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He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
Rollins Chapel
Matthew 25: 31-46
Justice and Judgment at last
Richard R. Crocker, College Chaplain
October 28, 2004
This is the last chapel service before the great election. When we meet again next week, we will most likely know not only who won the world series, but also who has been elected president of the United States. It is hard to tell which piece of information many people consider more important.
Let me assure you; who is elected president is much more important than who wins the world series - curse or no curse. Political life, even in a democracy, is greatly affected by who is in charge. Even in a society ruled by law, it is very important to know who makes the rules, and who interprets them. The president of the United States, we are constantly told, is the most powerful person in the world. The election is important.
But for Christians, who holds elected office is always a secondary matter - important, but secondary. The creed asserts the ancient Christian belief that the ruler of the world is God, and the judge of the world is the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Now this belief is not meant to sound menacing. It was meant to be reassuring. The Roman emperors and their appointees thought they ruled the world - that Caesar was Lord. Christians asserted that this was an illusion. The true ruler of the world was God, they claimed, and Jesus was Lord.
Now on the face of it this is nonsense. We know who holds power in the world. It is the people who control the oil and the money and the guns. So it seems. Such has the world always believed. And Dartmouth is a training ground to help you join their ranks.
To many people, the Christian belief in the Lordship of Christ seems self-evidently false. As sociologist Peter Berger puts it, "If Christ is victorious over evil, suffering, and death, why do these realities still dominate the human condition in this world?" For certainly they seem to do so.
The victory of Jesus is symbolized by his elevation to heaven and his being seated at the right hand of God. This is of course a figure of speech indicating the authority of Christ. In faithfulness to its belief that Jesus had redeemed the world by his death and resurrection, and in recognition that sin and death had not yet been vanquished, the church came to understand that while Christ's victory was assured by his resurrection, it would not complete until the final judgement.
So we are back at judgment. Something is still wrong in the world. Suffering and death and injustice symbolize what is wrong. The world will not be put right until justice prevails - until evil doers are defeated and punished and the righteous are crowned victorious. This is an ancient hope - as old as the Hebrew Scriptures and as contemporary as today's political headlines.
Even in a nation as relatively well-ordered and resourceful as our own, justice is imperfect. Even in a nation with a legal system as pervasive and powerful as our own, law-breakers go unpunished, and people are falsely imprisoned and executed. Police are bribed; justice is perverted. How much more is that the case in some other situations, where life and property are taken at the whim of a hopelessly corrupt government. Sudan comes to mind at the moment, but we could in fact list half of the nations of the world. The spilling of innocent blood cries out for vindication and punishment. If there is a righteous God, then those people who trample upon the rights of the poor and the innocent, those who practice torture and unjust imprisonment, must be brought to justice. They must be made to realize what they have done. They must be punished. So believe all of us.
So where is this Jesus, the one Christians believe was the messiah, the one who came to bring in God’s rule? Where is he when children starve because of greed, when women are raped by soldiers, when men who have by long toil have cleared a little land and built a house must stand by and watch it burn? God can not allow such things to stand. So believe all of us. But where is the Messiah?
We must wait, say Christians and Jews. Jews wait for the messiah to come. Christians wait for the messiah to return. But all agree that the arrival of the messiah will usher in a reign of peace and justice and health and fulfillment that is sadly lacking today.
And so the creed tells us that the Messiah who has ascended into heaven, into the Godly realm, will return to judge the quick and the dead – quick meaning the living, not the fleet of foot.
Far from being a frightening thing, judgment and justice at last are devoutly to be prayed for. People who have suffered from the tyranny of power and arbitrary torture want nothing more than to see its perpetrators destroyed. Don’t we all? Don’t we still root for the good people in the movies, the guys in the white hats, fighting for truth and justice and the American way? Don’t we want to see good rewarded and evil punished? Of course we do. If justice does not come, the world can not be redeemed.
It is into this expectation that Jesus arrived in history, and continues to arrive in our hearts. And the story of the last judgment, which is attributed to him in Matthew’s gospel, is both conventional and revolutionary. It is conventional in that it assures his hearers that good will prevail and that evil will be punished and destroyed. The image of the lake of fire is used for evil doers, and paradise for the righteous. But what is revolutionary is the standard used for judgment. Righteousness is not ascribed to members of a national or ritual group. There are no standards of orthodox belief that have to be met. Rather, Jesus assures his hearers that judgment will be meted out to everyone on the basis of how they have treated the innocent, the stranger, the imprisoned, the sick, the poor. That’s it. Those who have responded to need and suffering will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven, while those who – no matter how religious they claim to have been – have ignored the needs of others will be the ones who are destroyed. Reassuring? Yes, but only on the surface. More deeply it is a challenge to self-righteousness – not chiefly to someone else’s self-righteousness, but our own. Its effect should be to reassure us that justice matters, supremely and profoundly, and to break through every rationalization and ritual.
Many people today do not believe in any kind of ultimate judgment. All that matters is what happens now. The world belongs to those who take it. We should be nice, of course, but not because it matters ultimately. We should be nice just because it is to our advantage to be nice. This view characterizes most of our moral life. Other religious traditions, eastern ones, teach a law of karma. This present life’s actions will be rewarded or punished in a future incarnation. Ultimately, the mighty will be humbled. What goes around comes around. This teaching also proclaims a kind of justice.
But Christianity is different. We believe that we have only one life on this earth. What we do matters, ultimately. How we treat people will never be hidden. The truth will be known. Nothing is hidden that shall not be revealed. For most of the world, that truth is reassuring. But for some of us, it is scary as hell. Amen.
Sermon © 2004 Richard R. Crocker. All rights reserved.
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