do not wish to go there but because the concept itself is problematic.
I have three objections to hell.

The first objection is that the concept of hell is incompatible with our basic understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, namely to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbours as ourselves. It is impossible to love our neighbour while at the same time holding to a belief in hell because a belief in hell renders our speech of Christian love vacuous. Assuming that we get to spend eternity with God, how could we possibly be joyful while others suffered eternal torment? Such set-up would require of us to abandon the neighbours (and enemies) Christ calls us to love. It is not possible to love someone yet be willing to abandon them to a life of total misery.²

A second problem has to do with what the Epistle of John articulates about God, and which we see throughout the scriptures, culminating in the person of Jesus: God is love. “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love,” writes John.

So how could a loving God want some of God’s creatures to suffer eternally? Of course, we will say that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and others like them deserve such fate. But for one, how could this justify hell for the many others that are supposed to go there, the unbaptized, adherents of other faiths or of no faith, or people we deem morally more deficient than ourselves (and we don’t really know who). And secondly we must admit that eternal suffering, even for monsters like these is disproportionate to temporal sins, however great they are. We may wish this on our enemies but to suggest that this was God’s desire appears very much our projection.

A third problem with the concept of hell is that it questions the sovereignty of God. If God wants all flesh to see the salvation of God, how could it be that some don’t make it and are eternally lost? The answer we have tried to give is that God gave us freedom and therefore some of us choose eternal damnation. But remember that in John 8 Jesus says, “everyone committing sin is a slave to sin.” Jesus also says, “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.”

Freedom presupposes intention, deliberation, and judgment, determined by what we determine to be goodness, truth, or beauty. To be perfectly free would be to possess the ability to know with absolute clarity, undistorted by ignorance or trauma, what ends truly satisfy our deepest desires. The truth is that we are unable to make truly free choices. Think alone of some of the paths humanity has taken that have led to endless wars or environmental degradation, all in the name of rational freedom. Or paths we individually have taken, expecting one outcome but receiving another. It is impossible to imagine that anyone would choose eternal damnation.

Now, if you are wondering about scriptural references to perdition or some kind of hell, we know that Jesus spoke of a place called Gehenna. This is a garbage heap outside of Jerusalem. Because Jesus speaks of a landfill, it is precisely not a place of eternal torment but simply a place of the final disposal and destruction of the dead, not unlike a cemetery but not as pretty.

The New Testament contains two kinds of language about the last judgment: one that announces the final destruction of the wicked, and a second that promises universal salvation. Two examples of the latter are in 1 Timothy 2:4: God our Saviour desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and in today’s reading where John – despite all his talk of repentance and judgment – says, quoting Isaiah, that all flesh shall see the salvation of God. It is this last verse and the emphasis on “all flesh” that have brought us to the topic of hell and of purgatory.

Trying to understand these two competing views in the New Testament, the one of the final destruction of the wicket, and the other of the salvation of all, we ask which one is able to explain the other. Can they both make sense? The final destruction of the wicket cannot explain the promise that all flesh shall see the salvation of God, nor the verse from 1 Timothy. However, the promise of the salvation of all flesh can explain the threat of punishment in the sense that it is conceivable that it actually speaks about the destruction of our sinful self for the sake of our resurrection as God’s redeemed.³

That brings us back to the question whether there may be a place for purgatory. It also brings us to our first reading from the prophet Malachi who compares God to a washer’s soap and a refiners fire. That is where fire comes in.

The waiting and anticipation of Advent is not only a waiting for the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem. It is also a waiting and anticipation for the world to be set right, for God’s justice to reign, for the old things to pass away for all things to be made new. (2 Corinthians 5)

But the things that shall be made new are not just the others, we too shall be made new, and not only that the perishable shall take on imperishability (1 Corinthians 15), but we shall be made new and cleansed by a refiners fire in the same way that a metallurgist’s fire consumes the dross. For as hard as we try, and we should try, we cannot make ourselves new, only God can do that.

What does that mean for what we have said about hell? It means that for some of us there will be less to be burned off than for others. Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, André and Magda Trocmé, and Maria Skobtsova, all of these 20^th century figures of charity, the latter three extending hospitality to those persecuted by the Nazi regime, these will have fewer sins burned off than others. For them it may be almost painless. For others, like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot it will be another matter, for it seems that everything in them turned away from the grace and transforming love of God in Christ, and forgiveness was not something they ever sought. Yet God made them too, and giving up on them would mean to give up on the all-pervasive grace of God. So for them the refiners fire of which Malachi speaks would be an agonizing and almost total experience, and what would be left of them would be pretty much unrecognizable. That, however, would be a good thing.

The word purgatory comes from the Latin word purgare. From it comes our English verb to purge. So etymologically, the word purgatory is not a place that intends to bring suffering but to bring cleansing.

Where hell is about eternal suffering or annihilation, purgatory is about cleansing for the purpose of living with God forever.

Hell seems more like our idea, as we cannot reform others and at times need to abandon what is toxic. It also seems more like our idea because it permits us to see evil and dysfunction in others before we see it in ourselves.

Purgatory seems more in line with the character of God who never gives up on God’s creatures, who does not give up on you or me, who pursues us in love even to Christ’s death on the cross, and whose intent is to make all things new and whose promise is that all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

In October of 1994 I became the pastor of a church in Winnipeg’s West End. This was three years after the National Church had come to the conclusion that Holy Communion has no age restriction but that all who are baptized are invited to the table. The congregation I served had it written in their bylaws that only confirmed members may commune. This put clergy in a difficult spot, for we could not deny Holy Communion to children of visiting families who communed in their home congregations. When we started to talk about changing the bylaws, an odd objection was voiced. Why, it was asked, would children still want to be confirmed if they were already allowed to be at the table?

I think of this as I hold to the promise that it is God’s will that all flesh shall see the salvation of God. If what we just considered is true, then we need not believe in God and follow Jesus for the sake of being rewarded with heaven, nor do we need to believe in God and follow Jesus because we are afraid of hell. We are freed to believe in God simply for God’s sake, because we love God, because God is our life and salvation, because our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

And what a gift that is.

Amen.⁴