Third Sunday of Easter
April 23, 2023

I Believe in Jesus Christ; ...
from Thence He Shall Come to Judge the Living and the Dead

A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 67
Matthew 25:1–46

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This is a story about judgment. Half of the people in this troubling story are told, “Depart from me.”

That’s bad news.

The era of reality TV gave us lots of creative ways to give the bad news of judgment, maybe more interesting than just “Depart from me.”

If you hear one of these lines on a reality show, it’s bad news. See if you recognize some of them.

You are the weakest link. Goodbye! (The Weakest Link)

The tribe has spoken. (Survivor)

You’re out. Auf Wiedersehen. (Project Runway)

Now sashay away. (RuPaul’s Drag Race)

And then there’s the one from my favorite reality show, the one my wife and I have spent hours watching because it is currently in its twentieth season: Please pack your knives and go. (Top Chef)

Reality TV has given us lots of ways to render judgment with flair, and, for the judge, they’re all bad news.

Judgment is bad news.

I’ve been on the receiving end of judgment. It feels terrible. Most meaningful things we can do involve a measure of judgment, from auditioning for a play to applying to college or for a job or asking someone out on a date.

You expose yourself to judgment every time you put on clothes and go outside. Things you have no control over become fodder for peoples’ judgment. Whether it’s your skin color or your gender, any kind of observable disability you might live with, or just your physical appearance.

Whenever you publish or post something online, people can judge it; there it’s even worse, because the scale of the judgment is practically unlimited, and you can be badly hurt by the judgment of an online community.

We have all experienced some version of judgment that hurt us. We’ve all also rendered some version of judgment on someone else that hurt them.

But we’re in church here. Church should be a safe space in terms of hurtful judgment, right? Well, as some of you will know from your own experience, it isn’t always.

Christians are — not without good reason — associated by many with a very harmful kind of judgmentalism that looks down on and condemns people on the basis of their dress or their sexual orientation or gender identity, their age or their politics.

Sometimes the judgment is obvious and grotesque, like signs proclaiming that God hates certain groups of people and that they’re bound for hell.

Other times the judgment is delivered more gently and wrapped in assurances that the one passing the judgment is only doing so because of how much they love you, “speaking the truth in love,” loving the “sinner” while hating the “sin.”

Even churches that strive to be inclusive and welcoming can be places where people feel negatively judged. Maybe you don’t know the right greeting or the words to a prayer everyone else seems to know and nobody explained it to you, so you feel like an outsider or worse.

God forgive us.

Because Jesus taught very clearly about judgment. He said, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged.” He taught not to “judge by appearances.”

He said, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “‘Let me take the speck out of your own eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

He said, “Let you who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Jesus was very clear in his teaching about passing judgment on people, and so you would think that a church would be the least judgmental institution in the world. You know as well as I do that that’s not the case, and I’m sorry that’s not the case.

Jesus teaches us very clearly that judgment is bad news.

But judgment is also, somehow, good news.

We come today to the Apostles’ Creed clause about judgment. You can read it there in the bulletin: “he will come to judge the quick (that is, the living) and the dead.” This is the grand finale of what the creed has to say about Jesus, and it is uttered with the same amount of conviction as every other thing the creed says about Jesus.

He will come to judge, just as he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.

He will come to judge, just as he suffered under Pontius Pilate.

He will come to judge, just as he was crucified, died, and was buried, just as he rose again from the dead, and just as he ascended to heaven.

Just as he is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty, Jesus will come to judge.

The creed says “he will come to judge” like it’s excited about it, and it is. Because the creed knows what all of the voices of the scriptures know, that God’s judgment (God’s judgment!) is good news.

The psalms know that perhaps better than most biblical voices. Psalm 67 (which we just heard) exclaims to God, “Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth.” Psalm 72 prays, “May God judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.” Psalm 96 says, “The Lord is coming to judge the earth. God will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with God’s [own] truth.”

Psalm 119 even pleads for God’s judgment: “How long must your servant endure? When will you judge those who persecute me?”

To the ears of faith, the announcement of God’s judgment sounds like good news. Not condemnation, but equity — righteousness and truth and justice. As one commentator puts it, for the Bible “without judgment there is no justice.”

Which brings us back to Jesus’ story. This story — with its sheep and goats, its Son of Man coming in glory with angels to sit on a throne, its eternal fire and devil and his angels — is one of many biblical imaginings of God’s future judgment. They all belong to a kind of biblical literature called apocalyptic. The best known is probably the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, but it’s not the only one.

These kinds of biblical stories imagine the future judgment of God as good news, because they view it from the perspective of people who have been persecuted and oppressed.

The earliest apocalyptic visions of the Bible come from the time of the exile, when the Jewish people were conquered, their temple desecrated and destroyed, and many of them forcibly deported by the invading Babylonian empire. Out of that experience came visions like the one in the Old Testament book of Daniel, where this term “Son of Man” originates and where a great beast representing the empire is destroyed. It’s good news, because it comes from the perspective of those beaten down by the empire for generations.

Jesus’ apocalyptic stories use many of the same terms and images, because Jesus, too, takes the side of the persecuted and the oppressed. Jesus is one of the persecuted and the oppressed; he “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” remember?

Jesus tells his followers these stories of judgment in order to identify them with the persecuted and the oppressed. Jesus sent the disciples out two by two, and he told them to go with nothing, to subject themselves to the kindness of strangers, even as he warned them not to expect it. He sent them “as sheep into the midst of wolves.” He told them that they would be handed over and flogged and dragged before governors and kings.

Is it any wonder, then, that the earliest Christians looked forward to the judgment of God as good news, that they prayed, “Come, Lord, quickly!”? We should wonder today if we don’t do likewise. Because the voice that proclaims judgment as good news is the voice of Jesus’ followers, then and now, standing in solidarity with those crying out for equity and righteousness and truth and justice.

Even when they’re not even aware that they’re doing it.

The most remarkable feature of this story is the surprise of the two groups of people addressed by the king: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?”

“When was it that we saw you … hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?”

They were living into their reward — and living into their punishment — without even realizing it. One theologian has said, “To believe in heaven is to refuse to accept hell on earth,” and I think this is what he means, that the notion of an eternal kingdom for the righteous and eternal fire for the accursed are not reserved for the future but are actually part of life-and-death experience right now. He means that our hope for a future judgment of God as good news to rescue the persecuted and the oppressed has to be grounded in a struggle against the forces of persecution and oppression in real time.

Accepting hell on earth is its own punishment. When we resign ourselves to suffering (both that of our neighbors and our own), we are diminished as children created in God’s image and we build the walls of our own prison cell.

For you who find yourselves persecuted and oppressed today, believe in the hope of heaven and say no to unjust treatment, because your present plight is inconsistent with your promised future, and God did not create you for hell on earth.

If you don’t find yourself on the receiving end of persecution and oppression, consider how one of the oldest figures in the Presbyterian church, John Calvin, described the notion of hell. He said hell is a metaphor for self-imposed separation from God. For those on the left in the parable, God was right in front of them in their neighbors in need and they chose to separate themselves by not helping. They imposed hell on earth on themselves by accepting it for their neighbors.

And what’s true of the warning is true of the promise: it’s already here. Refusing to accept hell on earth is heaven. Resistance against any unjust treatment we or our neighbors experience is its own reward.

Mother Theresa, the nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and ministered to the people of that city for nearly fifty years, knew that reward perhaps better than anyone who ever lived this side of the resurrection. Mother Theresa spoke of Jesus’ appearance in what she called “the distressing disguise of the poor.” Of course, she knew Jesus’ apocalyptic story about the ones who served the Lord without even knowing it. Jesus also appears to us, she said, in the “lowly appearance of the bread.”

This is why we share this sacramental meal as part of our worship, because it’s a way for us to practice recognizing Jesus in something common, as common as the hunger and the thirst of our experience, as common as the need for shelter and affordable housing that dots this city and most others like it, as common as the face of the person who is going to ask you for help right at the moment you feel least prepared to offer it.

Communion is heavenly practice. It’s a taste of the future promised to “the least of these” who are members of God’s family, in the present. And you are invited. No tribe has voted you off the island; you are not the weakest link; you don’t have to pack your knives and go or sashay away. You can come as you are to be welcomed and fed and sent out to invite still more.

Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church