The End

Propers: Christ the King, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

This is it. This is the End.

On this last Sunday of the Western Church’s liturgical year, we look forward to the End of Time. But this does not mean end in the sense of termination, as though nothing more were to follow. Rather, this is the end in the sense of fulfilment, fruition, finishing, perfecting. The End of Time is the purpose of time, the meaning of time, the reason behind it all. It is the destination towards which we are all moving, the end of all our labors, the point of all our lives.

There will come a day when the shadows are ended, when lies and pain, darkness and death, evaporate like mists before the sun. On that day, Goodness and Beauty and Truth will be revealed in full splendor, and the distance between God and Man, the chasm torn between the Creator and Creation, will heal afresh, like a broken bone set right, or a scar knit smooth and slick.

Then will we see things as they truly are, the deep reality beneath the appearance of the world. And we shall behold Christ enthroned in glory, high above all angels and powers, with the world laid joyfully at His feet. And every promise will be fulfilled, and every wound healed, and every tear wiped away. And there shall be no more death, only joy in reunion, in seeing all those whom we know and love at last as they truly are—for the first time face-to-face.

And on that day it won’t matter how many places we’ve been or how much money we’ve made or even what legacy we’ve left for our children. What will matter is the love that we’ve shared, the mercy we’ve shown, in all things both small and great. And we will be amazed at how the ripples of tiny kindnesses have reached out far beyond a single lifetime, far beyond our generation, to affect the farthest shores of the cosmos, the most distant corners of humanity.

And we will be abashed to see how our sins have done the same—how little white lies and quick cruelties and the smallness of our pride set fissures and cracks through the intended harmony of the whole. We will see the depth of our sin, a darkness that was always there, brought now into the light. And the light will purge it, but not before we see how very ugly it all was.

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus proclaims that all nations will be gathered to the Throne of His glory, and will be surprised—we will all be surprised—by how we honored Him without knowing it, and the times we spurned Him without care. And we will be separated, the sheep from the goats, the former on His right, the latter on His left. And the sheep will enter into the Kingdom prepared from the very foundation of the world, while the goats will depart into the fire prepared for the devil and his angels: one to eternal life, the other to eternal punishment.

And that’s scary, isn’t it? As it is meant to be, I’m sure. The prospect of eternal punishment is a terror. Because we know, don’t we, that we are the goats? We know that often we have failed to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, to visit the sick and comfort the imprisoned. We know we have sinned and we cannot pay that debt. No one can but Christ alone. And so if we are judged by the love we have shown, then surely we are damned. But if we are judged by the One who loves us—then no power in heaven or earth can condemn. We are declared Not Guilty from the Cross.

See, here’s the thing about Judgment. We often think of God as someone schizophrenic, who at one time ladles out molten wrath upon mankind, while at another rains flowers of forgiveness from a rainbow of grace. We treat God as though He were manic depressive, a bipolar patient off His meds. And we wonder, “Which will fall on me today—judgment or grace? Justice or mercy?” Heads you win. Tails you burn.

I could fear that sort of God, certainly. I don’t know that anyone could love Him.

But justice and mercy are not the opposing forces we often take them to be. The great mystics of the Christian tradition speak with one accord: that perfect justice is mercy, and that perfect mercy is justice. Put another way, there is no truth without love, and there is no love without truth. The purer they each become, the clearer we see they are one and the same.

The truly penitent will experience justice as mercy. We want to be corrected. We want to be purified. We want to own up to our brokenness and overcome it in Christ. We want to confess our sins so that they may be forgiven! But for the unrepentant, even mercy will be seen as judgment, for goodness and kindness and grace ladled out upon us only bring into starker relief our own wickedness. The darkness does not hate the light; the darkness hates itself. The light just forces us to see what we try to keep hidden in shadow even from ourselves.

So it is with God. At the End of Time, when God at last will be all in all, there will be no more places to hide, even from ourselves. All shall be bathed in the Light and Love of God. And some will see the Light as pure mercy, pure grace, purging our darkness that we may at last become what God has meant for us to be all along. While others will cower before the Light, thinking it cruel judgment, burning away the very sins and dross by which we would define ourselves.

Yet God does not shine two different sorts of Light, one an unkind justice, the other an unfair grace. Rather they are one. Both God’s justice and God’s mercy are nothing other than Truth. Whether we love the Truth, or love the Lie, is rather up to us.

So then, is there no hope for the poor goats, who after all are sinners no less than the sheep? Well, I should point out two things. The first comes from Ilaria Ramelli, an esteemed scholar of Christian Scripture and patristics, who notes that the scene of Final Judgment in Christ’s parable is set before the holy Temple. And at the Temple, both the sheep and the goats have the same destination, the same end. Both enter into the same holy fire. Both are given over entirely to God, both transformed by the same fire of the Holy Spirit, both carried up as an offering to the same Heavenly home.

And the other comes from David Bentley Hart, perhaps the brightest theologian of our age, who points out quite bluntly that “eternal punishment” is simply a terrible translation of the Greek. What it really says is that the unrepentant, the selfish, the disobedient and the wicked, will enter into “the chastisement of the Age.” And chastisement is not retribution, not punishment for punishment’s sake. Rather, when God punishes, He always, always, always has as His purpose the correction and betterment and salvation of the one punished—just as a good and loving father chastises his son not because he hates him but precisely because he loves him.

In the Age to come there will be chastisement, correction, the pain of a surgeon cutting out a cancer, or a bonesetter re-breaking a leg that it might heal straight. There is nowhere in Scripture the popular image of sadistic and eternal torture devoid of either purpose or end. It’s just not there.

Judgement is God’s alone, and whatever His judgment, it is by definition perfectly merciful and just and true. There is a price to be paid for rebellion, the consequence of freely willed sin. Yes, there is a hell—one last desperate refuge for shadows, which will fall at the End of the Age. But we have already seen Christ descend into hell, rend it asunder, and raise up from its depths the very worst of humanity from damnation to eternal life.

And if that’s our King—and, oh, indeed He is—then in the end, hell hasn’t got a prayer.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.