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.

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The Propers for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (4 before Advent) can be viewed here.

Entrance Antiphon

Let hearts rejoice who search for the Lord.
Seek the Lord and his strength, seek always the face of the Lord.

The Collect

Blessed Lord,
who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,
we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Readings

Missal (St Mark’s)         Ecclesiasticus 35:12-14, 16-19

                                    Psalm 33:2-3, 17-19, 23

                                    2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

                                    Luke 18:9-14

 

RCL (St Gabriel’s)          Ecclesiasticus 35:12-17

                                    Psalm 84:1-7

                                    2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

                                    Luke 18:9-14

 

My parents, had they still been alive today, would now both be in their late 90s and so they were of a generation that grew up without TV. For them, as for millions of others of theirs and similar generations, home entertainment meant listening to the radio and playing records on a gramophone or record player. It’s not too surprising then that when I was growing up, even though I don’t remember a time when we didn’t have a TV, the radio or records would be playing in our house every bit as often as the TV would be on.

So when I was growing up I heard a lot of radio programmes. I must admit that I don’t remember too much about the programmes themselves except how annoying I found the habit of the presenters and DJs to constantly talk over the music they were playing. One thing I do remember though, from one early morning radio programme, that I heard on one particular morning, is the words that were spoken rather than any music that was played.

It must have been a ‘Thought for the Day’ slot in the programme or something like that and on this particular day the presenter was talking about a time when a younger member of his family had fallen seriously ill and, despite the prayers of other members of the family, had died. The presenter said how angry this had made him, and although he was now a Christian, at that time he was agnostic but even so, his anger was directed towards God. He said that he wanted God to be real, not to just exist, but to be a real, live person whom he could get his hands on because he wanted to put his hands round God’s throat and throttle him for allowing this young person to suffer and die and for putting his family through such pain. Even more, the presenter said he wanted God to have a family so that he could throttle the life out of them, so that God could know what it’s like to lose someone you love; so that God could suffer in the same way that he and his family were suffering. The thought for that day he wanted to make though was that later, when his anger had subsided, he realised that suffering isn’t God’s fault because people usually suffer at the hands of other human beings, and the world is the way it is because the world and it’s people have, to a very large extent, turned their backs on God and the love that Jesus Christ came into the world to proclaim and show. And he also realised that God had experienced the pain of seeing a loved one suffer and die, in the Passion and Cross endured by Jesus. And indeed, in the suffering of the world because each and every one of us is beloved of God.   

I’m not sure when I heard those words, I’m not sure whether it was shortly before or shortly after I’d returned to the Church after my teenaged absence, but I have always remembered it. And I think one of the reasons I’ve remembered those words is that I’m reminded of them whenever I read or hear the parable of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge, which we’ve just heard in our Gospel reading.

On the surface, the similarity is recognisable but not particularly remarkable; the widow isn’t getting the justice she thinks is due to her and so she keeps pestering the judge until she gets what she wants. So, as Jesus said, this is a parable about the need to pray, always, and not to lose heart even when our prayers go unanswered at first because, in the end, they will be answered. But if we look at this parable in a little more depth, the connection between it and the words I heard on the radio all those years ago become clearer.

Our translations of this parable vary, but whichever translation we use, the unjust judge says something like,

“…because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”

But a more literal translation would be,

“…because this widow causes me so much suffering, I will grant her justice, otherwise she will keep coming and end up giving me a black eye.” 

I think the similarities between that literal translation of the parable, and the sentiments expressed in that radio programme are very clear; the anger at someone who could give us what we want but doesn’t, and the wish to cause suffering and do physical violence to them because they haven’t given us what we want.

In the parable, of course, Jesus contrasts the unjust judge with God by saying that even an unjust judge will give justice eventually, if we’re persistent enough in our demands for justice, so how much more will God, who is a just judge, gives us justice and how much more quickly will he do that than an unjust judge. But this is where we run into a problem with this parable.

Jesus says that God will give his people justice ‘speedily’. But, as we look at the world around us, we can’t help but ask, where is God’s justice? We all know, I’m sure, that our prayers aren’t always answered in the way we’d like them to be, nor as speedily as we’d often like them to be, regardless of how often and how earnestly we pray. So what’s going on here, what is Jesus saying?

If we take Jesus’ words at the end of this parable as a whole, I think we can make sense of what he’s really saying. Jesus said,

“…will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

I think what these words imply is that God’s justice will come quickly, but only when the time for judgement and justice comes, and that is when Jesus, the Son of Man returns. That is when everything will be put right but the problem for us is that we have no idea when that will be, and it might not be in our lifetime. Nevertheless, we, as God’s people, are called to keep faith and persevere in prayer until Jesus returns, whenever that might be and however long that means we have to wait for justice.

That is difficult for us because we want to see justice now. We want to see the wrongs of the world put right now. And we want to see the suffering in the world end now. And that’s only natural because we think and operate on the short span of our human lifetimes and when we don’t see these things happening, when it looks as though our prayers aren’t being answered, it’s very easy for us to be disheartened. We can give up on prayer because we don’t think our prayers are being answered. We can become very angry at the injustice and suffering in the world, and angry with God too, if not for allowing these things to happen then at least for delaying in doing something about it. And, in the end, because of these things, many people start to question faith itself, and many give up on their faith.

The real problem for us, I’m sure, is that we simply don’t understand at times just what God is up to in and amidst all the injustice and suffering, either in individual lives or in the world at large. But we’re not alone in that. In the Scriptures, doesn’t Job lament the bitterness of life, the injustice of it all, especially the injustice of the good and innocent who suffer? Doesn’t he wonder how we can make sense of it all in light of our belief in a just and loving God? But in answer God begins by asking Job a question;

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

In fact, God doesn’t really give Job any answer at all except to imply that Job  has no right to question God because he, Job, is only looking at things in human terms and neither sees nor understands the bigger picture. 

And in the New Testament, doesn’t Peter rebuke Jesus, criticise Jesus and tell him how wrong he is when Jesus tells the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem where he will suffer at the hands of the religious authorities and be put to death? And doesn’t Jesus, in turn, rebuke Peter by telling him that he’s looking at things through human eyes rather than God’s eyes, in other words, that he doesn’t understand God’s ways?

It is natural for us to do that though because we are human, and we want to see things happen that we think are right and we want to see them happen in our own lifetime. So, and as the Scriptures tell us, it’s only natural for us to question God, to wonder what God is up to, even to become angry with God for not doing what we think he should be doing. But, in the end, we have to accept that our ways are not God’s ways, and he works on a cosmic scale and timescale that we simply can’t comprehend. We have to remember that, just like Job, we were not there when God laid the foundation of the earth.

We need to remember too, that there is no human emotion that God doesn’t understand, not only because he created us in his own image and likeness, but also because his Son has lived on earth as one of us. Jesus himself wept at the grave of Lazarus, his friend. He wept at the fate of Jerusalem and his own people because they wouldn’t listen to what God was saying to them. The Father knows what it’s like to see his loved ones suffer and die because it has happened to his chosen people, Israel. It happened to his own Son, Jesus Christ. And it continues to happen today because he loves each and every one of us as his own children.

So, when we see the injustice and suffering in the world, let’s try to remember that it’s not God’s fault. Let’s try to remember that it doesn’t happen because God doesn’t care and doesn’t love us. When we see these things, let’s try to remember the parable of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge and try to remember that these things will be put right, but in God’s good time, not necessarily in ours. And let’s persevere in faith and in prayer so that we will be ready for Jesus’ return when all will be made well.

Amen.

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The Propers for the 29th Sunday in Oridnary Time can be viewed here.