Proclaimer Blog
Rewriting hell
Enjoyed an evening at the opera (*) last week with Mrs R. I say 'enjoyed' but it all actually ended in disappointment. It was fine, lovely even, almost until the very last minute. We went to see Mozart's Don Giovanni which is the tale of a serial cad, the Don, who spends his whole time seducing (and even murdering to help his cause). No shame or regret even though he leaves a trail of battered women behind him. As the opera builds to a climax this trail gets longer and longer. FInally, his murder victim (the father of one of his conquests) appears and drags him down to hell. The cast reappear on stage rejoicing in his judgement and warning the audience not to think they can get away with such immorality.
It was good up to this point. But then, right at the end, the curtain dropped away to reveal hell itself where we saw Don Giovanni grinning from ear to ear with holding a woman in his arms. Hell had been rewritten for the 21st century as the place where evil doers get to keep on doing the things they love, rather than suffering the consequence of their rebellion against God. The audience cheered. Good old Don, good on him. Bravo!
I don't think either Mozart or the librettist (da Ponte) were particularly moral, but they lived in times when people believed actions had consequences. Today we have the caricature of hell being a place where we can spend an eternity doing all the wrong things (which, let's face it, are the fun things after all) we've spent a lifetime doing; that's not so bad. It makes preaching on hell hard work. There is a whole lot to undo, even if people get the idea of eternity in the first place.
Strangely, this was also the subject of the very first EMA I attended – 1994, I think, over in Westminster Central Hall. I was working in the city, but had been taken along by my pastor as he tried to encourage me into ministry (it failed). Bruce Milne expounded this very topic, later it became an excellent book, the BST guide to heaven and hell.
* for those worried about this pretentious hobby, this is (almost) my only one.