Doing time as teacher of a sixth-grade Sunday School class, I one time casually referred to the return of Christ and his final judgment. A kid blurted out, “You mean he’s coming back?” The innocent little Methodist did not appear to receive word of Christ’s Parousia as good news.
First Sunday of Advent, first of new church year, first lesson, the church makes us preach the good news of Christ’s judgment: “If only you would tear open the heavens and come down! … make your name known to your enemies, the nations would tremble in your presence … you were angry when we sinned … We have all become like the unclean; all our righteous deeds are like a menstrual rag … Don’t rage so fiercely, Lord; don’t hold our sins against us forever …” (Isa 64:1-9, CEB).
Judgmental Isaiah preps us for threatening Mark: “In those days, after the suffering of that time, the sun will become dark, and the moon won’t give its light. The stars will fall … Then they will see the Human One coming in the clouds with great power and splendor … He will send the angels and gather together his chosen people from the four corners of the earth … But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the angels in heaven and not the Son. Only the Father knows. Watch out! Stay alert!” (Mark 13:24-33, CEB).
Although he denies us final judgment upon others or ourselves (Matt. 7:1–2), Jesus publicly and repeatedly proclaims himself as judge. Most of his parables are about judgment, as if judgment is the most difficult idea for him to get across.1 Jesus’s first followers had debates over when he would finally judge; none doubted that Jesus would judge.
Isaiah 64 voices a frequent prophetic theme: the “day of the LORD” when God would at last “tear open the heavens and come down.” What’s the Day of the Lord? Judgement upon the disobedient and healing the righteous (Mal 3:1–5).
The Father “has given all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22): “Human One coming in the clouds with great power and splendor … He will send the angels and gather together his chosen people from the four corners of the earth …” (Mk 13:26-27).
The notion that Christ has been appointed “as judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42), has always been tough for pagans (like us) to swallow.
Modern, Western, relatively affluent, fairly self-satisfied people (like me) chafe at the notion that there are limits on living our lives anyway we please and that we are ultimately accountable to anything greater than our own, sweet, individual consciences: Nobody can judge me but me. Mistakes were made, but it wasn’t my fault. My mother messed me up. Etc.
Early in ministry I helped craft a new United Methodist Service of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. Pushback came from progressive Methodists upset over our inclusion of the historic affirmation, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” (Italics mine.) They thought it downright antediluvian to bring up judgment.
Dismissal of divine judgment is hypocritical in an age of “Cancel Culture.” Though my church is loath to make judgements on behavior in a bedroom, we gleefully condemn to hell the hijinks on the floor of the Senate. “Prophetic preaching” is when the preacher brings down the gavel upon everyone but the preacher. Why did you leave your congregation? “For four Sundays our preacher failed to condemn ICE. Even in the prayers.”
Divine judgment collides with our image of Christ as indulgent, all-affirming and non-retributive. No way affable Jesus would critique creatures so innocent and well-meaning as we. Nonjudgmental Jesus murmurs, “Don’t bother submitting to redemption. I love you just the way you are. Promise me you won’t change a thing.”
Belief in Jesus as judge is affirmation that Jesus is God and we aren’t. Fleming Rutledge once declared in an Advent sermon, “The world does not belong to us; it belongs to the One who is coming,” and because the world— past, present, and future—is his world, “he is free to judge.”2 Not to judge Jesus as Judge is sign of true faith in Jesus, says Fleming.
God has created us without the freedom to concoct a meaningful life any way we want; God reserves the right to hold us accountable.
We so want to be our own judge. Some evangelical interpretations of divine judgment put the free, personally responsible human agent front and center instead of the wrathful/merciful, free-to-judge God. No one is sent anywhere into eternity against your will. Your future with God is up to you.
“You are here tonight to make the most important decision of your life,” the evangelist told the gathered youth. “Don’t say, ‘I’m only sixteen. I can wait.’ A kid died in a car wreck in Huntsville last week. Where will you spend eternity? Decide! Close your eyes and say the words with me before it’s too late, “Tonight … I give … my life to Jesus … so I can be … with him in heaven when I die.”
I growled, Christ’s connection with a sixteen-year-old kid is determined by the decisions of the kid? Do you know the stupid decisions they are capable of making?
What should the youth evangelist have said? “Good news. Your relationship with God isn’t dependent upon you. Fine, make decisions about Christ. Just remember: the most important decision is Jesus Christ’s choice to be for you.”
Judgment has been either jettisoned by embarrassed, mainline, sophisticated preachers or neutralized by evangelicals. Both present the Christian faith as mainly what you think, feel, or do. We rework Christ’s forensic finale into a contemporary program of human self-improvement, giving the false impression that you are the key to your future, accountable only to you.
The church of my youth made us repeat every week, “He shall come again …” but we crossed our fingers at “to judge the quick and the dead.” Buncombe Street Methodist Church had gone on record opposing “racial mixing.” Who wanted Christ to show up anytime soon and render a just verdict on life in Greenville?
Whether judgment is good news or bad depends in part on where you happen to be standing when you hear the news. “Holy and true Master, how long will you wait before you pass judgment and take revenge for our blood …?” (Rev. 6:10) cry the victims. In her Magnificat, Mary claimed that God hears the wails of the wounded and, in the birth of her baby, is setting things right (Lk. 1:51–53). Wrongs can’t be made right without judgment. Mary’s song discomforts those of us who have little to gain and much to lose at the prospect of God’s recompense of the powerful and mighty, but the harassed and helpless join Mary in clenching their fists and crying out, “Rise up, God! Judge the earth because you hold all nations in your possession!” (Psalm 82:8; see also Psalm 96:13).
Vindicating victims and correcting perpetrators is more than reward and punishment, it’s the victory of God’s creative justice over all that is godless. God not only creates and loves the world; God promises to set a fallen world right side up.
Paul tells beleaguered Roman Christians, “Bless people who harass you—bless and don’t curse them” (Rom 12:14), a tough assignment for the oppressed, who already have their hands full just surviving. Paul commands in light of God’s, “Vengeance and payback are mine” (Deut. 32:35). The harassed can courageously live non-retributive, nonviolent lives, confident of a future in which God vows to repay.
What’s remarkable is not that God makes judgments, but the types of judgements God makes. While God is slow to anger, note what makes God’s blood boil: injustice, idolatry, and infidelity, for starters. On at least one occasion, God goes so far as to “hate.” The reason? Worship gone bad. Read Amos 5:21-24.
In Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats, the final judgment is not on the basis of biblical fidelity, correct doctrine, sexual orientation, or decisions for Christ but rather our response to the bodily needs of others: visiting the prisoner, giving a cup of water, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger (Matt 25:31–46).
We could have an interesting discussion about whether or not God will judge one political party as superior to another. Unfortunately, there can be no debate over God’s assessment of rich people like me; Jesus made too many judgmental statements on the matter.
Rather than wonder why Judge Jesus angrily whipped the money changers out of the temple (Matt 21:12–13), better to ask, “Why are we so calm when God’s house is perverted into a supermarket selling nationalism, prosperity gospel, militarism, virtue-signaling self-righteous posturing, or feelgood self-care?”
Maybe our judgment in eternity will be to stand before the mirror of truth and for the first time take an honest look at ourselves. Admitting the truth about me may take a while, still, I’ll have all eternity to do it.
Or perhaps the Judge will put us next to those we’ve betrayed, hurt, or wounded. Made to see how our misdeeds have put in pain our siblings in Christ, we’ll be forced to look on the saddened face of Jesus (1 Cor 13:12). To at last see all the ways that we have frustrated and disappointed his love for us.
Why doesn’t God just let us be? Because judgment is part and parcel of the relationship with a God who promises, “I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine” (Jer 31:33). Christ’s judgmentalism is a function of his having entrusted to a bunch of servants the display of his kingdom. How many of Jesus’s parables end with the boss asking, “What have you done with what you have been given?”3 The Judge takes it personally when we give him a poor return on his investment.
I may not be caring, courageous, or indignant enough to set all things right, but I know that someday, somehow, the Judge will. Why should I not start today setting right some of the things within my reach?
“Now when the Human One comes in his majesty and all his angels are with him, he will sit on his majestic throne. All the nations will be gathered in front of him” (Matt 25:31). The one who sits upon the judgment seat is none other than a crucified Lamb who, “will shepherd them. He will lead them to the springs of life-giving water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev 7:17).
If we think of the Judge as a humorless jurist in a black robe, cool, dispassionate, objective, at a distance from the accused, we will misunderstand Christ as Judge. I’m all for the art of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the
Sistine Chapel, but when I see Michelangelo’s Judge, it’s difficult to recognize that the Judge is the forgiving, crucified Lamb of God.
The Judge is the one who taught love of enemies and praised a God who graciously makes the “sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45); who told of the waiting Father eager to receive the prodigal home (Lk 15:11–32); the patient and forgiving God who, though slow to anger (Num 14:18), “isn’t slow to keep his promise … but he is patient toward you, not wanting anyone to perish but all to change their hearts and lives” (2 Pet 3:9); the savior who urged his disciples to imitate God’s forgiveness and patience, forgiving seventy-seven times (Matt 18:22); the same God who cried from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Lk 23:34).
Karl Barth said that we so want to be our own judge, justifying ourselves, condemning others, determining what’s right or wrong. To save us from ourselves, Jesus displaces us both on the judgment seat and on the gallows. To our surprise, the Judge does not condemn us to the damnation we deserve, but rather, in his Incarnation, becomes one of the guilty, taking our place, receiving our sin, simultaneously becoming “the judge, the judged, and the judgment.”4
Sin isn’t excused; it is judged with a resounding “No” that is based upon God’s eternal “Yes.” The cross is both condemnation of all our sin and a way that God makes for us to come back to God. Jesus the obedient Son, offers to God the faithful human response that humanity refused to give. “So now the righteous requirements necessary for life are met for everyone through the righteous act of one person, just as judgment fell on everyone through the failure of one person” (Rom 5:18). “God has locked up all people in disobedience, in order to have mercy on all of them” (Rom 11:32).
“But nobody knows when that day or hour will come … Watch out! Stay alert! (Mk 12:33).
Maybe we are already being judged by our multiple slippery evasions of Jesus that so often land us up to our necks in misery. Perhaps, when we suffer the consequences of our human stupidity, we are being judged.
Maybe we, the accused, do not stand in solitary judgment before the Judge, as is done in human criminal courts, but in the solitary torments of conscience. The victims stand with perpetrators, the perpetrators with the victims. Think Bishop Desmond Tutu and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not Nazi judge Roland Freisler at the People’s Court show trials.
The separation of all created beings from God shall be separated from our ultimate destiny by God. Our various rejections of God shall be rejected. Our repeated refusals refused by the Judge who, “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3–4). At the Last Judgment, God at last gets what God wants. Us.
Just heard a stirring sermon during which the preacher chided us for “not modifying your lifestyle in one detail, even though you know that your lifestyle imperils God’s Creation.”
That sunny Sunday about 11:30 was, proleptically, my Judgment Day.
We invited students over to our house for lunch after a Sunday service where I had preached. (Call me old-fashioned, but I feel it’s important to have students in faculty homes.) After lunch, as some played basketball in our backyard, a student said, “You have a beautiful place. This is the first time
I’ve ever been in a Duke faculty home.” “That’s terrible,” I replied with indignation.
“You aren’t typical of Duke faculty in being so hospitable to students,” said the student.
I beamed.
“Let me ask,” he continued, “as a Christian, how do you justify having such a nice house? Wasn’t Jesus kind of hard on people with this much property?” I should have been alert for the coming of my day of judgment.
One more: I was on a rant about the new denomination that had been formed by purloining congregations from my U.M.C., saying that the breakaways ought to be ashamed of themselves for tearing apart our church and taking what didn’t belong to them. And their spurious use of Scripture! Don’t get me started.
A divinity student interrupted, “So you are sure that there’s no way that the Holy Spirit might be behind some of this? Could it be that Jesus doesn’t need the U.M.C. as much as you?”
Even if Jesus is my only Judge, I was judged.
