The Four Last Things
Part Two: Judgment You’re judging me! That seems to be one of the worst accusations anyone can make against anyone else today. The thought that others may be judging us makes many people resentful. And the notion that God may judge us makes many people even more nervous and uncomfortable.
This Advent I’m preaching the traditional course of sermons on the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. So, today we come to judgment. Every Sunday, in the Nicene Creed, we proclaim that Christ “shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead.” Yet, in today’s Episcopal Church, the idea of God as judge is not often talked about; we’re far more likely to hear sermons about God’s unconditional love.
Yet, when we look at the word judgment itself, it’s not clear why it should have these negative connotations. According to one definition, judgment involves discerning the positives and negatives—or, in more traditional language, the good or evil—present in a person, situation, or action with a view to reaching a decision on how to respond. By this definition, we judge one another all the time, deciding, for example, who among our acquaintances are trustworthy, reliable, or worth cultivating as friends.
In the Bible, divine judgment comes at the very beginning, in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. On the third day of creation, God has just separated the dry land from the seas, and verse 10 tells us: “And God saw that it was good.” That refrain punctuates each of the succeeding days as God continues creating plants and vegetation, birds, sea creatures, animals and, finally, human beings. And then at the end of the sixth day: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
The original divine judgment on creation is thus entirely positive. And, if we’re honest, we welcome positive judgment from other people. The next time someone says, “You’re judging me,” an interesting response would be, “Yes, because I want to see the good in you.”
Yet we still resist judgment. One reason we don’t want to be judged is that we know from experience the imperfection of most human judges and we don’t want to be judged unfairly. We human beings tend to evaluate and judge one another with a critical eye that is quick to notice faults and flaws, quick to point out mistakes and missteps.
Yet, where human beings are prone to biased and defective judgments, God alone is the perfect judge who sees and knows us exactly as we are. God may judge us, indeed he will judge us, but he will never judge us unfairly.
But there is perhaps another reason why we resist the idea of judgment, and especially divine judgment. Right judgment always brings the truth to light; and in most cases there are still truths about ourselves that we’d rather not have to face: at least not yet. And so, like Adam and Eve in the Garden after eating the forbidden fruit, we hide ourselves and try to evade the judgment of a God who sees everything and knows all.
Last week, we considered death, the first of the four last things. What happens to us after death? The biblical revelation on the subject is couched in highly symbolic imagery and mysterious language that can only hint at rather than fully describe the realities to which it points. But the tradition distinguishes two judgments that we undergo after death: a particular judgment and a general judgment.
In the hour of our death, our soul is separated from our body and is brought into the presence of God. Immediately a judgment takes place based on how we lived our earthly life. If we lived and died in such a way as to completely reject God and all that he represents – if our lives entailed a willful rejection of all truth and goodness—then our soul is banished eternally from God’s presence and that is hell.
If, on the other hand, we lived and died in such a way as to have attained complete holiness and purity, then our soul is admitted directly into heaven. Most people, I suspect, fit into neither category – they are on the way but still have a way to go before they’re ready for heaven; and for them the immediate destination is that state of continued growth and purification that our tradition calls Purgatory.
And so, in the Particular Judgment in the hour of death, the soul, separated from the body, is assigned to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. Whatever happens in that hour, however, I suspect that the soul will recognize the judgment rendered as completely fair and just.
The biblical imagery of the General Judgment at the end of time is even more mysterious. At the Second Coming, when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, there will take place the General Resurrection, when our bodies will be raised from the dead, reconstituted from the elements, and reunited with our souls. Then will follow the Last Judgment, described in chapter 25 of Saint Matthew’s Gospel in the symbolic imagery of the king sitting on his glorious throne separating the righteous from the unrighteous as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. To the righteous, he will say, “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from before the foundation of the world …” But to the unrighteous he will say, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels …”
How, we may well ask, did such a negative judgment become possible? The answer is that the possibility of such divine condemnation is the necessary concomitant of human freedom and responsibility. Back in the Garden, Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden them to eat. The forbidden fruit symbolizes the aspiration to make choices based on our own judgment of what is good and evil. By misusing this freedom in the exercise of false judgments, however, we introduced sin into the world. Down through the generations, social evils have multiplied, from crime to poverty to war to destruction of the natural environment. And the only way that the whole creation can be redeemed and restored to its original state as very good in the eyes of God is by a process of divine judgment that begins in the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and ends in the return of Christ to judge the living and the dead at the end of time.
The season of Advent calls us to prepare to meet Christ as our judge. If we feel unprepared, the good news is that we still have time. But we don’t have forever. We are accountable to God for all our thoughts, words, and deeds. The choices we make in this life have eternal consequences. And on the remaining two Sundays of Advent, we shall have occasion to look at those consequences in more detail.
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