Years before I became a pastor I learned a lot of good things from people who, even at the time, I differed with a great deal.
I had just finished a bachelor’s degree. Jen and I were married when we were 20 and 22 respectively and I was in the process of being hired by the church that we attended. I wanted to learn what I could about ministry and I knew that connecting with people who had been at it for a while would be one piece of this. There was a man at the church who volunteered a lot. He helped with many things around the church and he volunteered at a church camp. He also went onto ships that came into port in Vancouver and handed out religious pamphlets, also known as tracts. I met with him. I even went on some ships with him. I saw the work that he did at a local community mission that aimed to help sailors from around the world. The centre provided means for the sailors to make calls home. It gave them a comfortable place to relax and watch tv or play pool. There was information on local grocery stores and of course, lots of tracts.
It was an interesting alignment. Much of the work was to help the crew of these ships, but behind it all was a hope that these men would “say the prayer”, that they would turn to Jesus. In other words, the work was informed by compassion and service, but also by a kind of fear of judgment. What would become of these men if they did not become Christians? Was anyone asking them about their eternal destiny?
I still appreciate the heart and selflessness of the man who put so much time into such church work. While this is true, I see the world and faith very differently than he did.
Around the same time I also met with a man (pretty much all of the leaders in the church at the time were male) who helped to run an inner city mission. This agency sought to help people who had fallen on hard times, people who were caught in cycles of addiction. When I became a youth pastor I took the youth group regularly to the mission to help prepare and serve meals and to run some chapel services. A few times a year I would have lunch or coffee with the man who went to our church and was key leadership figure at the mission. He gave a ton of time to this ministry. He clearly cared for the people who needed the help. Again, there was this interesting, and sometimes troubling, coming together of compassionate giving and service with an obvious desire that people who were helped would “accept Jesus". I remember during one lunch that this man told me that we don’t hear enough about judgment in the church. He said that God’s love was important, but that we ought to be more mindful of God’s judgment as well.
You may have heard similar things if you have had connection with religion in general and the evangelical church in particular. Judgment is one of those things that has been so deeply misunderstood. Years after the conversation at lunch that day I became senior pastor at the church. I came to discern that the man’s longing that people would hear about judgment likely had to do more with family and personal matters than it did with matters at the mission. These kinds of anxieties are true for most of us.
This understanding of judgment seems to see it as a kind of straightening out, a forceful, difficult and necessary correction. This view is demonstrated by a sense that “people (other people) need to hear” something that identifies a behaviour or belief or way of life as unacceptable or just wrong or damaging. Behind this is often the idea that the way someone else is living or believing is an offence to God and they must hear about it. Of course, any feeling of how arrogant such thinking is can be assuaged by the follow-up, “for their own good, for their eternal good”, etc. etc. This follow-up allows harsh judgment to be thought of as a virtue.
One obvious reaction against this kind of thinking has been to move away from the concept of judgment entirely. After all, Jesus did say, “Do not judge.” However, I have never actually met anyone who is against judgment. Look around today, during the fourth wave of this pandemic, and ask yourself if people are really against judgment. Of course we are not. The proper Christian view of judgment, though, is something so much better than that which pits person against person. It is instead a concept that exists within the larger concept of God’s love.
Karl Barth writes a lot about a hopeful concept of judgment in a section of his multi-volume theological work. The section is called, “The Judged Judge in Our Place.”
I won’t unpack all of the quotes below. I will simply invite you to read them and consider how they sound better than so much else we may have heard about judgment.
“Human judgment leads to the place where we pronounce ourselves innocent … and others guilty.”
“The fact that Jesus Christ judges in our place means an immeasurable liberation and hope. The loss which we always bewail and which we seem to suffer means in reality that a heavy and indeed oppressive burden is lifted from us when Jesus becomes our Judge.”
“It is a nuisance and at bottom an intolerable nuisance to have to be the person who gives sentence.”
“Why did God become human, one of us, our brother, our fellow in the human situation? The answer is: in order to judge the world. But in light of what God has actually done we must add at once: in order to judge the world in His freedom, to show His grace, to pronounce us free in passing sentence, to liberate us by imprisoning us. That is why He humbled Himself. That is why He never abandoned us.”
The way in which we judge: (as opposed to the self-giving way in which Jesus is Judge)
“We rack our brains to figure out how to make it clear to others that they are wrong. We want to either bring them to an amendment of their ways or give them up as hopeless, withdrawing from them or fighting against them.”
In days like these we can be given hope by the judgment of Jesus Christ. The picture of God’s judgment is Jesus giving Himself, not abandoning anyone, never de-humanizing anyone. We won’t have to watch the news for long today to see that there will be opportunity to aim for a life-giving view of judgment rather than a polarizing view.
Dear God;
Thank you that you show a judgment that is higher and better and more loving than that which we so often see in the church and in the world and in ourselves. Give us eyes to see.
Amen.