the Second Sunday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
On Judgement
Folks seem to have mixed opinions on memorizing scripture. For some, it just creates a fragmented view of the Bible that leads to the worst kind of proof-texting. For others, it is the practice necessary for indwelling the text such that interpretation becomes possible. Whichever is true, I happened to be formed in a strong Bible-memorizing community, but at best I only committed myself to that work halfheartedly. So I find myself left with fragments of verses from which to make sense of my faith and life. But, as Willie Jennings always observes, the work of theology is often no more than living among the fragments and trying to figure out how to go on (cf. After Whiteness)[1].
The fragments that sit with me this second Sunday in Advent come from Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” and 1 Cor. 6:3 “Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!” These two fragments point us to one of the great questions of tension in the Christian moral life, ‘What are the ways of judgment?’
In the ancient Church, it was taught that the season of Advent was the fitting time for concentrated preaching on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. As such, on this Second Sunday of Advent, we reflect on Judgment, specifically, the final Judgment. The Revised Common Lectionary lessons lean into this ancient theme of judgment with Malachi declaring the coming of the Day of the Lord, “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” The Church is right to ponder judgment in this anticipatory season of Advent, for the coming of the Lord is not just all mangers and angels; it is the arrival of the one whom the alternate Old Testament lesson from Baruch speaks, the Everlasting one who orders the mountains razed and the valleys raised.
The approaching judgment of the Divine arrival is a great and terrible moment, but it is not simply a cudgel to beat the fearful with. No, these texts are unanimous in their affirmation that this coming judgment is good news for Israel and good news for the world. But how can this be? Luke tells us, “...you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.” This, then, is the form of the judgment of the Divine coming; the proclamation of salvation by the forgiveness of sins.
But how is the forgiveness of sins the exercise of Divine judgment? Precisely because the forgiveness of sins carries with it a guilty sentence. The innocent do not require forgiveness, only the guilty. Forgiveness is the offense of the gospel. It is an incredible act of Divine power to at once proclaim a guilty sentence on the world and at the same time provide its means of salvation. This is a power that God alone can exercise, and has exercised in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The forgiveness of sins is properly God’s work because it is only God who can fully account for the demands of justice that such forgiveness entails. Who else can forgive offenders while ensuring justice for their victims? While it may be true that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ it is nevertheless also the case that the tragic outworking of the history of sin has left some of us more sinning than sinned against and others more sinned against than sinning. What human institution or exercise of power can sort out the competing demands of justice that the problem of sin has left our world mired in?
Thus it is God alone in the perfection of all holiness, power, and goodness, who has both the right and the ability to forgive sins. This is good news. For if God has the ability, nay, the prerogative to judge, then we have been freed from the anxiety that if we do not intervene, history will go awry. The Last Judgment of God is what ensures that history is more than a story written by an idiot. In God’s good Judgment, the life-denying works of evil come to naught and the alien righteousness of Christ is presented as our own. Covered in Christ’s blood, creation finds its answer to the prophet Malachi’s question of who may stand when the Lord appears.
The Last Judgment is a pastoral doctrine and an evangelical proclamation. But it is also a profound moral commitment. For the Christian to live in the time of the secular, this tension-ridden time before the end, is a gift we have been given wherein we exercise proximate judgments in the ongoing work of discerning the good owed to our neighbours without succumbing to the anxiety that we must set the world to right. We need not cry out with the crusader, “Deus Vult” while dispensing acts of retributive violence as a proximation of divine judgment, for this would be to prematurely cut history short. The Last Judgment will come at the end of all things, and so we are free to cultivate the moral patience necessary to live peaceably now. Because ultimate Judgment is the Lord’s, we are able to make the provisional judgments that make weeping with those who weep, and rejoicing with those who rejoice fitting responses to the somewhat absurd contingencies of history.
The exercise of Christian judgment can go forward with evangelical confidence precisely because the exercise of temporal judgment is provisional. This is where the fragments with which I began this piece come back into focus. The Last Judgment at once frees us from the burden of making ultimate judgments on the direction of history. For what could we do other than indict ourselves with that kind of judgment? Yet precisely because we have been set free from the burden of making history itself turn out alright, we are free to exercise proximate judgments amidst the matters of this world with confidence, as St. Paul reminds us. We live in the midst of tension, but we can live and act and make prudential judgments amidst this tension, secure in the knowledge that in the end, all will appear before the Judgment seat wherein the “tender mercy of God, the dawn from on high, will break upon us.”
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