Type “A”s, forgiveness, and the hell question

“If I don’t forgive him, will I go to hell?” asked a woman in my congregation.

Even if I was being interviewed as a potential candidate to do her funeral, this wasn’t a theoretical question. A few months earlier she had been given a hard diagnosis – an aggressive cancer was moving through her body. Chemo would slow its pace somewhat but she was to die soon.

Denial, anger, grief and acceptance had run their course. Now life was being measured in days and weeks not months and years. Now we were talking about what really happens after death.

She was not a religious person but considered herself “spiritual,” and since religion was part of funerals she would make sure it was handled well. I quickly realized I was being sized up. “Will he do the job without embarrassing me?” was the implicit interview question.

The “hell” question was not her first or even part of our first meeting. We had been doing a lot of talking and by now I was quite sure I had already been quietly selected for this terminal assignment. I had been highly recommended by a respected friend, she told me, when she first set up an appointment to meet at my office.

Before this we had never met. She hadn’t been to our church or any church for that matter, but here she was. She was a person who had lived her life organizing things. She was very good at this. In fact she was so good at it that after 35 years as a clerk in the provincial courthouse, even the judges deferred to her.

And once she accepted that dying well was the matter at hand, she set about organizing everything in its proximity.

“You realize, of course,” I told her, “that funerals are for the living, not the dead? If I am asked to do your funeral, your family’s wishes will be my concern. There are more important things for us to talk about before you die.”

It almost seemed it had not occurred to her that her ability to control things would end when she died. But she was not one to shrink from a statement of the obvious. So, one by one she brought in her family to my office so that they could meet the minister she had chosen. Those too were fascinating chats. Together we organized a funeral – under her gaze.

She and I moved on to other matters of organization. Indeed there was far more to sort out than estate and funeral details, as complex as these might be. There were the frayed and tangled ends of a lifetime of relationships, with parents and step-parents, with children, and grandchildren and siblings and co-workers. There were proud moments and there were deep regrets.

We will take care for the former, I told her, but only she could sort out the latter. That too had a logic she understood.

And that brought up the matter of forgiveness. It was a can of worms! Once it was cracked open the world’s greatest organizational genius had met her match. In some ways it was good that she didn’t have much time or energy left. This would not be a matter of making a list and working down it. The enormity of the task meant the tactic that had served her well for a lifetime was doomed.

A whole new approach would be needed to sort this out.

There are times when the gospel becomes very clear: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We don’t have to waste time explaining hell and certainly must not delude ourselves by explaining it away. But if we miss the fact that the gospel is about what happens after our “three score and ten” existence is over, we are indeed “to be pitied more than all men.”

“If it depended on our ability to forgive, no one would escape hell,” I answered. “But do you want to spend your last days dragging unforgiveness around?”

Jesus told a parable of workers in a vineyard. How those who worked through the heat of the day were paid the same as those who came at the very end. How in the kingdom of God the last will be first. Clearly, she was one of the last.

I look forward to seeing her again. We will have a laugh or two about that crazy set of interviews she subjected me to and I’ll tell her what we really did at her funeral.

James Toews is pastor at Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C.