The thing in this conversation that lit up my world was when Matthew made the point that when Jesus spoke about hell and fire and suffering and the afterlife, he wasn’t necessarily speaking about things that HE personally believed, but he was likely speaking about things that HIS LISTENERS believed or would have been familiar with so as to make a connection with them.
I mean, why did I never see this before?
I do this all the time in my life. Back when I worked at Apple I would try to find out something about my customer before we started talking about computer specs so that when I spoke about computer specs I could talk about them in a way that the customer would understand.
For example, this one time I found out that a customer had just sat in traffic for an hour on their way to the mall and they were beyond ticked off. They started asking all sorts of questions about the differences between MEMORY and STORAGE on the Mac and I could tell that they weren’t going to be pleased with a tech-y response.
I had to improvise and think of a way to meet them on their level.
“Well”, I said, “STORAGE is like your garage, which is where you’re going to be pumped to go once you leave here. Can I get an AMEN? Some computers have a TWO CAR garage and others have a ONE car. The more garages or gigabytes you have, the more space you have to store stuff like photos, videos, etc, etc, etc. A 256GB machine is like a 1 car garage whereas a 512GB machine is like a 2 car garage. If you’re storing a lot of big and clunky files like videos, you’ll need more garages. If you have smaller files like MS Word documents, you’ll be OK with a 1 car garage.”
Not bad, huh?
“And MEMORY or RAM”, I said, “is like lanes on the highway. If the highway you took to get here had 10 more lanes on it, the traffic would have moved a thousand times faster. MEMORY is like lanes on the highway - the more the computer has the faster the information is able to move around and process inside .. it makes the computer run a lot quicker, specifically when you’re working with multiple programs at a time. Just like you need all the cars on the highway to move quicker, you need the programs you have open to move quicker. And so we need more lanes on the highway, more RAM in the machine.”
I could care less about garages and highways (or STORAGE and RAM, for that matter - HA!), but since it was fresh on the mind of the customer I used those examples to help the tech-talk translate into something they might be able to better understand.
This is what Jesus did when he taught people about hell. He might not have subscribed to every idea or image about the afterlife that he shared because sharing details about the afterlife wasn’t his concern; his concern, rather, was typically to share with his listeners something specific about the importance of how to live in the here and now that would translate over into the next life, the age to come.
I love this idea because, honestly, it helped soften some of the passages that gave me nightmares as a kid. I went to a very conservative Evangelical Christian school from the 4th - 12th grades and so a lot of the words of Jesus regarding the afterlife were (quite literally!) burned into my memory. I’ve done a lot of work to deconstruct and reconstruct them, but something about this explanation from Matthew really helped put things in perspective.
Did it do the same for you?
- Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE
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“I don’t take sides"‘. We hear that all the time, right?
‘I just want to keep the peace.’
‘I don't want to rock the boat.’
‘There's enough division, I just to make peace.’
‘Jesus was a peacemaker and that's what I want to be too!’
Here's the thing, though - although Jesus was a peacemaker, he wasn't always a peacekeeper ... right? He flipped over tables in the temple and drove out the money changers because some tables need to be flipped and some terrible, toxic, and dangerous thinking needs to be driven out of the church.
Out of churches.
Out of schools.
Out of communities.
Out of governments.
Out of families.
Although every instance calls for us to work towards making peace for all parties involved, not every instance calls for us to keep peace.
Why?
Because …”