Apparently some in the blogosphere have been speculating, not without glee, that the late televangelist Jerry Falwell is now in the hell to which he so quickly consigned gays, liberals, and other folks outside the Moral Majority. Cautioning today against this uncharitable behavior, Hugo Schwyzer has some reflections on hell that I wholeheartedly endorse:

Do I believe there’s a hell? Reluctantly, I do. I believe there’s a hell because Scripture and tradition says there is, and because I believe God gives us the free will to turn away from Him. But I also reserve the right to believe and pray that hell is absolutely empty. I pray that every last creature on this planet will live eternally in paradise. I pray that prayer every danged day.

Episcopal theologian Robert Farrar Capon puts it beautifully in this sermon on the Prodigal Son:

This is the wonderful thing about this parable, because it isn’t that there was a Prodigal Son who was a bad boy and who, therefore, came home and turned out to be a good boy and had a happy ending. Then the elder brother—you would think Jesus, if he was an ordinary storyteller, would have said, “Let’s give the elder brother a rotten ending.” He doesn’t. He gives the older brother no ending. The parable ends with a freeze frame. It ends like that with just the father, and the sound goes dead—the servants may be moving around with the wine and veal—but the sound goes dead and Jesus shows you only the freeze frame of the father and the elder brother. That’s the way the parable has ended for 2,000 years.

My theory about this parable is that if, for 2,000 years, he has never let it end, then you can extend that indefinitely, that this is a signal, an image of the presence of Christ to the damned. When the father goes out into the courtyard, he is an image of Christ descending into hell; and, therefore, the great message in this is the same as Psalm 139, “If I go down to hell, You are there also.” God is there with us. There is no point at which the Shepherd who followed the lost sheep will ever stop following all of the damned. He will always seek the lost. He will always raise the dead. Even if the elder brother refused forever to go in and kiss his other brother, the Father would still be there pleading with him. Christ never gives up on anybody. Christ is not the enemy of the damned. He is the finder of the damned. If they don’t want to be found, well there is no imagery of hell too strong like fire and brimstone and all that for that kind of stupidity. But nonetheless, the point is that you can never get away from the love that will not let you go and the elder brother standing there in the courtyard in his own hell is never going to get away from the Jesus who seeks him and wills to raise him from the dead.