The bright side of the Judgment
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
December 8, 2019—Advent 2A
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Have you ever watched a commercial and thought, “Man, I never realized I should be worrying that much about the color of my teeth or the texture of my hair!”? Or those infomercials in which someone manages to make a relatively simple household task like baking muffins seem to be an impassable minefield of sticking, broken disasters?
Somehow, the advertisers have created a problem you never had and made it into something only they can solve. All you have to do is pull out your credit card, and buy their magical product NOW!
I’ve long seen much of the Christian rhetoric about judgement in this same light: an exaggerated catastrophe based on a particular reading of a few bible verses (I mean, sure, muffins DO stick sometimes) that gets emphasized to encourage people to buy the product. Which, in this case, is whatever religious practice they insist will save you from this threat.
And look, if you accept this view of the Last Judgment: as a time when people will be sorted into two camps, and one goes to heaven and one goes to hell, then you really ARE going to want to buy whatever solution they might be peddling!
But what if that’s not the last word about the Last Judgment (or judgment in general)? What if the idea of God’s eventual judgment is also the promise that God will someday redress the balance, will right the wrongs, will call the world to account and make things whole again?
Then, maybe, the appeal of the Judgment isn’t just to scare people into doing and believing what you want them to do or believe. Then, perhaps, it expresses a longing for healing. A speaking of truth. A time for justice to be done and unfairness to be noticed and undone.
It’s important, as we begin a year of reading Matthew, to work with the idea of Judgment. Because Matthew saw judgment as inextricably linked to salvation, and thus it’s an inextricable part of his story about Jesus. Here, we are asked to consider the role that judgment will play in saving us.
But not so simply as: there will be a judgment, and those who are judged worthy are saved and those who are unworthy are not. Even in the passages of Matthew that are more directly about sorting, this isn’t the only way to understand what’s happening. But especially here, we see Matthew’s understanding that judgment is part of what will actually do the saving. All of us need judgment. All of us need the fire. Because none of us is perfect. None of us can claim to be made of truth, or justice, or kindness, or selflessness. None of us has nothing to confess.
We are broken, in a broken world. And that larger broken world is what makes judgment good news to so many people. Communities who have experienced injustice, who have deeply experienced the unfairness of the world, hear the promise of judgment as a reassurance that God will someday make that right. They grab hold of the promise that the unfairness, as awful as it is, is not God’s will, and it is not eternal.
To extend that to a personal level, Matthew reminds us that to invite salvation is to invite Jesus to judge us. Which I suppose could be some kind of masochism (or sadism if you delight in the idea of him judging others), but that’s only true, I think, if you don’t truly trust or understand Jesus.
Because remember: Judgment is an integral part of salvation. It’s about healing, not destruction.
It begins with truth telling.[i] Which is what all people who have experienced injustice long for, isn’t it: that the entire story gets told? That the real story gets told, and others recognize the pain and unfairness we have suffered. This, finally, would stop those scripts running in our heads; this would quiet our raging at past injustice; this would redress the balance.
But we don’t just long for the injustice done to us to be revealed. We also, oddly, long for our own lies to be untold. At some deep level, we want the unfairness we have perpetrated to be brought into the light.
Because there is dis-ease in having told those lies. There is discomfort and damage to our own soul for having done those things. As much as we are tempted to cover our tracks, we never really get away with anything, because we carry it with us.
Which is what makes Judgment into such good news. It means we don’t have to run forever. We don’t have to keep lying forever. That’s the promise of judgment: that you will eventually be relieved of it all, healed of it all, cleansed of it all.
Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire, John the Baptist warns. And yes, it’s an image to bring you up short. But fire is not always a threat of destruction. Here, it is the refiner’s fire. It is a truth that will lay you bare and strip your protections away. It is being brought into the presence of such good, such honesty, such a searching and powerful love that you will finally be able to admit and be released of all those impurities you’ve been trying to hide.
This is the promise of judgment: that you will be cleansed; you will be healed; you will stand in the truth and it will remake you. And you too shall bloom, like that stump of Jesse that Isaiah foretold, that seemed beyond all hope. In the presence of Christ, when you willingly (and okay maybe less willingly) lay yourself open, the sad dead parts of you will leaf and bear fruit. And then, as Paul promises, “the God of hope [will] fill you with all joy and peace in believing” (Rom 15:13). That’s the Judgment. May it be so, Amen.
[i] Sermon Brainwave podcast, #694, Second Sunday of Advent, posted November 30, 2019.