In this week\u2019s column, I would like to catch up on some of the questions addressed by Msgr. Charles Pope in Our Sunday Visitor.<\/p>\n
Question dated April 19, 2015:\u00a0 On the cross, Jesus said, \u201cFather forgive them, they know not what they do\u201d (Luke 23:34).\u00a0 But if we don\u2019t know what we do, how can we ever sin or be blameworthy for it?<\/p>\n
Answer:\u00a0 Jesus is speaking to a particular situation, and we ought not generalize what he says here.\u00a0 The ignorance he refers to is that they do not know or understand his true identity.\u00a0 Do they really know that they were killing their Lord and Messiah?\u00a0 Likely not.\u00a0 While it is true that the Lord gave many proofs of his identity by fulfilling Scripture and working miracles, along with the testimony of John the Baptist and the Father\u2019s testimony in their heart, many of his accusers and condemners still did not understand or come to faith.<\/p>\n
Many considered Jesus a blasphemer and felt quite justified in their condemnation.\u00a0 Now this does not mean that they are without any sin at all, and as Jesus said earlier, \u201cIf you do not come to believe that I AM, you will die in your sins\u201d (John 8:24).<\/p>\n
Hence, while those who killed him may be acting in some ignorance at the moment of the crucifixion, the Lord is still calling them to receive strong faith and come out of their woeful ignorance.\u00a0 Ignorance and its relationship to culpability speaks to what a person could reasonably know and understand given their history, the condition of their heart and so forth.<\/p>\n
Vincible ignorance is ignorance we could reasonably overcome at the time of the sin.\u00a0 Invincible ignorance is an ignorance a person could not have reasonably overcome at the time of the sin.\u00a0 And while the Church makes these distinctions, only God can know the true inner condition of a person and make the judgment.\u00a0 That is why the Church does not formally teach that specific people are in hell.\u00a0 Only God can see into the heart of a person to make that judgment.<\/p>\n
Question dated October 28, 2012:\u00a0 I am aware that when we say in the Apostles Creed, Jesus descended into hell, we do not mean the hell of the damned, but merely the place of the dead.\u00a0 But do we have any idea what that place was like?
\nAlso, were the justified and condemned in that place together?<\/p>\n
Answer:\u00a0 You are correct in your distinction between the hell of the damned and the \u201chell\u201d that refers to the place where all the dead were until the Messiah came.\u00a0 It is an unfortunate fact, that in English, \u201chell\u201d is used to refer to both places.\u00a0 But the Jewish people clearly distinguished between Sheol, where all who had died were detained, and the hell of the damned, which Jesus often called Gehenna.\u00a0 As for what Sheol was like, we are left to a great deal of conjecture.\u00a0 Scripture describes it as a place of darkness, as the pit (Job 17:13-16).<\/p>\n
The state of the deceased there is described as a place of utter inactivity.\u00a0 The souls there would seem to be in a sleeplike, semi-comatose state.\u00a0 No one there is able to thank the Lord, or praise him (Isaiah 38:18), there is no work, no thought, no knowledge, no wisdom expressed (Ezekiel 9:10).\u00a0 It is a place from which no one emerges and is sometimes conceived as a fortress (Isaiah 38:10).\u00a0 It would seem that both the just and the wicked went there before the coming of Christ, though some are said to go down there \u201cin peace\u201d (1 Kings 2:6; etc.) and some go down there \u201cin sorrow\u201d (Genesis 37:35; etc.).<\/p>\n
Further, in this sort of suspended state, there does not seem to be any mention of punishment of the wicked, or reward of the just.\u00a0 Rather, it would seem that all waited until the Lord, who alone can deliver from Sheol, would come (1 Samuel 2:6).\u00a0 Mysteriously, God is present to those there (Psalm 139:8) but how the dead might experience that presence is not described.<\/p>\n
It is to this place that the Lord descended.\u00a0 As Scripture implies, he awoke the dead (Ephesians 5:14) and preached to these \u201csouls in prison\u201d (1 Peter 3:19-20).\u00a0 And while we have no complete biblical description of what took place, we can reasonably speculate that some among them, in particular the just, rejoiced in him and accepted him, while others rejected him even in death, and from there descended to the hell of the damned.<\/p>\n
Question dated April 26, 2015:\u00a0 I am 87 and have prayed the Lord\u2019s Prayer all my life.\u00a0 I was surprised to notice in certain forms among non-Catholics they say \u201cforgive us our debts,\u201d where we say \u201cforgive us our trespasses.\u201d\u00a0 What does it mean to have debts forgiven and for us to forgive our debtors?<\/p>\n
Answer:\u00a0 There is no essential difference at work.\u00a0 Rather, \u201cdebts\u201d is an older English translation that has fallen away in favor of \u201ctrespasses.\u201d\u00a0 Both are references to sin.\u00a0 The Greek word in question is \u201copheilemata,\u201d which most literally refers to having debts.<\/p>\n
But debts are not understood as financial here.\u00a0 Rather, we have incurred a debt of sin.\u00a0 St. Jerome, who translated the most widely used Latin translation (the Vulgate) used the Latin word \u201cdebitoribus,\u201d which most naturally came into English as \u201cdebts.\u201d\u00a0 Later, because of the tendency of \u201cdebt\u201d to refer more exclusively to financial matters, the term \u201ctrespasses\u201d became\u00a0 a more common translation in English.\u00a0 However, \u201ctrespasses\u201d has its problems, too, since, it tends to now mean being on someone\u2019s property illegally.<\/p>\n
Currently, there are those who want to simply say, \u201cforgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.\u201d\u00a0 But this loses some of what the original Greek, and likely the Lord, conveyed.\u00a0 For what is said here is not merely that we sinned (in some abstract sense) but that we have incurred an enormous debt, and that we have strayed into places we have no business being.\u00a0 Indeed, our debt is huge.\u00a0 The Lord is summoning us to forgive one another as we have been forgiven speaks of a man who owed 10,000 talents (an almost unimaginable amount).
\nBut that man is us. So sin is not an abstraction; it is a very heavy debt we cannot pay on our own.\u00a0 This is what the Greek work \u201copheilemata\u201d (debts) is conveying.<\/p>\n
God\u2019s blessings!\u00a0 Father Peter Schuster<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this week\u2019s column, I would like to catch up on some of the questions addressed by Msgr. Charles Pope in Our Sunday Visitor. Question dated April 19, 2015:\u00a0 On the cross, Jesus said, \u201cFather forgive them, they know not what they do\u201d (Luke 23:34).\u00a0 But if we don\u2019t know what we do, how can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weekly-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2829,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828\/revisions\/2829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rescathroch.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}