Hell- Next Exit?

20 May 2026  Acts 20:28-38

Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

“I know that after my departure savage wolves will come among you,… [a]nd from your own group men will come forward perverting the truth….” (Acts 20:29-30) 

Lloyd C. Douglas’ 1942 novel The Robe was one of the best-selling novels of the 1940s, and its film adaptation of 1953 won two Academy Awards, along with five other nominations. It is the fictional story of how various lives were changed through contact with the robe of Jesus, which the soldiers at Calvary gambled over (cf. John 19:23-24).

The path to Jesus generally requires more than just one step, and the path to the devil does, too – best therefore, for the devil, if we don’t pay much attention to the steps we are taking. Who would follow a sign saying, “Hell – Next Exit”?

The novel is very much a work of its time – 1942 was the middle of World War II, a time when depictions of evil lacked nuance almost entirely. The emperor Caligula is portrayed as a drooling psychopath, the emperor Tiberius lost in bitter senescence.

The heroes Marcellus, Diana, and Demetrius are just as unvarnished in their purity and good will. Neither the villains nor the heroes are ever puzzled about what to do, none wonder if they are doing the right thing. Even the Roman pagans seem to understand that their paganism is bad, and the villains simply don’t care that it’s bad. The step toward Jesus is never a long one, or more than just one.

But that was the world of 1942. The villains of that era were clearly evil, and the good guys just as clearly on the side of the angels. It wasn’t till after WW2 that evil started to have a more human face. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, described how people were surprised to find that the architects of the Holocaust were not drooling psychopaths, but people who appeared as normal as our neighbors. Members of the Klan were also members of the Rotary Club and the PTA. There is a reason why it took so long to achieve something like consensus about civil rights – evil is hard to recognize. It looks too much like us.

St. Paul warned about “fierce wolves” and “men speaking perverse things” (Acts 20:29-30), but don’t waste your time looking for fangs and perverts. You won’t find them. C.S. Lewis said that “the safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (The Screwtape Letters, p. 56). The path to Jesus generally requires more than just one step, and the path to the devil does, too – best therefore, for the devil, if we don’t pay much attention to the steps we are taking. Who would follow a sign saying, “Hell – Next Exit”?

The task of evangelization and discipleship, unlike the strategy of the devil, always involves making signs, labeling false turns and dangerous slopes, pointing out the places and ways that lead to health and safety. For that reason, more than any other, the Church has always advised regular reading of the Bible, and the noisy proclamation of the things it says for the people of God to do. One of the very oldest texts in the New Testament is I Corinthians 11:23-26, the earliest description of the Holy Eucharist, which says that every time the people of God celebrate it, the very life of the Risen  Jesus is made available to all. If you knew a time and place where heaven was going to touch the earth like that, and you knew that anyone could come and touch and hold that heaven, touch and hold it forever, wouldn’t it be the most obvious act of generosity to point that out?

Heaven touching earth like that is what happens at every Mass, everywhere it is celebrated all over the world, about half a million times a day.

The path to Hell has no signs. Every Church should have one that says, “Heaven. Here. Today.”