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The God Who Is Our Judge Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 15, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 4:2-6 John 5:19-30
“It’s not our sins we don’t want to think about” writes essayist Christina Buchmann in an essay on God’s judgment. “It is God. God’s greatness is uncomfortable to contemplate, reducing us to tininess. God’s power is an awful thing to imagine, since it means that we are continuously at God’s mercy.” We are thinking about God in the season of Lent through the revealing lens of John’s gospel as we make our way to Easter morning; and on this third Sunday, John would have us think about the God who is our judge. “Whether or not one believes in God,” Buchmann continues, “there is no appeal beyond God. The idea of God is savage and extravagant as we see during the few moments that we might try to think about God without the humane guises of benevolent father, disappointed husband, merciful judge. Our imagination puts a hand over our eyes as God passes.” But if it is “with a judge” that we have to do, “there is the hope of getting around his judgment. If God really knew it was Me, surely [God] would not let me die.” Have we not all thought precisely that thought: in the doctor’s office as we wait for the results of a biopsy or on a plane as it suddenly loses altitude? If God knew all of my good intentions, knew all that I have yet to do with these precious days I have been given, surely God will not let me die this way…here…now. But more than the vagaries of chance and accident that put a prayer on our lips begging God to spare us, there are the things left undone that we ought to have done and the things done that we ought not to have done due to…well…extenuating circumstances. “To know all is to forgive all, and we praise [God] as omniscient,” reasons Buchmann. “Modeling God on earthly ideals of justice gives humans a relatively good deal: To weigh our worth by the method we consider fair, [God] would have to take our individual circumstances into account.” Knowing us personally, paying singular attention to our situation, God would be “half-way to seeing us as we see ourselves….These are the terms we want to get God thinking in. Articulated rules, paradoxically, bring with them the possibility of reprieve and exceptions that might be made.” What sort of mental gymnastics do you suppose Bernie Madoff will be daring when he next appears before a judge for sentencing? What wild hope do white collar criminals hold out for themselves in particular because they are a cut above the fray, are intelligent and well-bred, are good husbands and great fathers? Why else did I, who never wears a clergy collar, don one for my own appearance in traffic court save that I was sure this particular detail about me would convince the judge that I really did check to make sure the perfect parking place did not have a handicapped sign painted on the ground? I did check. It did not. Really! Honestly! If human judges can take into account the details that made us do something we here and now promise we will never do again or can see us for the good person we really are, how much more will the God who is our judge be merciful, clergy collars and white collars notwithstanding? In both instances, we think God to be a God whose judgment of us is susceptible to influence. So when we find ourselves up against life’s intractability asking what we might have done to deserve some great suffering or what we might promise in order to be spared a tragic end, we plead, we bargain, we beg for mercy. And even when we know we deserve to have the book thrown at us…or at the very least a shoe…we convince ourselves that we are special in God’s sight, singularly seen by the omniscience of the One who, when all is honestly revealed, will take pity on us and forgive. We also think, in the second place, that the God who is our judge is a God whose judgments conform to our own in uncanny ways. So it is that our penchant for cheap grace as regards our own sin and God’s judgment does not translate into the same leniency being granted by the God who is our judge to those whom we judge to be beyond the pale of our God’s salvation. To wit: members of West Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas appeared on the campus of the University of Chicago this past week, where our own Blair Thornburgh and Claire Pritchard matriculate and where, according to the Baptists from Topeka, our antichrist President once taught lies…I mean law. The Christians carried placards declaring: God Hates Islam, God Hates the World, Mourn for Your Sins, You Are Going to Hell and their signature placard, God Hates Fags. “…where does our judgment always lead?” asks Karl Barth. “To the place where we pronounce ourselves innocent, and where, on account of their venial or mortal sins, and with more or less indulgence and understanding or severity and inflexibility, we pronounce others guilty. This is how we live.” The University of Chicago students countered the Christians with posters reading: God Hates Gen Chem, God Loves Red Lobster, God Listens to Kenny Loggins, God Plays Lazer Tag. Blair’s personal favorite was a flier declaring “God Hates Figs” replete with proof-texts: “Jesus rebuked the fig as an evil abomination” (Matthew 23); “Jesus commanded us not to eat of the cursed fig” (Mark 11); and God promises terrible vengeance upon any fig-loving nation” (Jeremiah 29). Wittingly or not, the students’ playful theological counter protest underlined the original sin on full display in the placards raised by the community of Christians opposite them. “We have seen that in its root and origin,” writes Barth, “sin is the arrogance in which [we] want to be [our] own and [our] neighbor’s judge….[Ironically, we] become a sinner [we distance ourselves from God] in trying to be as God.” This is, in fact, our human nature at work, says Barth. “To be a [mortal] means in practice to want to be a judge, to want to be able and competent to pronounce ourselves free and righteous and others more or less guilty. We enjoy ourselves in this craft and dignity. We find our consolation and refuge and strength in exercising it.” Surely this was the case with the religious community that caucused in the wake of Jesus’ sabbath healing by the Sheep Gate at the Pool of Bethesda. His offense was compounded, you remember, by his claim to be working as God was working. “For this reason,” writes John, they “were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.” Yet do you not see that by presuming to occupy a position of judgment, by deciding in God’s name that Jesus deserved death, Jesus’ accusers were the ones who made themselves equal to God? “The fruit of [the tree of knowledge of good and evil] which was eaten with such relish is still rumbling in all of us,” observed Barth wryly. Here is the arrogance of human judgment meted out in the name of God…against God…by God’s appellate appointees: by the Jews in the first century and the Baptists of Topeka or the Presbyterians of Philadelphia in the twenty-first and by all of God’s most religious followers who have unwittingly become sinners in trying to be as God. This is how we live…and we are literally killing each other as well as dying ourselves from “this office of judge which we have arrogated to ourselves.” But this is how we no longer can live, says John in his fifth chapter, because God in Christ has relieved us of the burden of being God, of being judge and jury in relation to the other. In response to the judgment of the particular religious cabal met in John’s fifth chapter, Jesus says that God has given all judgment to him. The news ought to come to human beings as a great relief! Yet as the story goes, not only in John but in most of the rest of human history, we do not step down from our lifetime appointment to the bench graciously. “If this man is my divine Judge,” we think, “I myself cannot be judge any longer” and one of us has to go. (“It’s not our sins we don’t want to think about: it’s God. God’s greatness is uncomfortable to contemplate, reducing us to tininess.”) In Jesus’ presence our human judgments, the judgments that would condemn the other to death either literally or by our denial of the other’s God-given destiny, are reduced to tininess, small mindedness, stupidity. Who made Christians judge and jury for the rest of humanity some logically have asked? Anticipating this, we come to the table armed with chapter and verse to justify ourselves. This is how Christians live: by text-proofed human judgments that condemn not only the other but also our own human existence to the death that is life without God in the world. Do you begin to hear the irony? By presuming to be judges in God’s name against the other, we are guilty of blasphemy, of equating our knowledge of good and evil with God’s. Yet the One who, in truth, is our Judge—who opposes our judgment--is judged by us to be the blasphemer when, in truth, he is the Judge who is judged in our place: judged by us and condemned; judged by God for the sake of our redemption. There are no human analogies. You could say that it is as if the judge were himself a victim of Bernie Madoff’s ponzie scheme and instead of recusing himself from the case he pronounces Madoff a prisoner for life and then announces that he will serve the life sentence in Madoff’s place. Unfortunately this is not redemptive but ridiculous. Rather there is only One who, in the place of all of us, “has wrestled with that which separates [us] from [God]. [Christ] has Himself borne the consequence of this separation to bear it away.” He did this not because we were innocent, but because we have chosen to live without him; he did this not for the eternal salvation of the ethically pure but in order to dwell with those who finally know they need him every hour, need him to keep them from falling, need him especially when they are sure they have fallen too far from his grace; he did this because the God who is our Judge is for us and decided, from the foundation of the world, to be with us eternally. “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus says “anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life.” “It’s as if we instinctively know that taking in this [word] would be like seeing God himself,” Buchmann concludes, “and if that didn’t kill us, as seeing [God] would, it would mean losing or giving up something, because it would change us in uncomfortable ways.” It would be as if we had passed from death to life because in him and by his grace, we have. Thanks be to God! |