God's judgement and mercy - a sermon for the seventh Sunday after Trinity

Wisdom 12: 13, 15-19; Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-42

John Martin, The Last Judgement

As I have been reflecting on today’s gospel reading and its theme of judgement, and particularly of God’s final judgement on us all, I kept returning in my mind to words I have commonly used when taking funerals. Those words begin like this:

God alone is holy and just and good.

In that confidence, therefore, we commend you

to God’s judgment and mercy,

to God’s forgiveness and love.

As I then sat down to start writing this sermon, I thought I would just confirm where I had got these words from. After a period of extensive searching I couldn’t find them in any of the Church of England’s official liturgies. Now as someone who takes my vow of canonical obedience to use “only those forms of worship authorised and allowed by canon” I started to worry that through all my ordained ministry I had been using forms of words and prayers plucked from some unknown and unattributable source. After more searching, I discovered that these words – which I think I must have picked up from colleagues when I was a curate – actually come from the funeral service in the Prayer Book of the Church of New Zealand. 

As I disappeared and then reappeared from this little liturgical rabbit-hole I was struck by one thing; how little our liturgies at the time of death, and beyond that our worship more widely, speaks with any confidence of the theme of judgement. For instance, when I was searching for these texts through the online versions of the Church of England’s funeral liturgies, I discovered that judgement is only mentioned eight times. Seven of these are either in, or references to, biblical texts, and only once is it used explicitly in the prayers we are asked to use. And even then, this is a third alternative prayer. Similarly, as I was searching for the source of the words I opened this sermon with, I found more than one example of their use where the word “judgement” had been removed.

Why, I wonder, are we so anxious about judgement?

There are, I suspect a whole series of reasons. One reason is that questions of a God who will judge us are difficult to square with the image of a benign and loving God. That then links to our desire not to think too hard about how we might fair on that fateful day. Then we reflect on how thoughts on judgement draw us uncomfortably to the darker angels of our identity and humanity.

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath

Too often in human history the justification of judgement has been used to excuse acts of human cruelty in the name of some greater cause or hope. For instance, in 1209, during the siege of the French city of Bezier during the Albigensian crusade, the Cistercian Abbot Arnaud Amarlic was asked how the invading Catholic army could distinguish between the orthodox Catholics and the Cathars they had come to kill. “Kill them all”, Arnaud is said to have cried in judgement, “God knows which are his own”. Such terrifying certainty in judgement is not limited to those seeking a religious justification. Several centuries after the massacre in Bezier, during the aftermath of the French Revolution, the revolutionary General Turreau took troops to quell and anti-revolutionary uprising in the Vendee. There, in an echo of Arnaud’s judgement, he was again asked how to distinguish between those loyal to the revolution and those they had come to put down. His judgement was terrifyingly clear:

I order you to burn down everything that can be burned and to spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region – it matters not, we must sacrifice all.

When faced with this history of the rashness and cruelty of human judgement it is not a surprise to find that we struggle to make sense of this theme when we encounter it in our theology and in our reading of scripture and in our image of God.

Judgement – and in particular God’s final judgement – is at the heart of our gospel reading this morning. Known as the Parable of the Weeds, Jesus helps us navigate this theological conundrum. He does this by speaking of two differing forms of judgement. The first is recognisable to us in their extreme form in the examples from Bezier and the Vendee. In the parable the master’s slaves, when they discover the weeds growing amongst the good wheat, suggest a quick and decisive response:

The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?”

This is the response of human judgment. A quick, clear, and decisive response, where the utilitarian desire is to cut away and remove the perceived problem comes, for those who suggest this, with the acceptable cost of destroying the good grain.

Against this we hear of a second form of judgement. Responding to the slaves, the master instead counsels patience. To the slaves question the Master replies:

No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.

On one hand we could argue that this second form of judgement merely postpones the fateful judgement what we are squeamish about now. That whenever it occurs judgement brings with it a judgement that some will be saved and others will not. But what this reading misses is the role that God’s patience and love play in this second form of judgement. We have a glimpse of this more benign form of judgement in our reading from the Book of Wisdom. Here God’s judgement is always tempered by mildness. However, the ultimate sovereignty and power of God is not denied.

In our parable Jesus takes this tempered and patient judgement and brings us to a deeper understanding of the inextricable link between God’s judgement and the love God reveals to us in Jesus. It is a form of judgement which speaks, as all Jesus’ parables do, not about us, but about the true nature of God. That, as the prayer I opened this sermon with reminds us, God judgement comes interwoven with God’s mercy, and forgiveness and love.

In his poem Judgement the great English priest-poet George Hebert reminds us of the inextricable link between God’s judgement and God’s love for us in Jesus. The poem begins with a vision of the terrifying forms of human judgement which we do often project onto our understanding of expectation of God’s judgement:

Almightie Judge, how shall poore wretches brook

                                  Thy dreadfull look,

Able a heart of iron to appall,

                                  When thou shalt call

          For ev’ry mans peculiar book?

Faced with this terrifying and dread-filled image of judgement, Herbert suggests that some will seek to present a polished, if not honest account of themselves to God. 

What others mean to do, I know not well,

                                  Yet I heare tell,

That some will turn thee to some leaves therein

                                  So void of sinne,

          That they in merit shall excell.

But, Herbert argues, this cannot stand. At the last judgement we will be called to be honest and open with God about all our failings. That all of us, returning to the image of our Gospel reading, are not one thing or another, but bundles of weeds and wheat in different measure.

However, as he imagines us presenting this ledger of our lives to God only to find that our failings, our faulty, our sinfulness has already been accounted for in God’s love for us in Jesus. It is, Herbert reminds us, Jesus who gathers to himself all the sinfulness and fallenness of our lives in the love and sacrifice of the cross. As the poem concludes:

But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,

                                  That to decline,

And thrust a Testament into thy hand:

                                  Let that be scann’d.

          There thou shalt finde my faults are thine.

What our parable reminds us today, and what George Hebert’s poem invites us to reflect on, is the reality that – despite our squeamishness – God’s judgement is something on a vastly different scale and scope than our human models and experiences of judgement could ever show.

God’s promised judgement is not something we should fear or try to hide from. God’s judgement is, and will be, a source of comfort because this judgement does not start with human certainty and confidence. Rather this divine judgement comes from the source of our God who is patient and loving. It is, and will be, a judgement that draws us into the true revelation of God’s mercy, and forgiveness, and love.

John Martin, The Plains of Heaven