Thoughts for the Day

… where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.                      Matthew 25:30

Isn’t this such an evocative phrase?  Even more so in the King James version’s “wailing and gnashing of teeth”.  I’ve only come across it in the Bible, where it is spoken only by Jesus, six times in Matthew’s gospel and once in Luke’s.  So, I’m reckoning Jesus really did say it and maybe quite often.  But what does it mean?  Weeping, or wailing, denotes deep sorrow.  Gnashing of teeth denotes consuming anger.  An unlikely combination?  Not long ago I came across someone like that, deeply sad at how a situation had turned out and yet implacably angry at the other party.  The result was utter despair.

In each of these seven instances Jesus identified some representative individual or group who cannot be accepted into the Kingdom and will be excluded. I find it interesting that among these seven individuals or groups, while for two where they will be thrown is not specified, three are described as thrown into darkness and two as thrown into blazing furnaces.  It could be that some of the wicked will be consigned to one and some to the other, but I suspect it more likely that both are pictures capturing an element of the reality of this exclusion.   Darkness may emphasise abandonment and the incineration of a blazing furnace the finality of destruction.  Certainly, I find it hard to imagine a literal blazing furnace not being primarily a place of pain rather than, as Jesus describes it, a place of ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’.   

These are not words of Jesus to take lightly, but we need to appreciate the context in which he said them.  He only seems to have spoken about these things to people who considered their place in the Kingdom assured.  He did not try to scare people into the Kingdom, but jolt those who incorrectly thought they were already there.