Damn Goats

Propers: Christ the King Sunday, AD 2023 A

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.

Sheep and goats. Scary stuff. Some go up and some go down. Such is the terror of religion, the fearful insecurity of never quite knowing whether one is saved or one is damned. Will it be justice or mercy for us, absolution or guilt in the end? The easiest way to feel saved is, of course, to point out other people who are almost certainly damned. You know, bad people, different people, as different from you as can be. We’re all hoping, are we not, that God might grade us on a curve?

But what if it isn’t that at all? What if that was never how God works, Christ works, in Christianity or in religion writ large? What if we’ve been misinterpreting divine judgment this entire time? I would offer for our consideration three verses from the Holy Gospel According to St John.

John, chapter three, verse 17: “For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” John, chapter five, verse 22: “The Father judges no-one, but has given all judgment to the Son.” And John, chapter 12, verse 47: Jesus said, “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” It’s hard to get clearer than that.

For as cryptic as His public parables can be, the clear teaching of Jesus to His Apostles, as recorded in the Gospels, is that Christ has come to save the world, period. But if the Father does not judge us, handing judgment to His Son, and the Son does not judge us, having come to save us all, then what is all this judgment talk in Scripture? Who exactly is our judge, dividing the sheep and the goats?

Here I defer to Fr Sergei Bulgakov, a Russian Orthodox priest and economist, and likely the greatest systematic theologian of the twentieth century. Bulgakov writes that the Son of Man desires the salvation of the world, not its condemnation. He wants to make us one in Him, one in His humanity joined to His divinity. Christ is both the Adam and the Eve whom we were always meant to be. And He gathers us into His Body, gathers us all as His Bride, as one in His Blood and His Spirit.

That’s what the Resurrection is. It is all of us, all of humanity, all of Creation, joined to Christ in eternity, beyond death and sin and space and time. And when all of humanity is transfigured into the glorified humanity of Christ—when we are all made into Him—then the Holy Spirit reveals the Image of God within us. We see at last who we truly are and were always supposed to be. We see the version of us that didn’t fall, that never sinned, never cut herself off from the Lord.

And that’s our final judgment. It isn’t an external condemnation cast upon us from on high. It’s the Spirit of truth illuminating our lives, our selves, our souls. We see what we were meant to be, meant to do, whom all we were meant to love. And we see just how short of that intended goal each one of us has fallen. God doesn’t judge us. He simply banishes the shadows, and we stand naked before a truth from which we can no longer hide. We then judge ourselves.

The Image of God within us, who is who we truly are, judges the false self below us, who is who we think we are. Christians are intended to be mirrors of Jesus’ face, images of the image of God, sent out to save the world. Yet He is our mirror as well. And like a sword, He cuts through ignorance and ego and laziness and lies. He shows us the god whom we have buried deep inside.

And so judgment, for Bulgakov, is not vertical, forever cleaving humanity into two separate tribes, one irredeemably damned and the other spotlessly white. How easy that would be! —if one group were all evil, and the other wholly good, and all we had to do would be to rid ourselves of the worst, to cast them in the pit. But no. The line of good and evil runs through every human heart. And so the judgment of which Christ speaks is horizontal, carving deep into us all.

There is no sinless saint, for we are saved by grace, not by merits we could earn. Nor is any human being so utterly sinful that no trace of good can be found in them. Pure evil does not exist in man, for evil is a shadow of the good. We are all of us a mixture, both a sinner and a saint—simul iustus et peccator, Luther liked to say. And the differences between us, between Mother Theresa and Joseph Stalin, extreme as they may be, are relative. They are quantitative, never qualitative, in nature.

Quoting Fr Bulgakov at length:

The separation into sheep and goats is accomplished (of course to different degrees) within every individual … All are condemned and all are justified … Thus the judgment … consists in participating in glory and incorruptibility, and, at the same time, in burning in the fire of divine rejection. The difference between the two states can here be only a quantitative one.

The judgment condemns in every person that which deserves condemnation, that which is incompatible with glory. The judgment is inwardly executed by every person’s [image of God], which … judges his … creaturely self-determination, [and] convinces him that it does not correspond to this norm. His … image in incorruptibility and glory is his true reality, which is recognized by him as such. On the contrary, that which seemed to him real in his earthly life is condemned as unreal, as illusory: “He himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.”

In other words, we shall find in the light of the Risen Christ, and by His Spirit burning within us, that we are all both sheep and goat. We each have things within us that need to be condemned, and we each have a holiness destined for eternity. And we shall be surprised by what gets sorted out: surprised by the righteousness we’ve worked without awareness; surprised by the evils we have wrought without a thought. Our falseness must be burned away; our truth shall shine the brighter.

This is as good a point as any to remind the congregation that as Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats, He is standing before the Temple in Jerusalem; a Temple at which sin offerings of goats, and burnt offerings of sheep, are continually sacrificed before the Lord. And those goats and those sheep—they all burn in the same fire, they all go the same place, they all enter into the presence of one and the same Lord.

Thus the pitiless words of Scripture associated with our judgment—death, perdition, destruction, annihilation—must be taken allegorically, spiritually, as referring to the painful separation worked by the Holy Spirit within the heart of every sinner. “Every person,” Bulgakov writes, “bears within himself the principle of [hellish] burning, which is ignited by the [coming] of Christ in glory.”

As Fr Aidan Kimel ably puts it: “Every person must freely endure the purifying torments of hell. All malice, hatred, greed, envy, lust, bitterness must be named and expunged. Everything that does not conform to the image of the Second Adam, the Primal Image [who is Christ], must be severed from the person and cast into the lake of fire.” Hence, writes Bulgakov, “in a sense, hell is a function of heaven.”

He’s not pulling all this from the æther. Bulgakov is drawing from John and Paul and all the Apostles who understood “our God is a consuming fire,” a white-hot blazing grace that burns out of us all impurities, all dross, all that we are not, so that we might be as silver refined seven times, purified in the furnace of divine love. Christ died and descended to hell, to rise again in greater glory. He has led the way. We who have entered into His death already died for us, and into His own eternal life already begun, must follow in His footsteps, down to hell and up to heaven.

Scriptures speak of final judgment, yes. But there is a final mercy beyond judgment, an age to come, in fact, when they shall both be one and the same: wherein a perfect justice culminates in mercy, and a perfect mercy culminates in the opportunity for restitution, to heal what we have harmed. Here sin is not simply forgiven: it is expunged. Bulgakov, one last time:

Love is the Holy Spirit … But this love, this blazing up of the Spirit, is also the judgment of the individual upon himself … The same fire, the same love, [both] gladdens and burns, torments and gives joy. The judgment of love is the most terrible judgment, more terrible than that of justice and wrath, than that of the law, for it includes all of this but also transcends it.

All of us will be judged. All of us will be condemned. And all of us will be saved.

Such is Jesus’ sovereignty, the King of both heaven and of hell.

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

Credit where credit is due: This homily is a reworking of a post from Fr Aidan Kimel’s blog Eclectic Orthodoxy. If you liked mine, you should go read his original.

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