In the last week of his life, Jesus stood in the temple in Jerusalem and spoke to the religious teachers who ran it. A short walk away, below the city wall, lay the valley where fathers had once burned their own children for a god. Jesus looked at these powerful men and told them they made their new followers into children of that valley.
In the gospels, Jesus says the name of that valley eleven times. Each time, he was pointing at the place where people killed their own children because they thought a god wanted it.
The word he used
The gospels were written in Greek, and the word Jesus used is γέεννα (geenna), Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom. Eleven of the twelve times the word shows up in the New Testament, Jesus is the one speaking. English Bibles later put a different word in its place, so the real valley got lost.
On the hillside
The first time comes in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, when Jesus taught a large crowd on a hillside. He reminded them of the old rule against killing. Killing starts long before anyone picks up a stone, he said. It starts when you are angry with your brother and call him worthless. At the end of that road is the valley, where people burned the ones they did not value.
The sparrows
In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 12, Jesus warned his friends that people would hate them because of him. He spoke of the one who, after killing, has power to throw a person into Gehenna. Then, in the very next breath, he talked about birds.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.
Luke 12:6-7 · King James Version
That is where he was going all along. He named the valley so that his frightened friends would stop being afraid.
The child in his arms
Once his followers argued about which of them would be the greatest. The Gospel of Mark tells how Jesus, in a house in Capernaum, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, picked up a little child and held the child in his arms. Then he warned the grown men about anyone who made one of these little ones fall, and he named the valley three times. In Matthew's telling of that scene, he ends like this.
Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.
Matthew 18:14 · King James Version
A man held a little child, and he warned men who wanted to be great about the valley where children were burned. The Father he spoke for wants the child held.
Back in the temple
That brings us back to the temple. In Matthew, chapter 23, Jesus told the scribes, who taught the law, and the Pharisees, a group of strict religious teachers, that they were hypocrites. He said they crossed sea and land to win one new follower, and then made that person twice as much a child of the valley as themselves. Religion that teaches that God wants someone hurt does not stay small. Within days, the high priest's council handed Jesus to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and he was nailed to a cross. The men who were sure God was on their side killed him in God's name.
What the valley shows
Gehenna is not a place we are sent to. It is a reminder of how far we could go if we believe in the wrong God, the kind of God who wants blood, and of how far his Father is from that valley.
Maybe you grew up afraid of a fire after death, and one wrong thought felt like enough to send you there. Jesus was not threatening children. He was holding one in his arms. The Father he showed has counted the hairs on your head, and he does not want to lose even one of his little ones, and that includes the little one you once were.
Read the full teaching
This is the heart of the fifth and last lesson in the series Many gods before and after Jesus. The full teaching walks through all eleven times Jesus named the valley, in the Greek he used.