On Fear Based on Reverence, Not Terror (By Jack McGuane)

A confusing part of Christianity and Catholicism is the notion that one should fear Jesus. If He is the Messiah and the Father (through His divinity with God) of His children of the world, then why should Catholics fear Him? It is because it is not as much fear as it is the acknowledgment that Jesus is superior, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Because of His gentle supremacy and impactful role in our daily lives, Jesus must be respected, honored, and loved in the Catholic faith. One of His roles and responsibilities that makes Him superior and yields fear is that He will carry out judgment. In the Catholic faith, there is individual and final judgment. Individual judgment happens directly after death, in which “each individual will be judged on how they have lived their life. The soul will then either go to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory,” (bbc.co.uk). Jesus judges the newly dead in their individual judgment, but He is also responsible for final judgment, which has yet to occur. As BBC states,

“The belief is that final judgment will come at the end of time. This is when all of humanity will be raised and each person's body and soul will be reunited. Here, everyone will be judged by Christ who will have returned in all his glory. The teaching on judgment is reflected in the Gospels.”

Similarly to individual judgment, the angels, led by Jesus, will separate “the evil” from “the righteous,” according to Matthew 13:49. Everyone in history, dead or alive, will be judged during the final judgment, to either spend eternity in Purgatory/Heaven or Hell. That is why Catholicism calls for people to live Christian lives in sound accordance with how the Bible tells us to live: Hell is horrible.

I have heard claims that life on Earth might be Hell, and we are all living here in our afterlife, but I don’t believe that is true. In the Bible, Hell is described as the “second death” (Revelation 21:8), “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), a place where everyone will be “shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:9), and “a blazing furnace” in which “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:50). That doesn’t sound like life on Earth to me. Hell is the most terrible and horrendous place. Imagining Biblically accurate Hell, I can’t describe it in words. There is not a word awful enough to describe a place in which the souls of people burn for eternity, constantly on fire, with no hope of Jesus saving them. But Jesus won’t save them because He has given them millions of chances to live a better Christian life, millions of chances to ask for forgiveness, so much time to turn themselves around, and yet they didn’t.

Fear of Jesus is essential to the Catholic and, more generally, Christian faith because honoring God means living for Him and by His word, and knowing that eternity is inevitable, just in a different location. Fear of Jesus contributes to the scale of a Christian life. Either one fears Jesus and adds to their chances of going to Heaven, or they neglect Him, don’t seek forgiveness for their sins, and add to their chances of suffering in the scalding, fiery inferno that is Hell. For Catholics, fearing Jesus is the same as aiming to be granted positive divine judgment, leading to the avoidance of Hell.