There will be a judgment, but it will be merciful, says John Garvey, an Orthodox parish priest in New York and a columnist for Commonweal.
Once I was talking with a woman in our parish who had come from a Muslim background and had been baptized as an adult in her husband’s Orthodox Christian faith. It was important for a couple to share a religion, she said, but what really matters is belief in God. I thought for a minute that she would follow this with the standard ‘we are all going the same way by different paths,’ the usual bland American thing (although she is Albanian). What she did say surprised me: ‘I think that I am able to trust a person more if he knows that some day he will be judged.’
Belief in judgment
For her, a belief in God was tied to a belief in judgment. This is certainly rare these days, even among many who consider themselves faithful believers. The God of popular imagining is less Father than Uncle. And while this may be blamed on many things – on a permissive culture, an overemphasis on unconditional love, etc. – it may also be a reaction against a version of Christianity which too often offered the vision of a God whose rules seemed arbitrary and capricious, a Christianity whose preachers seemed to take more pleasure in thinking of the torments awaiting sinners than the glory awaiting the saved.
Nevertheless, judgment is an essential part of the picture. Although there is a mushy way of representing Christianity as if it were a softer, less harsh religion than the Judaism of the Old Testament (and the mush usually continues by blaming all the bad Christian stuff on Saint Paul), in fact judgment and hell are much more a presence in the New Testament than in all the rest of the Bible.
Need to forgivethat God’s love is unconditional. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God longs for us to repent and will wait for us forever. But God’s forgiveness is not unconditional. The Lord’s Prayer and what follows in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew make it clear that if we do not forgive we will not be forgiven. Period. No qualification. Similarly, Matthew 25 shows that our eternal fate rests in what we have done or failed to do for others, most particularly the weak and powerless with whom the Lord is identified.
I do believe
This is in unbroken continuity with the tone of the prophets, who revealed God’s command that mercy and justice must be shown to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger – that is, to people who cannot return the favour. You have nothing to gain in such an exchange, and so you are like God in his mercy. And if you do not show mercy, you will not be shown mercy.
Actions have consequences
All religious traditions have a place for the idea that actions have consequences. In most forms of Hinduism and Buddhism this takes the form of karma: The consequences of your actions will be known in the next life, if not in this one, and the fruits of your actions, for good or ill, must be played out completely through the cycle of birth and rebirth, and can be escaped only through extraordinary effort.
Our tradition places a God who is not beyond good and evil at the centre, a God who has made us in his image, and who makes demands. Judgment in some central way comes directly from, is demanded by, the belief that we are made in God’s image. We had no choice in the matter – this is how God made us. That is to say, we are to reveal in our created natures what God is, through compassion and through our efforts toward clarity, our attempts to understand and know our world. We reveal God’s image by making and by cherishing. We are responsible for what we have been given, and we will be held accountable.
We cannot enter into the joy of the Lord without judgment. God’s judgment is not the external verdict of a magistrate passing sentence on someone he barely knows. It is the judgment present in our relationship with God as Father: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ This is not just a question of trading one good deed for another. Until we become capable of forgiving, we cannot become capable of being forgiven. We cannot know in its fullness what being forgiven means. And knowing is part of what our eternity means: ‘Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known’ (1 Cor 13:12).
Don’t rush to judgment
It may be asked, ‘What about “judge not, lest ye be judged”?’ This is addressed not to God but to us. Obviously it has to do with the rush to judgment that arises in our hearts when we encounter people who offend us, morally or even physically. (Consider the way some of us react negatively to people who are overweight.) The judgments we obviously need to make – to take a violent criminal off the streets, to arbitrate between quarrelling brothers – aren’t of this order; but even here we must watch the way we lurch toward judgment. Our judgment often means, to use an overworked and usually unnecessary word, closure – an ending of compassion, the slamming of a door.
Just as the Crucifixion cannot be separated from the Resurrection, so the knowing Paul speaks about in Corinthians cannot be separated from judgment. When the Son of Man comes in glory it will be for a rendering of accounts. We hope, because of what we have seen in Christ, that the judgment will be merciful. But it will be.
This article first appeared in Commonweal and was reprinted with permission in Doctrine and Life (Nov. 2001).
