Judgment. Wrath. Destruction and Darkness. Bitter Devastation. Weeping and Gnashing of teeth. We are told that these are the things the Day of the Lord will be filled with—the Day of God’s reckoning—the day of God’s judgment. It’s not a pretty picture: “I will bring such distress upon people that they shall walk like the blind; because they have sinned against the LORD, their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung.” Talk about a bleak image! The Day of the Lord is not comfortable, in fact, the biblical picture of the coming of God is downright terrifying.
And notice, this isn’t just the witness of dour Old Testament prophets like Zephaniah—the picture is no different in the New Testament, when Jesus himself is talking about the day of the Lord. The master of the parable of the talents, standing in for God, renders his judgment on the unproductive slave: “You wicked and lazy slave! . . . Take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus himself is right in line with the Old Testament prophets: God is a God of judgment, and on the last day, people will be called to give an account of their lives. In fact, Jesus is in on this judging thing, too—we’ll hear more about that next week. And every Sunday, we agree with him! We stand up after the sermon, and we say that line in the creed about Jesus coming to give judgment: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Does this sit well with you, this description of the Day of the Lord and the Judgment of God? Or does it make you shift a little bit in your seat, set your teeth on edge, so to speak? I know that it’s not what I want to hear about God as we get closer and closer to Turkey Day and looking forward to Christmas. I want to hear about the God who loves me, the God who created the world and called it good, who fills my life with blessings. I want to hear about the God who comes into the world as a cute little baby, the God of “silent night” and the Christmas Crib. I want to hear the easy things about God, the nice things about God: that’s what I want to hear; but I need to hear the harder things about God, too: I need to hear the whole truth about God. I need to be reminded that God is not all puppy dogs and rainbows; God is not just a warm fuzzy feeling—God is real, and God is powerful, and God loves with the world with a ferocious love that will not rest until we are what God has made us to be. God’s love is not indulgent affection: God’s love is like the love a mother has for her children when they are in danger—a love that will do anything to protect the loved one from harm.
We are not accustomed to thinking about love and judgment together; in fact, I suspect we’ve been trained to think about love as overcoming judgment: isn’t love about forgiveness? But judgment and forgiving aren’t opposed to each other—you can’t forgive someone unless you’ve judged that what they’ve done is wrong, and requires forgiveness. God is everything that we say about Him—God is full of love and compassion, forgiveness and mercy, but God is also a god of Justice. And if there’s one thing I want you to hear today, it’s that all of those things: God’s justice, God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, and God’s judgment—all of it stems from God’s true and fundamental nature: God is love. And God’s love judges everything that goes against love. That’s the meaning of justice—justice is not about vengeance and punishment; God’s justice is about making room for real love to flourish and grow by removing the things that try to stamp it out.
Jesus teaches us that the greatest commandments are these: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Our senior warden Myra preached a fine sermon about those commandments just a few weeks ago. The judgment that we hear about in today’s lessons is mostly a judgment on our failure to love God—next week we will hear more about loving our neighbors, but for now, the focus is on God. Who are the ones undergoing judgment on the day of the Lord, according to Zephaniah? They are the ones who have contempt for God: “those who say in their hearts, ‘The LORD will not do good, nor will he do harm.’” According to Zephaniah, God’s judgment comes upon those who think God is irrelevant and uninvolved in their lives, it comes upon those whose lives are consumed with the accumulation of things and wealth and who care nothing for matters of the spirit: “Their wealth shall be plundered, and their houses laid waste. Though they build houses, they shall not inhabit them; though they plant vineyards, they shall not drink wine from them.” If all of our attention is on our material well-being, and not on what is pleasing to God, how can we say that we love God? If we think that God is impotent, that God will take no action, will do no good or harm, how can we say that we love God? If we are to really love God, then we have to act and behave as if God matters to us, we have to spend time talking to God, and listening to him, trusting him, and recognizing that God cares about everything we do.
But we also have to recognize that God cares out of love, and not out of a desire to catch us in our wrongdoing—God is not out to get us. And that’s the other obstacle to loving God, the obstacle we see illustrated in the parable of the talents. The problem with the slave who buries his master’s money isn’t that he doesn’t care what his master will do; the problem is that he is so afraid of his master that he completely misjudges the master’s character. The unproductive slave is so afraid of his master that there is no room for love; he is paralyzed by fear. When the master demands an account, the slave insults his master: “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid.” We can do the same thing to God, we can convince ourselves that God is harsh and cruel and vindictive, and if that is how we approach God, without love for God in our hearts, should we be surprised if that is how God appears to us? If we are convinced that God is a terrible and awful and harsh judge, how can we say that we love God? How can we say we love God if we refuse to see that God is love?
The parable of the talents closes with that terribly hard verse that seems to go against so much of what we say and believe about a loving God: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Whatever happened to the God who loves and cares for the poor? Will that God take away what little they have? This verse makes no sense if we think it is talking about possessions, or money, but it makes perfect sense if it talking about love. When God calls us to account, and judges our lives—if we have no love to show from the love that God has given us—then we have nothing. But if our lives are full of love, if we are bursting with love, then we will filled with even more.
God is judging us, but the basis of God’s judgment is God’s love. And we know the fullness of God’s love in the life and death of Jesus Christ. I’m going to say a lot more about that next Sunday, when we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, but for now, I want to leave you with some words from St. Paul about God’s judgment, and about how we are to support each other in faith and love as disciples of Jesus: “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.”
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