Judged

 

Maat, by Meridianos.

Propers: The Fifth Sunday in Lent, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Let’s talk about judgment.

The idea of reward or punishment after death is not some Christian invention. Indeed, it appears universally human. Every society, every religion, it seems, has some notion of justice outliving the grave. There is truth in death, we all believe, and in what comes thereafter.

The ancient Egyptians held that the human heart recorded all good deeds and bad, and that at the end of life each of us would have our heart weighed against a single feather of Maat, the goddess of justice and truth. And if our heart were heavier than a feather, it would then be consumed by the Eater of the Dead, and our soul would languish in the underworld forever. I have a painting of this on papyrus, in my office, if you’d like to see.

The ancient Greeks believed that a tribunal judged the newly dead, assigning both deserved destinations and poetic punishments. The virtuous frolicked in the Elysian Fields, while the worst of the worst were cast down to Tartarus, the underworld beneath the underworld. The Tibetan Buddhists have hells that would curl your toes, hells like you wouldn’t believe. But they also have false heavens, that would trap a soul in pleasure just as other worlds would trap a soul in fear and in pain.

Then, of course, there’s the Taoists, with their earth prisons; the Native Americans, with their happy hunting grounds; the Mayans, with Xibalba. It’s all the same notion, really, just in different context, different cultures.

Heavens and hells. Justice and truth. Righteous rewards and everlasting torment. These truths are deep in our bones, in our very souls. Even people who claim not to believe in life after death seek redemption, seek justification, in the judgments of history and in the monuments of societal memory. And so it is natural, to some degree, that Christians should fall into this way of thinking. Does not St Paul say that God will reward each according to his or her deeds?

For many churches, many Christians, Jesus is the “Get Out of Hell Free” card, the idea being that we would be judged according to our deeds—God help up—save that we know the password. We are under grace, not under wrath, like everyone else. And this can be a bit of a sticky wicket, because theology like this inevitably leads either to boasting—“We know the password and you don’t; we got it right while you got it wrong”—or to the particularly disturbing notion that God’s salvation is utterly arbitrary, an accident of birth or the fickle whims of predestination.

But what if salvation weren’t merely about a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on the day that we die? What if Jesus came to do more than this, came to liberate us from the whole ancient system of punishment and reward, of death as the source both of existential terror and of overweening pride? What if salvation were now?

The Gospel of John seems to think this way. Whereas the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke point to a coming judgment—point to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem less than 40 years after the Resurrection of our Lord—in John’s eyes, the judgment has already occurred. For John, there’s no need to wait for the end of the world, for the end of the world is here. It has come for us in Jesus Christ. It has come for us on the Cross.

“Now is the judgment of this world!” Christ proclaims. “Now is the ruler of this world driven out! And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.” But even that’s a bad translation, because Jesus doesn’t say draw. He says drag. “When I am lifted up, I will drag all people to Myself.”

This is the thematic continuation of the Good News that we heard from John’s Gospel last week:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Those who believe in Him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already … And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

Now that right there is astounding. This is not password salvation. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, not to condemn it, not to judge it, but that all the world should be saved in Him! And let’s be clear what John means by “Son.” God did not send someone else, some angel or prophet or proxy. God does not sire children in the manner of Hercules or Thor. The Son of God is God, God in the flesh, God come down, God made one of us.

Because you all know how John’s Gospel begins, right? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God …

He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him; yet the world did not know Him. He came to what was His own, and His own people did not accept Him. But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

For John, the world is already condemned. We already live in darkness. And we live in darkness because we love the darkness more than we love the light.

And so something had to be done. The world had to be saved. And so God saved it. He saved it by becoming flesh to dwell among us. He saved it by coming down into this world when this world would not look up to Him. He saved it purely out of mercy, purely out of love, purely out of grace. He did not send the Son to condemn to world, but in order that the whole world might be saved. In the words of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

So the light comes into the darkness. God comes into the world. And what does He say? “Forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown”? No. He goes around, willy-nilly, forgiving sins, healing wounds, feeding the hungry, raising the dead. And He says the Kingdom of God is here. It’s not coming; it’s here. Repent. Be turned. Believe the Good News. And that term “Good News,” that we call Gospel, that term means something in the Bible. It means the Good News of victory won.

It means the fight’s over before it even began. It means that you and I and everyone are free, even before we’ve realized everything that’s enslaved us.

And how do we respond to this? How do we react to a light that the darkness cannot overcome? Well, we kill Him, of course. We do our best, which is to say, our very worst. We strip Him and we whip Him and we nail Him to a Cross. We put thorns around His head and spear up in His heart. And then we throw Him into a tomb and we drop a rock on top and we say, “That’s that. Back to business.”

And that’s the judgment, right there. That’s what the Cross is for us. It’s the white-hot light of truth, so bright we cannot stand it, shining on our world, shining on our deeds, revealing us for who we truly are and revealing God for who He truly is. For the Christian, that Man on the Cross, that God in the Tomb, is the Apocalypse, is the Revelation of the highest and the deepest cracks and crevices of Creation. God doesn’t judge us; we do. God doesn’t pour out His wrath on the innocent; we do. He doesn’t kill us—we kill Him! That’s what I am. That’s what we are.

And in the face of selfless, self-giving, infinite, eternal, and unmerited love, all our wrath, all our violence, all our swords and spears are utterly impotent. We poured everything we had into Him, cast Him into hell, and it barely slowed Him down. Someday the truth revealed on the Cross will shine its light into the furthest reaches of the cosmos, the highest halls of heaven, the deepest pits of hell. And the reality we see there, of the undying love of God, will raise all the dead, and right every wrong, and bring all of our wickedness out into light.

And truth will reward every soul for its deeds, for the fires of love burn hot. Thus we shall be purified; thus we shall be purged, like silver refined seven times in the flames. For this is the judgment: that Jesus died for us and for our whole world. And that love, at the last, will drag all peoples unto Him.

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