As I’ve spoken to people about their faith over the years that I’ve been going to church, and especially since I’ve been ordained, one of the things that I’ve found people to struggle most with about the Christian faith is the belief in a final judgement, the idea that, at the end of our lives we will be judged, and that God will punish people for their sins and that they might be condemned to an eternity in Hell for the things they’ve done wrong in this life. People find it very difficult to square their Christian belief in the good and loving God whom Jesus spoke about with the idea that such a God, a God who is love, could be so vengeful. And these conversations haven’t just been with lay people either. I remember very well a conversation about this with a group of curates during one of the study groups we had to attend when I was in the diocese of Blackburn.
In fact, this is a very old problem. Those 1st Century Jewish and early Christian groups whom we collectively call ‘Gnostics’ tried to solve this problem by making a distinction between a supreme and loving, but hidden God, and a lesser, judgemental god, whom they sometimes referred to as the demiurge. In their thought, it was the demiurge who was responsible for creation and for the evil in the world. In Christian Gnosticism, it was this god whom we read about in the Old Testament and Jesus, the Son of the supreme, good God, came to earth to bring knowledge of his Father, the true God. Judgement was a separation of the true disciples of Christ, who entered the good God’s kingdom, and the unbeliever, who remained a slave of the demiurge. One of the early Christian sects who promoted these ideas were known as the Marcionites. They rejected the Old Testament completely and their canon, their authorised scriptures, consisted of just eleven books; ten of St Paul’s Letters and a heavily edited version of St Luke’s Gospel. And if you think that sounds very odd, those ideas are still around today. I’ve met modern day Marcionites, people who think that the Church should do away with the Old Testament and all references to it in the New Testament on the grounds that the vengeful god of the Old Testament can’t possibly be the same God whom Jesus spoke about.
Unfortunately for those who think like this though, and for those who have problems with the idea of final judgement more generally, unless we simply ignore it, as the Marcionites did, we can’t get round the fact that Jesus himself spoke many times about judgement.
In St Matthew’s Gospel, for example, Jesus spoke about separating the sheep from the goats. The sheep, those who did the will of the Father, will be welcomed into the Father’s kingdom and into eternal life, whereas the goats, those who did not do the will of the Father, will be sent away to eternal fire and punishment. And in the Nicene Creed, which we say every Sunday and Holy Day in church, do we not profess our belief that Jesus
‘…will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead..?
Unless we’re going to ignore Jesus’ words, and step outside orthodox Christianity, we can’t doubt that we will all be judged on what we’ve done in this life. But how then, can we reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable things, a loving God who sent his Son into the world to save the world on the one hand, and the idea that some people will be judged not only unfit for salvation, but deserving of eternal punishment on the other? I think the answer perhaps lies in the way we think about judgement.
For us, judgement is very much about reward and punishment; reward for doing good, and punishment for doing wrong or evil. When we think or speak about justice that’s usually what we mean. But in the ancient world, rather than being about reward and punishment for good and evil, judgement was more often about knowing the right thing to do, and justice was about doing the right thing.
The Scriptures tell us the fear of the Lord, respect and reverence for God’s ways, is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is closely linked to judgement. Perhaps the most well-known biblical story about wisdom and judgement is the story of Solomon. In the First Book of Kings we read that God appeared to Solomon in a dream and told Solomon that he would give him whatever he asked for. But rather than asking for riches or long life, or any of the things he might have been expected to ask for, Solomon asked for wisdom. And the story we read to demonstrate Solomon’s wisdom is the story of his judgement
between two women who were arguing about which of them was the mother of a baby boy. Solomon judged the case correctly and we’re told that,
‘…all Israel heard of the judgement that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.’
Wisdom and judgement are closely linked and so when we think about the way Christ will judge us, and the justice God will hand out to us, rather than thinking purely in terms of reward and punishment, perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of what is the right thing to do. What is the right thing to do for a God who wants us to show justice and mercy to each other? And surely, the right thing to do for the God who not only wants us to show justice and mercy to each other but who sent his Son into the world, not to condemn it, but to save it, is to show justice to us by showing us mercy and saving us from eternal punishment.
When I’ve spoken about this to people in the past, they’ve been very happy with this idea of judgement because it seems to solve the problem of how a loving God can be so vengeful and be willing to condemn people to the eternal fires of Hell. It solves this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction by saying that the right thing for a loving God to do is to forgive us. So, when we stand before Christ to be judged, whilst our sins might warrant eternal punishment, Christ will plead his sacrifice on the Cross which takes away our sins, and we’ll be forgiven, acquitted, and welcomed into God’s heavenly kingdom. But there are a couple of problems with that.
If we go completely down this line, it suggests that no one will be condemned, and everyone will be forgiven and enter heaven. But just think for a moment about what that means. In this case who will we find in heaven, Jack the Ripper? Adolf Hitler? I think we’d have a great deal of difficulty with that idea too because our sense of justice would say that can’t be right. And in any case, that would go against Jesus’ own teaching that only those who do the will of the Father will enter his heavenly Kingdom.
But we also have to be very careful with this idea of judgement in another sense too. Whatever sins we may have committed, we’re not Jack the Ripper, still less are we Adolf Hitler. But we are still all sinners, and we can’t excuse our sins by saying that they’re not as bad as the sins of others and using that as a basis to say that we should go to heaven while someone else shouldn’t. Because what is that other than that worst of sins, spiritual pride, the belief that we are more worthy of heaven than other people, perhaps even that sin which some would call an unforgivable sin against the Spirit, the sin of presuming that our acquittal at the time of judgement is a foregone conclusion because we are already saved on account of our own efforts?
How ever good we think we are, we’re still sinners and as such, we’re all going to need the mercy and forgiveness of God when it’s our time to be judged if we’re going to enter the kingdom of heaven. So what can we do?
The first thing we can do, is avoid those sins against the Spirit that Jesus himself said are unforgivable. Proclaiming the words and ways of God to be evil, or to be wrong and perhaps, by extension, deliberately distorting the Word of God for our own ends. Wilfully and deliberately leading others away from God and into sin, especially the young and the vulnerable. For some, sins against the Spirit would include deliberately refusing God’s offer of salvation by turning away from Christ after having been his disciple. Or of presuming that we can achieve, or perhaps have already achieved our own salvation by our own efforts, without the help of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Some would include obstinacy in our sins as a sin against the Spirit too.
But even if we can avoid all these things, we must still see ourselves as sinners and recognise our need of God’s mercy and forgiveness because it’s only when we do see ourselves in this way that we’ll be able to do the things we all need to do if we’re going to be granted the salvation that God has offered us in Jesus Christ. We need to see ourselves as sinners so that we can show repentance for our sins. And that’s the message of the story of Zacchaeus in this morning’s Gospel. After meeting Jesus, Zacchaeus repented of his sins, he promised to change his ways, and Jesus said,
“Today salvation has come to this house because he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
We’re told that everyone who saw this meeting between Jesus and Zacchaeus, the tax collector, thought it was all wrong. No doubt these were the people who thought they were better than Zacchaeus, perhaps people who saw his sins without recognising their own? But we have to remember that judgement lies in God’s hands, not our own and so, regardless of what we’ve done, regardless of how good we think we are, we need to acknowledge that we are sinners and throw ourselves on the mercy of God, just as Zacchaeus did, and just as the repentant thief who hung on a cross beside Jesus did. Zacchaeus was granted salvation and the repentant thief was granted a place in Paradise.
We can’t doubt that we will all be judged on how well we’ve fulfilled the Father’s will during our earthly lives. None of us can really doubt either that the answer to that question, for all of us, will be that we could have done better. But let’s not forget either than God wants us to be saved and wants us to enter his heavenly kingdom; that’s why he sent his Son into the world. And let’s not forget that judgement does belong to him, and not to us. That might mean that there will be people in heaven whom we wouldn’t expect to be there, but let’s do all we can to make sure that we get there to find out.
Amen.
The Propers for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (4 before Advent) can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 