Wailing and Grinding of Teeth: The Existence of Hell
Saturday, August 31st Readings Reflection: Saturday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel is the Parable of the Talents. While much can be said about this entire parable, which is rich with symbolism pertaining to the spiritual life, I would like to focus today on the parable’s condemnation of the wicked servant: “[T]hrow this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
The Catholic Church has always understood the place of wailing and grinding of teeth to be Hell, where souls who die in unrepentant mortal sin suffer eternal damnation. The existence of Hell is a fundamental truth of the Catholic Faith. From the Church’s inception, she has infallibly affirmed the existence of Hell and the tragic reality that many souls, who refuse to repent of their mortal sins through their own free will, are eternally damned.
St Jerome, one of the Fathers of the Church, wrote that Our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel are a metaphor for the sufferings the damned shall experience in Hell after the resurrection of the body. These souls have left the light of Christ and entered darkness by their free choice to reject God and His forgiveness. According to St. Jerome, the wailing (which in some translations of the Bible reads “weeping”) refers to the tears the damned shall shed due to the nearly blinding smoke from the fire that surrounds them. The grinding of teeth, according to St. Jerome, refers to the chattering of teeth due to extreme cold. To support his interpretation of both extreme heat (fire) and extreme cold, St. Jerome points to a passage from the Book of Job, which says, “Let him pass from the snow waters to excessive heat, and his sin even to hell” (Job 24:19 DRB).
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, wrote that the darkness of Hell “is caused by the massing together of the bodies of the damned, which will so fill the place of hell with their numbers, that no air will remain” (Summa Theologiae). The outer darkness of Hell reflects the interior darkness into which the soul first fell, according to St. Gregory the Great, another Father of the Church. The punishment of Hell is not the whim of a vindictive God but rather the extension of God’s infinite justice to the damned souls.
We have our entire earthly lives in which to accept God’s grace. The choices that we make throughout our earthly lives draw us either closer or farther from God. Even when we sin, God offers us His mercy and forgiveness through the Sacrament of Penance. However, we have free will and can choose to accept or reject this opportunity to reconcile with our ever-loving God.
Right up until the moment of our deaths, we can choose to repent from our sins; however, after we die, we must spent eternity living out the just reward or punishment for the choices that we made during our earthly lives. May we always accept God’s grace to remain “faithful in small matters,” as Our Lord instructs us in today’s Gospel, so that we may not face eternal damnation but instead merit to spend eternity in God’s infinite glory and love.
Great reflection.. thank you.. wish I could hear this from the pulpit
I have a question. Why does God allow us to repent right up to the moment of death, but not at any point after death?