Advent 3(C) - 17^th December 2006
Judgment or mercy?

So, with many other exhortations, [John] proclaimed the good news to the people.

And good news it is, I assure you!  Good news that God is coming near to his people.  The Kingdom is upon you! went John the Baptist’s preaching – and what does that mean to us?  How does it make us feel to know that the light is going to shine in the dark places of our world, the dark places of our lives?  What will God’s judgment be like?

The Church is often criticised, and particularly the liberal part of the Church of England, for failing to speak out.  We’re criticized for sitting on the fence, for shilly-shallying and giving vague, even evasive answers when challenged to say what the good news actually means.  We’re always ready to speak of the love of God in our daily lives, and how that helps us to face the pressures and pains of life.  But are we as ready to speak about the destination of our journey – that’s what the season of Advent invites us to consider: it invites us to stand in that excited crowd listening to the Baptist: Prepare the way of the Lord!  Make his paths straight!  It’s a compelling thought that the paths of the Lord are those which we have prepared through our love for each other, and for him.  How straight are they?

John the Baptist was a prophet.  That’s to say, when he spoke, people felt that they were hearing, directly, God’s word for them.  John was an old-fashioned preacher, and didn’t mince his words; even the hardened nuts, like tax-collectors and Roman soldiers, were suddenly willing to change their lives in response to his powerful preaching.  John the Baptist tells us that the Lord is coming, with his winnowing-fork in his hand, to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Hell-fire preaching is a thing of the past, and rightly so – although you might well say that we heard some here from our visiting preacher three or four weeks ago.  So what is the message of John the Baptist’s preaching for us today?  I am sure that he would caution us: make sure that you retain the truth of God as judge, even if you reject the style in which that truth was communicated.  So for a moment, let’s consider the judgment John is announcing.  Human justice is always inadequate: the guilty are sometimes acquitted, and the innocent wrongly condemned.  John’s message was that there is an ultimate court which we must all face, and to which we must all give account.  Life is not meaningless; actions ultimately do matter – and so does inaction, and we must answer before a just judge.

So does this mean that we must live in fear and trembling in the face of God as a fearful judge?  Certainly, if we are guilty, we’re going to be found guilty in this ultimate court.  However – and this is a huge but – judgment is only half of the story, and there’s the other aspect of the good news which as Christians we know is love and mercy.  Yes, there will be judgment, but yes, God is merciful and loving because, as St John says, Jesus came into the world not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.  St Paul says, In Christ there is no condemnation.

In our epistle reading St Paul writes to the Christians at Philippi and gives a very different story.  There, the announcement that the Lord is near doesn’t strike terror, but causes rejoicing.  It puts an end to worry, instead of causing it.  Because the Lord is near, his peace will rule our hearts in all circumstances.  So Rejoice in the Lord always … And the message of the prophet Zephaniah in the first reading is the same: Rejoice and exult with all your heart.  The Lord has taken away the judgments against you – there it is quite plainly in the Old Testament as well, surely a promise of the new order promised with the coming of the Lord

Jesus came into the world not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.  That’s why we don’t need to preach hell fire and damnation.  Because though even Jesus himself spoke of the wheat and the chaff, and the separation of the sheep from the goats when the Son of Man would come in his glory to judge the nations: and although he spoke of the outer darkness, and the weeping and gnashing of teeth of those who had not done the Father’s will – I’m quite convinced that that was a figure of speech, setting up the alternative to the life of eternity in God’s presence.  Can we really believe that God would create people in order to condemn them to eternal torment?  I don’t believe that, and I’m ready to say that I disagree entirely with what we heard three or four weeks ago when our visiting archdeacon spoke about the Book of Life, and those whose names are written in it, and those – more importantly – who are not.

Quite apart from anything else, it’s clear that we can’t judge whose name is and whose isn’t written in the Book of Life.  When Jesus was asked who would enter the Kingdom of heaven he said very clearly that it was not necessarily the good, religious people who thought that they were assured of a place in heaven: It is not those who say Lord, Lord who enter the Kingdom of heaven – but those who do the will of my Father.  And in that end-of-the-world scenario in the judgment court in heaven (in St Matthew chapter 25 if you want to look at it later) the people who thought they had good lives were told that they had missed the point: and the people who thought they had never done anything good for God in their whole lives were told: inasmuch as you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.  So we can’t judge whose name is written in the Book of Life; and I believe most strongly that life is offered to everyone, to all of God’s creatures – even though that offends our sense of justice, which includes not just the finding of guilt or otherwise, but the sentence as well – because it is in the sentence that God’s love and mercy are shown.

The Old Testament is strong on judgment, and condemnation.  But it’s also strong on God’s love and mercy; and sometimes these two aspects of God are difficult to reconcile.  There are many texts in the Old Testament which speak of a loving God who disciplines his people – and perhaps we can understand that in a human way, but there’s still a sense of uneasiness, of two conflicting themes.  But the story of the Old Testament was of God revealing himself to his people, and the building up of a relationship in which, bit by bit, they began to understand him better.  The full revelation – hinted at by the prophets – was only seen in Jesus Christ; in him the tension between the conflicting themes – the apparent conflict between judgment and mercy – was resolved by his incarnation, death and resurrection.  Here judgment and mercy find resolution, as God himself intervenes to defuse the power of human rebellion, to absorb sin and death into himself in Christ, so that they ‘count’ no longer.

Now that sounds like what this Christmas season is supposed to be about - good cheer and exuberance and all that.  And so much more!  The rejoicing that Zephaniah and Paul announce is so much more than the superficial merry-making of Christmas.  Real rejoicing is what happens when we ‘confront’ our sin, ‘face up’ to the coming judgment, and ‘turn toward’ God's redeeming love.

The Good News of Advent is that God is coming to us, not to destroy us but to refine us, to help us to become what we were meant to be.  Praise God!  Rejoice!