Reign of Christ
Diana Lipton, author of a tome on “Unexpected Biblical Tales”, wrote that:
Readers of all persuasions have a tendency to privilege simple interpretations over complex, unsettling, readings. The more fraught the issue, the more often we find in the history of interpretation that a simple reading has been generated that masks its complexity.1
So, to the Judgement of the World. Not just a little bit of it. All of it. The phrase “all the nations” is deliberate. Judgement, then, is not about individual fate per se. It is about the fate of “all the nations”.
Furthermore, it is vital to keep in mind that the Parables of the Kingdom are always qualified by the phrase “is like” or “as if”. “The Kingdom of God is as if
…” That opens many doors of enquiry. And it also means that attempting to derive doctrine from parables is a pretty futile exercise. In short, do not take a parable literally.
Which means that we are faced with questions, the exploration of which may lead “all the nations” through the thicket to enlightenment.
Philosophy and Religion teacher, Janet Williams, often starts a study session on judgement by asking her students to summarize what they already know. 2 And up pops the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.
When asked, “What is the criterion by which one is judged?”, they usually agree that the answer is ethical, but disagree on what ethic. Compassion for the poor? Have we been good or bad? Or are we, as Luther suggested, justified by grace, that is to say, through God’s free and unmerited gift of faith in his Son as our Saviour?
Nevertheless, everyone usually agrees that “there will be a day when humanity will be gathered before the throne of a righteous Judge, who will separate us into two streams, one welcomed into his kingdom of love, one banished forever”.
What do we do with this? It is there in black and white. Unthinkable. Unpreachable.
Rowan Williams noted that “the Christian engaged at the frontier with politics, art or science will frequently find that he or she will not know what to say,”3 because the languages of these other arenas of life are not at home with our theological language. The premature and facile use of Christian interpretation, he says, “invites judgement of another kind”. 4 So, the “Church judges the world; but it also hears God’s judgement on itself in the judgement passed upon it by the world”. And that judgement amounts to this:
… that Christian language actually fails to transform the world’s meaning because it neglects or trivializes or evades aspects of the human. It is notoriously awkward about sexuality; it risks being unserious about death when it speaks too glibly and confidently about eternal life; it can disguise the abiding reality of unhealed and meaningless suffering. So it is that some of those most serious about the renewal of a moral discourse reject formal Christian commitment as something that would weaken or corrupt their imagination.5
It is possible that when the Church fails to understand that, inter alia, “the political realm is a place of spiritual decision …”, it “forfeits the authority to use certain of its familiar concepts or images in the public arena”.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s well-known meditation written for his godson’s baptism in 1944, remarks that
Our Church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self- preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word or reconciliation and redemption to [hu]mankind and the world. 6
Bonhoeffer sought a non-religious language in which to proclaim the Gospel, one that would purvey the word of God in such a way as to change and renew the world. He did not seek to modernize or secularize the lexicon of dogma and liturgy. Rather, it would be more like Jesus’ own language and practice, in that it elicits God’s peace within her/his creatures – that is, all the world.
Whether or not it uses the word “God”, it would bring about faith, conversion, hope.7
Bonhoeffer’s paradigm is, quite simply, the encounters between Jesus and those he calls or heals, events in which people are drawn into a new kind of life and identity. In this, “They do not receive an additional item called faith; their ordinary existence is not reorganized, found wanting in specific respects and supplemented: it is transfigured as a whole.”8
We could call the language Bonhoeffer sought Parables-plus-Jesus, for its seminal context would be that of Jesus’ own life and practice. Such a language is universal because Parables-plus-Jesus are not religious stories or expositions of a tradition. Rather, they are stories of everyday life; they crystallize how “people decide for or against self-destruction, for or against newness of life, acceptance, relatedness”.9 This is what made Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book Women Who Run with the Wolves so powerful.
Parables do not so much convey a particular truth as provoke discussion and rumination, during which deeper layers of truth will be disclosed. This is, in part, what Jesus and Hebrew prophets meant by “having eyes to see and ears to hear”.10
The transfiguring of the world in Christ will seem partial or marginal if we have not learned, by speaking and hearing parables, a willingness to lose the identities and perceptions we make for ourselves. All good stories change us if we listen to them attentively. The most serious stories change us radically.11 (Death and Resurrection and all that.)
Litmus test. Ask yourself, am I the same today as I was yesterday? Theology, wrote Williams,
should equip us to recognize and respond to the parabolic in the world - all that resists the control of capital and administration and hints at or struggles to a true sharing of human understanding, in art, science and politics. It should also equip us to speak parabolically as Christians, to construct our meanings and our acting “texts” about conversion – not translations of doctrine into digestible forms, but effective images of a new world like the parables of Christ.
Therein lies the power of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, which is almost devoid of Christian language. And the force of the witness of the L’Arche Communities lies in what they are, collaborations of those we call handicapped with those we call normal. Is all. No theology. Just living – pun intended.
With that, I leave you with the parable to ponder afresh over the coming weeks or months. Keep it close to your heart; and you may receive an unexpected gift.
And what price judgement? More questions. Consider the empty tomb. Only John’s Gospel has two angels sitting inside the tomb, at either end of the grave slab (20:12). Why? This tale calls to mind the Mercy-Seat of God, the Ark of the Covenant surmounted by two golden cherubim, their huge wings touching to frame the empty space of the seat itself (Exodus 25:18-19).12 So John’s Gospel invites us to see the empty tomb as the very judgment seat of God. Is Christ’s resurrection the “incarnation” of God’s word of judgment? Is our judgment about the identity of this Christ the criterion which will separate the sheep from the goats? Is this a valid question? Or does John perhaps seek to reassure us that our Judge is the one who, in surpassing love, gave his life for us, and asks us “Why do you weep?”13
“Whatever story we tell about judgment is secondary. What has primacy is the greater conviction: God is love, loves us freely, and in him justice and mercy meet and kiss.”14
Amen.
Doug Bannerman 2020