Judgment: A Proposed Paradigm

Don: In our discussion to date, we seem to have arrived at six principles regarding judgment:

  1. There is a judgment, and everyone is subject to it.
  2. Judgment is counterintuitive—everyone is surprised by his or her judgment.
  3. There can be joy in judgment.
  4. Judgment is a divine, not a human, prerogative.
  5. Judgment is linked to how we judge others.
  6. The quantitative outcome of judgment tends strongly to the positive rather than to the negative.

We’ve also noted that Jesus had much to say on the topic, particularly as He approached the end of His ministry.

Today I would like to propose a new paradigm for judgment; namely, that what is judged is simply our willingness to accept God’s grace. To put it another way: Our destiny is shaped by our willingness to accept God’s grace. Many parables support this paradigm.

Jesus knew that grace is a commodity so difficult that it is hard even to give away. The parable of the Rich Young Ruler makes the point:

And someone came to Him and said, “Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life?” And He said to him, “Why are you asking Me about what is good? There is only One who is good; but if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Then he said to Him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not commit murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother; and You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept; what am I still lacking?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But when the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property.

And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were very astonished and said, “Then who can be saved?” And looking at them Jesus said to them, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:16-26)

The rich young man asked how he could reach a favorable judgment that would lead to eternal life. The central criterion seems to be a willingness to relinquish the work of one’s own hands, to relinquish one’s own good deeds and righteous acts, and the profit therefrom, in favor of faith and trust in God. In short, we must be willing to exchange our own effort for the grace of God.

The answer Jesus gave the rich young man provides two important principles about judgment: (1) It is not about human goodness, since nothing is good but God; (2) Whatever the criteria might be, the act of judgment is something only God can do.

In contrast to the rich young aristocrat, Zaccheus, a hated (and rich) tax collector, willingly gave up half of his possessions, and was saved:

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man called by the name of Zaccheus; he was a chief tax collector and he was rich. Zaccheus was trying to see who Jesus was, and was unable because of the crowd, for he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree in order to see Him, for He was about to pass through that way. When Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, “Zaccheus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house.” And he hurried and came down and received Him gladly. When they saw it, they all began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:1-10)

Zaccheus was deficient in physical height (hence his need to climb a tree to see Jesus over the crowd) and in spirit. He sought to overcome his deficiencies through his own effort (climbing the tree). Jesus invited him down from his tree—and from his spiritual height such as it was—in order to experience the presence of the judge of all Mankind. The short, declarative sentence: “…hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house” is telling. There was no time to be lost, Zaccheus had to come down from his perch, and Jesus had to stay at his house—it was personal. Grace is urgent, essential, and personal. Zaccheus accepted all this and did so gladly, with joy. It is vital to note that it was God’s grace—not Zaccheus’ willingness to give half his wealth to the poor—that brought “salvation…to this house.” Zaccheus responded to the grace he was given by willingly passing it on to others. In contrast, the rich young ruler wanted to hoard what he had been given.

David: It seems to me that what is given up is not possessions but selfhood. The poor and the oppressed and others in the Beatitudes would have had no possessions to speak of—they had nothing left to give but their selves. The Prodigal Son had nothing left when he threw himself—by now, an empty shell—upon his father’s grace. Not all of us have material possessions, but each and every one of us has a self, which we must give up in order to receive God’s grace.

Donald: Many of us identify with our possessions. Giving up our identity, our sense of self, is indeed a very, very difficult thing to do. I remain somewhat confused. Grace is accepting Christ, but giving up one’s self for Christ seems to be a different thing.

Michael: Sometimes Jesus sets criteria we can align with; but sometimes they are impossible (in practice) for us to follow. “Don’t look at another woman or you are committing adultery! Give up everything! If your eye does something bad then pluck it out! If it’s your arm then chop it off!” and so on. So grace is our only alternative, if I am understanding this correctly.

Robin: You are talking about works, in contrast to faith.

Donald: Faith is about grace and our acceptance of Christ; works are our behavior. We seem to be trying to tie them together, but we tend to see them as separate entities.

Robin: I think the important thing is to get them in the right order. Our behavior should change in response to the revelations and acceptance of grace. Our behavior does not earn us grace.

Anonymous:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God. (John 3:16-21)

A decision to follow the darkness instead of the light is not work—it is just a decision. But having made a decision to follow the light, it is not easy, as Michael pointed out, to do so. The key thing is to make the decision—to prefer the light over the dark. To be saved, we must want to be saved.

Aishwarya: Giving up possessions and giving up sin are indeed difficult in human terms. But if we do good works because we feel it’s our duty to do so, then it is that much easier to give up our possessions. To the extent they work hard, company workers often seem to do so mainly with an eye to promotion, not because it’s the right thing to do. So, it seems to me, with God’s grace: We should live life as we feel it is our duty to live it, not because we expect to be rewarded. It is easier to give up things if we don’t look for them.

David: The good people in the Judgment passage had treated others with care and concern because it seemed to them to be the right thing to do. They were surprised to be rewarded with a place in heaven.

Donald: What is the rationale, or the motive, for giving to the poor or visiting people in prison? Is it a recognition of the difference, between giver and recipient, in needs, and in the ability to meet those needs?

Anonymous: It is something inside us that motivates us to give. It is not the object of compassion. Sometimes the seemingly needy are just frauds. We give because something inside us tells us to.

Donald: We don’t want to be selfish. If we don’t give, we appear selfish.

Anonymous: Sometimes we don’t give because we don’t have enough faith to believe that God will make it up to us.

Donald: I am not sure we think of our own needs and desires in that case.

Jay: I don’t think I understand what it means to accept God’s grace. I don’t know what it looks like. I can’t tell from other people’s faces if they have received it. Could we tell somehow, without knowing the events that happened to them, that the rich young ruler did not accept grace but Zaccheus did? How would we know?

Don: The joyous impoverishment of Zaccheus versus the joyless lifestyle of the rich young man might provide a clue. The key to accepting grace is to divest one’s self of something, in order to become selfless. In what proportion, I don’t know, but the passing on of grace is evidence of having received it.

Kiran: There is also a discernible gratitude component—Zaccheus showed it when he received grace. The woman Jesus saved from being stoned to death showed it in return for the grace she received. Paul lived simply but was always professing his gratitude for what he had. It might not be immediately obvious but will manifest itself over time. One is unlikely to get this sense of sincere gratitude from people who have refused grace because they think they don’t need it, like the Pharisee whose thanks to God for not being like other people ring hollow.

David: Where we go seriously wrong, it seems to me, is in seeking to discern on a rational basis. To the extent it can occur at all, true discernment can occur only internally, via the inner spirit, not via intellectual analysis of external sensory signals. The inner spirit is God. The intellect is self. Whether or not we think of ourselves as religious or spiritual, we often call the inner spirit “conscience” and we often tell our selves to do as our conscience urges. Intuitively, we know that our conscience is not part of our selves. Discernment is a tricky thing. Jesus (in my reading of Him) told us clearly enough not to mess with it intellectually.

Chris: The concept of grace should be comforting, yet I find it scary because it seems to require going against human nature. First, we have to give up control over our own lives; and second, we have to admit our faults in order to recognize our need for grace. Both of these are very hard for us to do.

Robin: As children we are told we must learn to “control ourselves.”

Kiran: Even after accepting grace, can we really know that we have received it, when we seem unable to help but retain some sin in us? If we help someone in need even though our intellect is screaming against it, can’t we only conclude that we are being driven by something divine, not something rational? Unfortunately, we tend to resist the divine.

Don: The paradox of grace is that it seems, on the face of it, so easy to accept. Who could turn down a free pass for sin? Muslims and others are aghast at what seems to them to be an evil concept. Jesus Himself said (if not in exactly these words) that it is extremely difficult for the divine to give away grace.

David: It seems we are most inclined to accept grace only when we appear to have no choice—when we have reached the end of our tether. I sense that Zaccheus was hurting badly, whereas the rich young ruler was just seeking to hedge his bets. The Publican was beating his breast in anguish, while the Pharisee next to him was preening in self-worshipful prayer. A mid-life crisis might make us feel like we have reached the end of our tether, but have we? One thing we can be sure of: We all come to the end of our tether when we die. And that must surely be the moment when the acceptance of grace is most critical.

Donald: We like to think we control our destiny, but we all know we don’t, really. We fight against unwanted circumstances—we seek to control them.

Jay: There seems to be a dichotomy between accepting grace and passing it on. On the one hand, we should do nothing—just passively accept the grace, since we cannot control the future; on the other hand, we should do something with the grace we have accepted. Perhaps doing something with grace follows naturally from receiving it. But in any case, the choice of doing something with grace or doing nothing (hoarding it) implies that we do in fact have some control over our future!

Donald: If we are dying, we have no control over the future, so it is easy to accept and pass on grace.

Michael: Jesus simply told Zaccheus to “Come down!” but He told the rich young ruler to give up everything he owned. Surely Zaccheus had it much easier…!?

Chris: If we are not sure we have received grace (or love, or kindness, or anything else, for that matter) then how are we able to pass it on? If we accept it, perhaps there is a natural gratitude that drives us to pass it on.

Donald: Is it necessary to consider grace and judgment together? It seems we can talk about grace alone. Can judgment be considered alone?

Don: Jesus seems to tie them together in the parables. That He devoted so much time and effort to His parables must mean that they contain very important messages. We will continue to examine them in this light, for messages about grace and judgment that God wants us to see. But all perspectives are welcome!

Anonymous: People don’t like the light because it exposes their bad deeds. So the judgment is not against them—it is for them, but they refuse it!

* * *

Who, or What, is Judged?

Jay: The parable of the Wheat and the Tares ends with a statement about judgment:

(New King James Version:) Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’ ” (Matthew 13:24-30)

Unusually, Jesus took pains to explain this parable:

(New King James Version:) Then Jesus sent the multitude away and went into the house. And His disciples came to Him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the tares of the field.”

He answered and said to them: “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, the good seeds are the sons of the kingdom, but the tares are the sons of the wicked one. The enemy who sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels. Therefore as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of this age. The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear! (Matthew 13:36-43)

What did Jesus mean by all this, and in particular what did He mean by “things that offend” and “those who practice lawlessness?

David: The simple answer to the latter is that “things that offend” in the NKJV is translated as “stumbling blocks” in the NASB, and “practice” is translated as “commit.”

Jay: Does this help us understand better what “discernment” means in the judgment context?

David: Jesus defines the “field” as His kingdom of heaven on earth. We usually equate “heaven” with “paradise,” but this kingdom has evil (tares) in it, so cannot be paradise.

Jay: We tend to think that the kingdom of heaven comes after judgment, but in this parable, heaven precedes judgment.

David: It also refers to two heavens: The heaven on earth of Jesus, and the heaven of God the Father. I don’t recall seeing Scripture writ so clearly!

Jay: Yes. For once, Jesus says: “This is what I mean.” It makes the parable especially interesting.

Anonymous: It is not a judgment of people. It is a judgment of “things” that get between us and God. They could be buildings, jobs, titles, certificates, possessions, sicknesses, greediness, and so on. But these things are not to be removed while we live: They are to be removed at the end, when there will be nothing to come between us and God. So there is no judgment of people. We are the wheat, and will be saved for God. Ecclesiastes says that the deeds of good men are in God’s hands.

So if people do good deeds, who is practicing bad things? “Practice” implies having things to practice on and with. Paul said that God will test our works, and those that are built on straw will be burned. But the builder of the bad works will be saved anyway. What people practice is built on straw. It will be burned, but they will be saved. Judgment is not of people, but of the things that stand between them and God.

Jay: So it is things, not people, that end up in outer darkness?

David: Jonah said, in effect, that he would rather live in outer darkness than to be “shining forth as the sun in the kingdom of God” (to paraphrase slightly).

Michael: Parables like this seem to present things in black and white. People are presented as good or bad, and the difference is supposed to be obvious. This strikes me as simplistic and false (in the sense of irrational, not immoral).

Jay: The parable does talk about discernment, about who is capable of it, and about about when it should be exercised. It should not be done until the harvest and it should be done by angel reapers, not by field hands.

Anonymous: “Field hands” probably means humans. Reapers reap grain—a good thing.

David: Perhaps “lawlessness” is meant as an absolute; as the complete absence of any lawful, redeeming behavior whatsoever. Absent any smidgen of good, what’s left is pure, unadulterated evil.

The parable is about God’s judgment, so it’s not surprising that we should be denied the job of judging. The judgment is not of people but of good and evil. The wheat and the tares represent good and evil, not good people and bad people. People have varying degrees of both. What is being chased out of them at judgment is the evil in them, leaving behind only the good, which by definition is worthy of being saved and worthy of a place in the kingdom of heaven. It is barely conceivable that there is any human without at least some tiny shred of goodness in him or her.

Michael: I prefer to soften the black/white nature of judgment by applying principles of the Dao and yin/yang. I believe that in every good act, there is a seed of evil; and in every evil act, there is a seed of goodness. Good and evil cannot be separated completely, it seems to me. For instance, we’re bound to feel good after doing a good deed, no matter how pure our motive. We feel pleasurably rewarded, even though we did not do it for reward, and that then makes us feel guilty for feeling good about doing it—as though there must have been some slight evil in it.

David: Our tendency to selfishness is indeed a Daoist sin. The pure, perfect Daoist is selfless, period. If one is selfless, what is there to be judged?

Jay: Did Satan have the ability to sow bad people (tares) in the world (the field)?

Anonymous: The tares are perhaps the angels of the Devil.

Michael: We know the reapers are God’s angels, because Jesus said so. But He did not say who the servants/field hands are.

Anonymous: Perhaps they are anyone who tries to remove the tares—priests and all of us who think it is our duty to pluck out evil. Yet it seems we are just not capable of it.

Jay: Not without risking harm to the good—to the wheat. As Michael said, good and evil are so intertwined that it is hard to separate them cleanly. It takes a supernatural, a divine hand. And it cannot be done before the harvest. Why not? Is it because the fruit/grain is not ripe, not ready, until then?

Anonymous: At first, wheat and tares are hard to differentiate; but when ripe, the difference between ears of wheat and of tares is very obvious.

David: We are told we cannot discern good from evil, even though we gained knowledge of them in the garden of Eden. The difference between pre- and post-Fall Adam and Eve was in their self-awareness. Anything that has selfhood is incapable of complete discernment of good and evil. Our white lies use evil (the lie) to do good (to help someone). That we resort to telling white lies shows just how incapable we are of separating good from evil. We all have selves, until we die. That is our harvest time, that is our End of the Age.

Jay: If we replace the notion of judgment being about people with judgment of good and evil, then all Scripture of all religions perhaps needs to be reinterpreted in that light.

Anonymous: Could it be that the injunction to “Judge not, lest ye be judged” refer to Satan, who is always complaining about us to God? Jesus said He did not come to judge.

Eb: How does this relate to a school with good and bad students? How do we deal with them?

Jay: The good teacher does not separate but rather seeks to unite the two groups.

David: Scripture does indeed need to be reinterpreted. Religions focus on getting us and helping us to improve ourselves—our selves—so that we will be judged more leniently. But the self is the wrong thing to focus on! Selflessness ought to be the focus, as it was for Jesus and is for philosophical Daoism and (perhaps) for Buddhism.

Jay: Most religions teach personal piety. Selflessness implies a focus away from the self and instead toward others. This reflects the judgment scene, where those judged to be good and bad are equally shocked at their judgment. The good are shocked because, being selfless, they expect no reward; the bad are shocked because, being selfish, they expect a reward.

David: The inevitable and natural corollary to selflessness is humility, and humility was hammered home by Jesus in both His way of life and His teaching:

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5-9; KJV)

Jay: Scripture is full of burning lakes of fire, outer darkness, and gnashing teeth. This seems not to be the judgment that awaits us, but neither does the paradisaical heaven we balance it with.

* * *

Judgment and Jonah

Don: There are two aspects to judgment: First an invitation to grace, and then a response to the invitation. The Book of Jonah tells us much about these aspects, if it is treated as allegory (its historical and scientific plausibility are often challenged). It shows us that God is the God of all Creation, that He has a plan for every one of us and for the whole of Creation, that His judgment is centered on grace, and that the Creator is also the Redeemer. For those who have not read it, or who need a refresher, here is the story:

The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.” But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up. Then the sailors became afraid and every man cried to his god, and they threw the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, lain down and fallen sound asleep. So the captain approached him and said, “How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish.”

Each man said to his mate, “Come, let us cast lots so we may learn on whose account this calamity has struck us.” So they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, “Tell us, now! On whose account has this calamity struck us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?” He said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.”

Then the men became extremely frightened and they said to him, “How could you do this?” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. So they said to him, “What should we do to you that the sea may become calm for us?”—for the sea was becoming increasingly stormy. He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you.” However, the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them. Then they called on the Lord and said, “We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.”

So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. Then the men feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. (Jonah 1)

So in this first chapter, we first note that God “appointed” Jonah to go on a mission, He appointed a storm, and He appointed a great fish. They are all under the appointment of the Creator—a point which Jonah acknowledges in stating he is a Hebrew and fears “the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.” Second, it is evident that Creation plays a central part in the story. God’s grace is administered through His Creation. Jonah fails to see that, but all of Creation nevertheless works to save him—and through him, all of mankind (Jonah represents the chosen people, and Nineveh represents everyone else).

Fleeing from the presence of the Lord is a dangerous move. It takes Jonas on a downward spiral. He goes down to Jaffa, then down into the ship, then down into the hold. But to a God able to employ the whole of Creation, there is nowhere for Jonah to hide. God invests a great deal of effort in saving both His chosen one, Jonah, and the Ninevites. Jonah was chosen not because he was special, but in order to fulfill a mission.

Jonah is the object of God’s grace, just as the men who threw him overboard are also the objects of God’s grace. Grace arrives for Jonah in the form of the great fish. Jonah himself described it in a prayer, which makes up chapter 2 of the Book of Jonah:

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish, and he said,
“I called out of my distress to the Lord,
And He answered me.
 I cried for help from the depth of Sheol;
 You heard my voice.
“For You had cast me into the deep, 
Into the heart of the seas,
 And the current engulfed me.
 All Your breakers and billows passed over me.
“So I said, ‘I have been expelled from Your sight.
 Nevertheless I will look again toward Your holy temple.’
“Water encompassed me to the point of death.
 The great deep engulfed me,
 Weeds were wrapped around my head.
“I descended to the roots of the mountains.
 The earth with its bars was around me forever,
 But You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God.
“While I was fainting away,
 I remembered the Lord,
 And my prayer came to You,
 Into Your holy temple.
“Those who regard vain idols
 Forsake their faithfulness,
 But I will sacrifice to You
 With the voice of thanksgiving.
 That which I have vowed I will pay.
 Salvation is from the Lord.”
Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land. (Jonah 2)

By God’s grace, Jonah is delivered from hell but his prayer is hardly a model of humble gratitude—it is self-centered, full of self-reference and self-justification. He says “I” no fewer than 24 times. He offers no words of repentance or regret and asks for no forgiveness.

It is ironic that his prayer condemns those who are unfaithful to God (i.e., the idol-worshiping Ninevites, the Gentiles) yet, as the story develops, it is Jonah himself who ends up rejecting God’s grace, while the Ninevites accept it:

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim to it the proclamation which I am going to tell you.” So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days’ walk. Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk; and he cried out and said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. He issued a proclamation and it said, “In Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let man, beast, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat or drink water. But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth; and let men call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way and from the violence which is in his hands. Who knows, God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish.”

When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it. (Jonah 3)

But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.” The Lord said, “Do you have good reason to be angry?”

Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city. So the Lord God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered. When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, “Death is better to me than life.”

Then God said to Jonah, “Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “I have good reason to be angry, even to death.” Then the Lord said, “You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?” (Jonah 4)

The judgment of God can be seen in the fact that His grace is given without need for confession, without our seeking forgiveness, and even without seeking grace at all. The invitation to grace merely needs to be accepted. It is noteworthy, though, that unlike Jonah, the Ninevites did confess their sins and demonstrated their humility by wearing sackcloth and ashes. (Could this be the preparatory clothing required before donning the robe of righteousness?)

Jonah’s anger at God for giving grace to the Ninevites is especially hard to understand considering that he was himself the recipient of God’s grace in the belly of the fish. It also reveals a third aspect to judgment: After the invitation to grace and the response to that invitation, there needs to be a readiness to pass on the grace to others. Grace cannot be hoarded, as Jesus said in the Judgment passage, referring to the people judged to be wicked:

‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to [i.e., you did not share God’s grace with] one of the least of these [people in need of God’s grace], you did not do it to Me.’ These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25: 45-46)

Jonah failed to grasp the crucial concept of passing on the grace. Indeed, he is the author of some of the most indicting statements in all of Scripture in blaming God for His graciousness, compassion, lovingkindness, and forgiveness which, Jonah said—not once but twice—he found so unbearable that he would rather die than be subjected to it!

God gave Jonah one more chance, by “appointing” a plant to shade him from the burning sun. But He then “appointed” a worm to destroy the plant. It reminds us that God uses all of Creation (in this case, represented by a storm, a fish, a plant, a worm, a scorching wind, the sailors on the boat, and even Jonah himself) in the administration of His grace to all Mankind.

That God asked Jonah specifically why he was angry about His graciousness suggests that grace is central to judgment. God is asking: “Why should I not have compassion?” He said that the Ninevites didn’t really know what they were doing, so why should they not be forgiven? It had nothing to do with their repentance and their sackcloth and ashes, and it had everything to do with God’s graciousness.

We are not told what happened to Jonah in the end, but it is implied that this chosen prophet chose, in the end, not to pass on the grace that God had given to him. He would rather die than live under a regime where grace without merit is dispensed. In the final judgment, it seems, Jonah chose darkness rather than the light.

Anonymous: It is ironic that Jonah willingly let himself be thrown into the sea, trusting in God’s grace to rescue him.

Donald: That grace is bestowed without merit shows how little we understand God. We seek every week in class to understand Him a little more, but He seems beyond comprehension. Was the storm a representation of God’s anger? Jonah went below decks to avoid it.

David: In light of Don’s analysis, it seems to me the storm is not God’s anger, but merely an aspect of Creation helping in the administration of grace. I personally feel somewhat relieved 🙂 that this Scripture confirms my belief in a God who is more than slow to anger—He is a God who never angers (despite Scriptural passages to the contrary). If He was ever going to be angry about anything, surely it would be about Jonah’s rejection of Him. Yet one can sense in God’s questions to Jonah only a poignant sense of divine dismay, of sorrow that Jonah had reached such a tragic end.

I also think the story tells us that judgment precedes grace: Jonah descends into hell (surely a statement that he has been judged and found guilty) before God gives him grace.

The ultimate message in the story, it seems to me, is trust in God and don’t question His administration of grace.

Donald: Did Jonah trust God?

David: For a short time, at least, after he was rescued from the fish.

Don: But that may be the exception. He ran away from God when called to go on a mission, he ran away from grace. His unbelievable indictment condemns God for being merciful, long-suffering, kind, and forgiving. Jonah just does not want such a God. God’s questions concerning Jonah’s anger do indeed support the contention that anger is not a part of God’s character. The implication is: “I (God) am not angry. Why are you?”

I don’t see the storm as anger but as a piece of the entire Creation that is employed in the process of dispensing God’s grace. Things, often unwelcome things, happen to us, but to me they are evidence of God’s cooptation of the entire Creation in His plan for our lives.

David: The message seems to be: “In my (God’s) Creation, stuff happens! Don’t worry about it—it does not matter in the end.” We want to lay blame, but God does not, and that is hard for us to accept. We can understand the concept of withholding judgment, just as we can understand grace and compassion and forgiveness and so on, but we cannot understand them at the level at which God applies them. It seems to me tragic that there are those among us who, like Jonah, cannot live with that.

Don: To proclaim a preference for death over living with God’s grace is a self-indictment and a self-judgment. To proclaim the preference twice gives it a sense of finality, of irrevocability. Jonah has seen God dispense grace over and over again, using all of Creation in His mighty labor of love for all Mankind, and decides he wants no part of that.

Anonymous: The storm was perhaps a demonstration of God’s might to the Gentile sailors, who ended up praying to Him for mercy and salvation. So there was a victory in it for God.

Jonah was comfortable with his life. He did not want to go on the mission. He was stubborn. He wanted his will to be done, not God’s. But God’s way prevailed—Jonah went to Nineveh in the end and God’s grace was delivered. That’s what made Jonah so angry. I don’t think he blamed God for being a God of mercy—“I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity”; rather, he blamed God for making him do things he did not want to do. “You wanna be merciful? Fine. Just leave me out of it.”

Don: Indeed, it is interesting to reflect that God could have been merciful without Jonah. But the graciousness of God was working for Jonah as well as for the Ninevites.

David: It seems that Jonah would have been happy if God had sent him on a mission to massacre every man, woman, and child in Nineveh. This would have been Jonah’s kind of God. It reflects poorly upon all religions that substantial proportions of their believers have a similar view of a retributive, vengeful God.

Michael: Is Jonah angry because as a Hebrew he goes to all the bother of following the rules and rituals, while God gives free salvation passes to everybody who does not? Jonah seems to have taken this mission as a personal affront.

Don: Jonah should get credit for evidently having been effective in his mission, since after he had warned the Ninevites they would be overthrown after 40 days, the Ninevites then “believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them” etc. Jonah saw this: “Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city.” He was evidently dismayed not to see God destroy the city and massacre its people. Jonah is nothing if not arrogant!

Anonymous: He must have thought that when a people refuses an offer of salvation (perhaps the Jews had been out evangelizing among the nations) it deserves destruction.

Donald: Was Jonah a missionary? Today, evangelism is looked upon as politically incorrect. Americans generally seem to believe we have no business telling other cultures how to live and think, no business imposing our culture on them.

Don: God certainly wanted Jonah to go on a mission to fulfill God’s plan, but for that reason, it had to be God’s mission, not Jonah’s. There does seem to have been some arm-twisting on God’s part.

Donald: We tend not to think of missionary work as dispensing God’s grace. We tend to want to make people see things our way.

Anonymous: Perhaps God’s objective was to improve Jonah’s spirit by teaching him a lesson. Maybe he did learn the lesson, in the end.

Don: It’s possible; but it seems to me unambiguous that Jonah’s way—Man’s way—is not God’s way. We just don’t know what actually happened to Jonah. God asks: “Why shouldn’t I be compassionate?”—end of story.

David: On first reading it does seem that God appeared before Jonah and gave him his marching orders for the mission. It implies that Jonah was coerced by God into setting off, kicking at the traces as he went and sneaking off in the opposite direction. But recalling our discussions of the inner light, I am inclined to think he was driven to set off by a willing spirit—his nagging conscience, the spirit within, the inner light—telling him to go do the right thing, but the weak flesh (his human nature) drove him in the opposite direction. His angry renunciation of God’s way reminds me of a wayward child, petulantly refusing a parent’s lovingly intended command not to play in the traffic.

Like so many (mis)understandings in Scripture, those that arise from the story of Jonah may be a reflection of the crucible of languages and cultures in which Scripture has been cast and re-cast. The language of the story, even in a modern translation such as the NASB, leaves the average English-speaking reader (that would be me 🙂 ) with a mental picture of a wraith-like apparition appearing externally before Jonah and issuing commandments. In reality, I think that’s a not-very-helpful metaphor in this day and age for what is (I believe Scripture shows) an intensely internal relationship with God. In misdirecting us away from consideration of the inner light, it serves to obfuscate and confuse.

If we accept that we have a conscience, and that Jonah had a conscience, then we can much more easily identify with him and with God, and (hopefully) learn from his tragic story.

Donald: We don’t know how Jonah’s life ends, but we do get a sense for his whole life story by working backwards from the end of the story as presented so far. Could we do the same for ourselves?

Don: I think that’s precisely why the story is important.

Anonymous: The whole story seems to be about us and a compassionate, merciful, gracious God. He was even good to the sailors who did not know or worship Him. He did not punish Jonah for running away. At every turn in this story, we see a God of mercy. That is what He wants us to know about Him. Why should we be angry with Him?

By faith, I believe the story is factual, though modern people have a problem with that. But whether it is fact or allegorical fiction, the message is from God and is very real.

Donald: We have many such stories, starting with a human child born without a human father!

Anonymous: Factual or not, God delivers messages in a way that causes us to remember them.

Michael: I can see myself as Jonah. I can be very judgmental. I often inwardly criticize people for doing things in a way I disagree with. But the implications of the story seem to be that the concepts of judgment and even of morality, as we understand them, are very much human concepts.

Donald: Is grace the opposite of judgment?

David: I see Jonah judged by virtue of his having gone to hell. But again, it is indeed a self-judgment. Jonah knew, as we all do, our failings. The inner light, the conscience, keeps us informed. We might ignore it or cover our inner eyes and ears for a while but ultimately it will not be ignored. We will all go to hell, but we will instantly saved from hell by God’s grace. In a perfect world of perfect people, there would be no need for judgment. But that’s not our world.

Michael: Am I to understand that God’s judgment is grace?

Don: That’s very close to my view.

Donald: Does God always judge but always deliver grace?

* * *

Judgment and the Chosen Few

Don: We are struggling with the Christian concept of salvation through grace, and how it fits with the concept of divine judgment. On its own, judgment would be easy to understand, but not when grace is thrown into the mix. Some have expressed the thought that an enraged God (characterized as the “King” in the parable) who destroys people who murder His couriers may not seem  graceful, but is at least understandable in human terms.

The closing verses of Matthew 21, in which Jesus tells the parable of the Landowner who sends his servants to collect the harvest from the vineyard workers, but the workers murder the servants, may provide some context for the next parable (of the Wedding Feast) and throw the issue of judgment and grace into sharper relief:

Therefore [Jesus asked his audience of Pharisees] when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine-growers?” They [the Pharisees] said to Him, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.” … When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they understood that He was speaking about them. (Matthew 21:40-41; 45)

Not only is the imagery in the Landowner almost identical to that in the Wedding Feast, but the intended audience—the Pharisees—is the same.

Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. And he sent out his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come. Again he sent out other slaves saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.”’ But they paid no attention and went their way, one to his own farm, another to his business, and the rest seized his slaves and mistreated them and killed them. But the king was enraged, and he sent his armies and destroyed those murderers and set their city on fire. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.

“But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?’ And the man was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:1-14)

These parables suggest that there are at least two phases in the process of judgment. First comes an invitation to grace; second, a response to that invitation. For the Wedding Feast, the king actually invited those “who had been invited” no fewer than three times. The persistence is significant. The parable does not say how many (if any) of the first or the second group of invitees accepted, and how many rejected, the invitations, but it seems that some small number of the first group may be those whom Jesus later calls “chosen.”

The Pharisees could not help but see themselves as the chosen ones, the first to receive the invitation. Similarly, they would have seen themselves as having been identified in the Landowner parable as the workers selected to work the vineyard and harvest the fruits.

The few chosen ones could be expected to have a close relationship with the king/landowner. One would not expect courtiers invited to their king’s son’s wedding feast to turn it down—unless the relationship were of a nature so extremely casual and mundane that the courtiers put their own business before that of their king, and were even prepared to resort to violence in the face of the king’s persistence. This highlights, metaphorically, the judgment principle that to refuse grace is to invite separation from God, destruction, and consignment to outer darkness.

What did the king mean when he called such people not “worthy”? It seems that worthiness requires clean white garments:

But you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their garments; and they will walk with Me in white, for they are worthy. He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels. (Revelation 3:4-5)

It seems as though the members of the first group of wedding feast invitees, the chosen, were given white garments by the king but refused to wear them.

If we change the order of the clauses in “For many are called, but few are chosen” so that it reads “For few are chosen, though many are called” it seems to alter the sense of the sentence in a qualitative way. It seems to emphasize more that there are two distinct groups: “Chosen” and “called.” Bearing in mind that Pharisees comprised His main audience, Jesus was telling them that being chosen did not of itself make them worthy to participate in the wedding feast; that it was wearing the white robes that would make them worthy.

It seems that white robes were distributed to the chosen, whose mission was then to bring all the invited to the wedding. The concept of being chosen is mentioned often in the Scriptures, and the Pharisees in Jesus’s audience would have considered themselves to be the chosen ones on that Scriptural basis.

Every religion and every sect believes its members to be the chosen ones of God. No religious group defers to any other in that regard. A Muslim friend recently showed me a picture of Moslems being harassed by security while attempting to pray at an airport, while other passengers chanted “Let them pray!” He told me he was amazed and humbled by the power and influence of his own great religion in realizing the wishes of Allah. This was tantamount to saying “Here is evidence that Islam is God’s chosen religion.”

But then again, we Adventists tend to think we are the chosen people—as do Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Catholics, and every other sect and religion. The Jews point back to God’s covenants with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob as evidence that they are the chosen ones.

The theology of the chosen ones—sometimes called “the remnant”—contains two principles: First, it is God’s prerogative to do the choosing, not Man’s; and second, God’s purpose in choosing is to spread His message—it is not about redemption and salvation for the chosen ones. It is a call to conduct a mission for God. In Scripture, this was certainly true of the Israelites. Yet how easily we pervert God’s purpose to suit our own ends and read “chosen” as “saved” rather than “tasked.”

The first invitees to the Wedding Feast were tasked to put on the wedding garments and lead the people to the feast. This was not a routine task to be entrusted to mere servants. It was a special mission. It was not the intent to fill the banquet hall with chosen ones, because they were too few. They were to round up the rest of the “called”—the invited. The chosen ones—like the Pharisees in the parable of the Blind Man—claimed that they could see, that they knew how the king worked—but their familiarity bred contempt. This led them to reject the robe of righteousness and the invitation to grace. To have accepted it would have implied that they were unworthy and therefore needed it. They did not need it, they thought.

The story of Jonah affirms that it is not enough to accept grace: Having accepted it, one must be prepared to share it. The chosen invitees to the wedding feast had a mission to pass on the invitation to all those who were called. Three times, they neglected to do so, and in so doing judged themselves as preferring darkness to light and condemned themselves to darkness. It seems each and every one of us will be given the opportunity to accept and share the grace. This is the judgment. A few people have been chosen to receive and pass on the invitation to the many who need it. We are judged on whether we accept the responsibility or not.

David: Could the invitation have been a test of sovereignty? In a kingdom, history shows, people treat a royal invitation as if it were a royal command—unless they do not acknowledge the king’s royal authority at all. It seems to me this better explains the dismissive way in which the invitees responded, and the violence to which they resorted in the face of this upstart king’s persistence. Assuming that in this parable the king is a metaphor for God and the betrothed prince is Jesus, it seems to me the next verse in Revelation, immediately following the passage quoted earlier, supports the argument that this is about authority—specifically, religious authority—more than it is about judgment:

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. (Revelation 3:6)

It seems to me the message to the Pharisees and all Jews was that they had better recognize Jesus as the son of God, by attending his wedding, or they would be thrown out of God’s kingdom. In other words, they had better become Christians! “He who has an ear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches” sounds ominous, much like a warning: “The spirit—God—is talking to you, synagogues of Judaism, and you had better listen!”

The issue, though, of so few being invited initially remains unresolved for me. As I interpret it, when the few whom the king had (wrongly!) deemed worthy (we are not told on what grounds he deemed them worthy in the first place—they certainly were not wearing the white robes at that point) refused the invitation, the king concocted plan B in angry haste, sending out his servants to pressgang anyone, worthy or not, just so long as he wouldn’t be embarrassed by an empty banquet hall on his son’s big day. Those after-thought guests were not a part of Plan A, even though some of them were “good”—and it is not at all clear that the king equated “good” with “worthy.”

Donald: We’ve all had marketing calls from people offering loans. They say they’re calling because of our good credit record, but we all know that they say that to everyone. Everyone is called! But knowing that, devalues the offer. In the parable, the original invitees were genuinely a chosen few—they were not randomly selected from the phone book. The offer went to the masses only after the chosen few turned it down. I remain puzzled about how this relates to God, and about the meaning of the white robe—was it just an artifact that went along with the invitation, or was it based on works, or what?

David: We have spent a lot of time discussing the attributes of God. One we seem to have agreed upon is that He is the God of all mankind. But the king/God of the parable does not show much affinity for this attribute, until he is forced to!

Anonymous: Perhaps it’s Man that did the choosing. Maybe God called all, but some chose accept the invitation.

Donald: You seem to be suggesting it’s like Facebook, where you post something for everyone to see but only a few people choose to respond to it. Would that work as a metaphor for grace?

Anonymous: Exactly. Everyone is invited (offered grace), but few choose to respond (to accept it). It’s not God’s mistake. It is not clear to me, from the parable, that the first group were chosen by God to do the mission of inviting others.

David: I believe that there must be an answer to the question of judgment and grace. In fact, I think judgment AND grace is precisely the answer. Jesus spoke of both in other passages which, unlike these parables, clarify rather than obfuscate. The Judgment passage in Matthew 25:31-46 explains judgment with enlightening clarity, and the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 do the same for grace. These passages are enough to tell me that there is judgment AND there is grace. They don’t tell me how the two concepts go together—maybe it takes divine understanding, that won’t stop me from trying, as follows:

Jesus told us clearly what judgment is, in order that we would understand it (else why bother?) and, understanding it, be more inclined to love our neighbor. This judgment takes place constantly, inside us, through our conscience—the inner light, the spirit of God within us. We notice, we feel, we sense judgment all the time. Grace, on the other hand, while always available, goes unnoticed most of the time, and that’s a good thing. There is no grace in winning the lottery. Grace comes only when, like the people of the Beatitudes, we are at the end of our spiritual tether. I imagine this includes physical death, but it can also be experienced in life, when we’ve taken all the punishment we can handle and have nowhere to turn. That’s when God’s grace reveals itself. At that point, judgment has ended. We have judged ourselves and know ourselves, beyond doubt, to be utterly unworthy. We have been punished with unbearable suffering. There seems to be nothing left, no reason for being—except God’s grace, love, and forgiveness.

Jay: In the first part of the parable at least, Jesus is clearly addressing the Pharisees. He admonishes them for thinking that they know God and how He works, thereby failing to acknowledge the true God. The consequence for them—consignment to outer darkness—is different than the consequence for ordinary people. I don’t know why there is a difference, but I find the point intriguing.

Could we be interpreting “chosen” in the wrong way? It usually signifies something positive—one is chosen for a beneficial reason or purpose; but in the parable, the few “chosen” end up being chosen for outer darkness. That many are called, as they were in the second invitation to the wedding feast, and that very few were chosen to not be there, shows that this is a king (God) of inclusiveness.

Anonymous: So in judging themselves to be “chosen”, Jews are essentially judging themselves to be unworthy?

Jay: The chosen are not the people first invited. The chosen are those very few (in the parable, only one) who, of the multitudes who accepted the invitation, chose not to wear the wedding garment. He in turn is chosen for outer darkness, but really he chose it himself.

Donald: Is it a matter of paying forward—giving someone something they did not earn, in anticipation of later receiving something we did not earn? Many are chosen, but how many display so much generosity to others? Do most of us live by the principle “What’s in it for me?”

Michael: I find the point of view that judgment is grace more interesting than the traditional Christian view. Intellectually, it’s hard to make sense of it—perhaps it just has to be experienced—it’s a pragmatic question, as William James might have put it.

Chris: Jesus said the parable was about the kingdom of God. He did not say “kingdom of heaven.” Is the kingdom of God a place? Or is it a call to action, to service? Luke 13 and 17 liken the kingdom of God to a tiny mustard seed that grows into a tree so large that birds can nest in it. Jesus also noted that that kingdom is not to come—it is already here, in our midst. So there is something that we are supposed to do, here and now, that we are not doing. The Pharisees were not doing it. Judgment is not about getting into heaven; it’s about our actions in this life. God calls all of us to do the right thing, and perhaps He selects a few people to help Him get the message across. But most people choose not to do the right thing, so then He has to call others to take their place. Sometimes they may turn out to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Donald: We think of being chosen for eternal life, but perhaps this is about being guided to live life to its fullest. If I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior then I should expect, with His grace, to live eternally with Him. We should expect the blessings and the richness of life to be achieved by paying something forward, rather than by being selfish.

David: I think these parables are about religion, rather than about judgment.

* * *

Judgment: The Outcome

Don: The theme of judgment runs throughout the story told in John chapter 9:

As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” [Thus, the story begins with a question about judgment.] Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him. [Note that here Jesus relates judgment to “the works of God” being displayed in the blind man.] We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.” [Light and darkness are central to judgment, as for example in John 3.] When He had said this, He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and applied the clay to his eyes, and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent). So he went away and washed, and came back seeing. Therefore the neighbors, and those who previously saw him as a beggar, were saying, “Is not this the one who used to sit and beg?” Others were saying, “This is he,” still others were saying, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the one.” So they were saying to him, “How then were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man who is called Jesus made clay, and anointed my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’; so I went away and washed, and I received sight.” They said to him, “Where is He?” He said, “I do not know.”

They brought to the Pharisees the man who was formerly blind. Now it was a Sabbath on the day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also were asking him again how he received his sight. And he said to them, “He applied clay to my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” Therefore some of the Pharisees were saying, “This man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath.” But others were saying, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And there was a division among them. So they said to the blind man again, “What do you say about Him, since He opened your eyes?” And he said, “He is a prophet.”

The Jews then did not believe it of him, that he had been blind and had received sight, until they called the parents of the very one who had received his sight, and questioned them, saying, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? Then how does he now see?” His parents answered them and said, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but how he now sees, we do not know; or who opened his eyes, we do not know. Ask him; he is of age, he will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone confessed Him to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue. For this reason his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

So a second time they called the man who had been blind, and said to him, “Give glory to God; we know that this man is a sinner.” He then answered, “Whether He is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” So they said to him, “What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?” He answered them, “I told you already and you did not listen; why do you want to hear it again? You do not want to become His disciples too, do you?” They reviled him and said, “You are His disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where He is from.” The man answered and said to them, “Well, here is an amazing thing, that you do not know where He is from, and yet He opened my eyes. We know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is God-fearing and does His will, He hears him. Since the beginning of time it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?” So they put him out.

Jesus heard that they had put him out, and finding him, He said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?” Jesus said to him, “You have both seen Him, and He is the one who is talking with you.” And he said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped Him. And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.” Those of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things and said to Him, “We are not blind too, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” (John 9)

* * *

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:16-21)

God is responsible for deeds—works—“wrought” (made) by Him. Grace is a work of God manifested in people who come to His light. His light—the light that “has come into the world”—is Jesus. Jesus is responsible for the works of light. He demonstrated this by taking clay from the ground and mixing it into a poultice with His spittle. The imagery is straight from Creation: God crafted Man from clay and breathed life into him from His mouth (Book of Genesis). In healing the blind man, Jesus was demonstrating God’s power to re-create, to restore; as well as His power to create. In that case, could it be that judgment as presented by Jesus here is not about us at all, but is about God Himself?

We assume judgment is about us because we want it to be about us. We want to know how good or bad we are. But Scripture (Romans 5:20) tells us that where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds even more. If judgment is about God and His grace, and not about us and our sin, then this changes everything. It turns judgment from potentially awful news into guaranteed good news.

In the story of the blind man, judgment is clearly about the work of God and His grace. It is not about us, individually, and our particular sins. God’s graciousness was demonstrated through the blind man for all to see. Many instances of God’s grace appear to us to be as mysterious, wonderful, and inexplicable as, evidently, it seemed to the Pharisees in the story.

When light enters a place, it reveals something that was hitherto invisible, hidden from view. What Jesus revealed when He came into the world was the grace of God. In the conclusion of the story about the blind man, Jesus said: “For judgment I came into this world.” But the judgment had nothing to do with punishing the world and everything to do with saving it through the grace and the creative and restorative power of God (John 3:17–“For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”)

But the Light reveals other things has well. It exposes everyone to the refining light of God. The blind are those who (like the blind man in the story) simply accept the grace (the poultice) that is given to them. The Pharisees, on the other hand, arrogantly claimed clarity of vision about God, citing Moses as their authority. They needed no poultice, and readily pronounced judgment on others (as represented by the blind man) on the basis of their assumed divine insight and authority. They simultaneously shunned and hoarded God’s grace, leaving them in a state of sin: “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains,” Jesus admonished them.

The Light reveals both humble blindness and arrogant vision. To accept blindness is to see the Light, to see Jesus. The significance of the poultice is that such a clay/spittle concoction is indeed blinding—to those who think they can see. But it could open their eyes if, like the blind man, they would simply accept it. The poultice of grace blinds us to our own arrogant viewpoint, our own works; and restores our (in)sight of Jesus and makes us open to God’s work in us.

The judgment as declared by Jesus is that they have no sin who make no claim to see. We are all blind wo/men or Pharisees, but we have God’s work, God’s grace, within each and every one of us, individually. To fail to accept that—to be blinded to it by one’s own arrogant claim to exclusive insight into God and to the right to judge others—and to refuse the poultice, is to be lost in the judgment.

In short, the judgment of God is the grace of God offered individually to all who accept the poultice. Similarly, in the parable of the Wedding Feast, the judgment of God is the grace of God offered individually to all who accept the wedding garment.

Our eyes must be blinded because it is through the eyes that we are most likely to be judgmental of others. Only when our eyesight has been replaced by true insight can we safely view the world around us. And, like the blind man in the story, we will see Jesus (“You have both seen Him, and He is the one who is talking with you.”) This is the vision that results when spiritual sight is restored. One sees Jesus—God—in a different light, in a different way.

Have we misunderstood the judgment?

Nick: If we didn’t have Jesus, we wouldn’t have judgment.

David: I am not sure I am any further forward in understanding it. I can see the argument in the passage we have read today that judgment is grace, but going back to the judgment passage we’ve discussed previously, where Jesus judges and divides people to the right and to the left, I don’t see any grace in it.

Donald: The idea of judgment as grace is indeed a new perspective for me. It flips my former perspective on its head, and that has implications for my past and future duties and behaviors and for how to get to heaven.

Jay: The story of the blind man does a good job of reinforcing the notion that divine judgment is not something we humans can hope to understand. Much of the story is taken up by the Pharisees trying to understand how this topsy-turvy judgment could have happened; how this obviously guilty man or his parents could have been forgiven for the sin he/they must, in their view, have committed (else why would he have been born blind?)

Human judgment is based on fear. The blind man’s parents were afraid of being disbarred from the temple, so they did not want to talk with the Pharisees about their son. But the blind man, once his (in)sight was restored when he accepted the poultice and the divine judgment, was notably unafraid of the Pharisees and the threat of disbarment. He openly acknowledged that he could not understand why he had been judged so positively, but it could not be denied, he pointed out, that it had indeed happened, that it was a good thing that had happened, and that therefore it came from God. The Pharisees were unable to rebut his argument, but they nevertheless refused to accept it and disbarred him from the temple anyway.

To claim to understand judgment and thus to be able to judge others is actually the far more dangerous claim, yet it is one we tend to want to make. We don’t like uncertainty—we want to be sure of what is right and what is wrong.

Donald: There is a big difference between “liking to know” and judging others in the belief that we do know and therefore have that right. We may be comfortable with the description of the Pharisees as people arrogantly claiming to know.

David: But surely Christian Scripture, including the story of our eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as well as what Jesus told us in the right and left judgment passage, shows us the mind of God with respect to judgment. Did you help the poor, the sick, the imprisoned? If so, that’s good. I know it’s good because Jesus said so, and because I feel it in my heart. If you did not help the poor, etc., that’s bad, and I know it’s bad because Jesus said so and because I feel it in my heart.

It seems to me the message is crystal clear, and it came straight out of the mouth of Jesus. So is it arrogant of me to claim that I understand it? Why can’t I judge you on the basis of my Scripturally based and heartfelt understanding of the mind of God with respect to judgment? (Perhaps the question should be “Why shouldn’t I judge you?”)

Nick: We are told that when we stand before God, everything will be revealed to us. We will have no place to hide, and our sins will be presented to us. But our public defender, Jesus, will atone for our sins with His own blood.

I once heard a pastor say there were different levels of heaven, and that those who undertook the greatest responsibility would get to the higher levels. I recall telling him that in that case, I would happily relinquish some of my responsibilities. 🙂

Don: Scripture does mention a “seventh heaven”, suggesting there are at least seven levels. Many religions believe in multiple stages or levels of heaven and hell.

Kiran: We know from Scripture that our works don’t matter when it comes to judgment. No matter how good I think I am, God knows how bad I am. I can only be saved—and will be saved—by grace. It is hard to do the good deeds described in the judgment chapter from pure altruism, without some sort of selfish motive; including the motive of getting in to heaven. I know I am not capable of pure altruism, but I can be at peace anyway, knowing that God is loving and gracious at a level far beyond my understanding.

Donald: Can we separate judgment from works? We try to, in arguing that grace trumps works, so works don’t really play a role in judgment and in our access to eternal life. I met a stranger yesterday. We “hit it off” instantly, and had a great conversation. Such moments are the spice of life. It made me wonder whether my meeting was a “work” and if so whether works are simply those things that make life better, that help us live a full life, with no thought of judgment.

Aishwarya: My first thought in hearing the story of the blind man was that he seemed to have done no “works” to deserve God’s grace, but God might have seen something in him to give grace to him. The story seemed to me to be about the man, not about God. My second thought was that, like Kiran, I would be happier believing that it is indeed about God and that I do not need to worry about judgment, whether I am doing good works or not. We want the story to be about God because we can’t be sure of our own self-judgment. Just a moment ago, I killed a spider that happened to come near me. It was just minding its own business. I started to wonder if what I did was a sin in God’s eyes and would be held against me one day. But I found myself going in circles between God’s grace and my actions, and must conclude that I basically don’t understand judgment!

David: I sense you feel guilty about the spider, and I suspect that your guilt was the voice and judgment of God. In the left/right judgment passage, Jesus was differentiating between, on the one hand, works we intellectualize as good—“Obey the Commandments”,…

[Don: (and “Don’t kill spiders”…. 😉 ]

David: …and, on the other, the works Jesus told us were good (visiting the sick, the incarcerated, etc.) without a thought for ourselves. We obey the Commandments because our intellect tells us to; we visit the sick because our heart tells us to. By “heart” I mean the inner light, God within us. When we respond to the dictates of the inner light—of God—rather than the dictates of our intellect, then our lives and works are all about God and not about us. Our intellect-based works don’t matter at all. Only God’s works matter. This seems to me to be what Jesus was getting at in both the left/right judgment passage and in the story of the blind man. If this is so, then I begin to see the mist of judgment parting a little.

Nick: Self-judgment is helpful. I remember being approached at my table in a MacDonald’s restaurant by a down-at-heels man. He said: “God wanted me to speak to you.” I said: “Sir, I don’t have time. I am running late for church [which was true]. I have to go.” It has bothered me ever since, that perhaps God brought the man to me and wanted me to speak with him, but I denied Him. Such self-judgment makes us, I think, better people, more inclined to help next time something like this happens.

Donald: The moment could have been spiritually rich—you’ll never know now. But “Do unto others” is indeed the golden rule that leads to a spiritually better life, regardless of and separate from judgment.

David: Such stories do indeed seem to me reveal the works of God. Like Aishwarya and the spider, Nick’s feeling of guilt did not come from his intellect: It came from God. It was not self-judgment. It was the judgment of God. As Jesus said, we are not capable of judgment. But we are capable of hearing it when God delivers it, but we don’t want to hear. I can’t bear to think about how many beggars I have turned away, sometimes with reasonable intellectual reasons (“I’m all out of small change”) because it makes me feel bad to think about it. God is telling me, softly but clearly, what the right thing to do is, and I don’t do it. I’m not capable of turning the other cheek, either.

Being good in the eyes of God, as Jesus knew and told us and demonstrated to us through His own suffering, is so very, very hard.

Kiran: Self-judgment is indeed tricky. I may think I am helping an addict by giving money for food, but others criticize me for only making a bad situation worse. I don’t know what’s right.

Robin: I was once approached by a woman claiming to be homeless and ill, and begging for money for food. My purse contained two dollar notes and one 20 dollar note. I thought that $2 would not buy her a meal, so I gave her the $20, and she hugged me and sobbed. My co-workers said she would probably spend it on alcohol or drugs. I said that was not my responsibility; that my responsibility was to try to meet her stated need.

Kiran: To answer the simple call for help simplifies things.

Donald: Was there any self-judgment on the part of the blind man?

Kiran: He did not even ask to be healed.

Don: Let’s continue to think and talk about this.

* * *

Judgment and Grace

Don: The concept of an afterlife is relatively easy to understand in most religions. But in Christianity, the issues of judgment—which rewards or punishes us with the afterlife we deserve—and grace, which only appears to reward, clouds the issue. Our binary concept of judgment—you are good or bad, a sheep or a goat, on the left or on the right right—allows of no middle ground, no degree of goodness or badness; and that itself is problematic.

What tips the scale one way or the other? How good do you have to be to be to be admitted to heaven, and how bad to be consigned to hell? We all know we are not perfect, that there is some good and some bad in all of us. How much of either does it take to go one way or the other? Without grace, these are questions of utmost significance. But with grace, they are not. With grace, it is God’s infinite goodness which is at stake, not ours.

In churches and in Scripture, much has been written and discussed concerning judgment before and after death, before and after the millennium, and even judgment after resurrection from death. There is debate on judgment criteria—are we judged on our works or on our words? And above all is the question of the identity of the judge: Is it God the Father or God the Son? Is it the angels? Is it our good peers who went to the afterlife before us? Is there a record of all our deeds, and if so, is it reliable? Is it questionable? Could it be hacked?

Some religions believe that mortal prayers can influence the judge in the judgment and disposition of souls in the afterlife. The Mormons practice baptism for the dead: Each believer is responsible for being baptized on behalf of his or her ancestors through the previous four generations. It is an elaborate theology based upon a short passage in Scripture:

Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them? (1 Corinthians 15:29)

Essentially, it enables dead ancestors to be forgiven their sins in life long after their death. It explains why genealogy is so important to Mormons. It seems unfair that someone might be denied heaven because their descendants failed or forgot to intercede with God for their salvation.

Are we all barking up the wrong tree? Could judgment be something other than the final binary assignment, something other than salvation? If so, what? Our study of the topic so far has produced a number of principles that might guide us toward an answer.

1. The first principle is that there is a judgment that no-one can escape:

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. (2 Corinthians 5:10)

2. The second principle is that the results of judgement seem to be counterintuitive, given that the judged on both sides—good and bad—are surprised to have been so judged.

3. The third principle is that judgment is a divine prerogative. We see this in the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve are prohibited from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—knowledge which would enable them to judge right from wrong, good from evil. Specifically, judgment is the prerogative of Jesus:

For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, (John 5:22)

4. The fourth principle links judgment specifically to our judgment of others. How we are judged depends on how we judge others:

Do not judge so that you will not be judged. (Matthew 7:1)

5. The fifth principle is that the numbers suggested in Scripture give odds overwhelmingly in favor of a positive outcome from judgment. Waiting for admission to heaven will be…

…a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands,… (Revelation 7:9)

Similarly in the parable of the Wedding Feast, the admitted guests are innumerable, while the number of gatecrashers is just one.

6. The sixth and final principle is that the end product of judgment is either to remain with God or to be separated from Him and consigned to outer darkness, for eternity.

Nevertheless, the contradiction remains: How can we be both judged and given grace? In one parable, the laborers in the vineyard who worked longest and hardest yet were paid the same as those who worked little and lazily at all posed essentially this same question:

‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ So the last shall be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:12-16)

The hard workers thought they should be judged on the quantity and quality of their work. So did the elder brother of the Prodigal Son, when their…

…father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate. (Luke 15:22-24)

This did not sit at all well with the elder son, who said angrily to his father:

‘Look! For so many years I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet you have never given me a young goat, so that I might celebrate with my friends; but when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him.’ (Luke 15:29-30)

Like the laborers and the prodigal’s brother, we too think that judgment should be premised upon the quantity or quality (or both) of our work. Then along comes grace and throws a spanner in our works. This is no problem for those who are lazy good-for-nothings, but it is a problem for those who think their works are good enough not to need the intervention of a spanner. The acceptance of grace is more difficult than one might think. For some reason, the lone uninvited guest at the Wedding Feast felt unable to accept the guest robe—a metaphor for grace. The Pharisee in the following passage seemed to be of a similar frame of mind:

The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ (Luke 18:11)

So, too, did the Rich Young Ruler who thought that obeying the commandments was enough to earn a place in the kingdom of heaven.

Don’t the hardworking laborers, the elder brother, the Pharisee, and the Rich Young Ruler have a point? How can we reconcile judgment with grace?

Donald: Judgment is about how we live our lives. Fundamentally we need to ask ourselves whether we should live life with the goal of earning a good judgment, or allow God to guide our lives according to His plan. The Commandments are a recipe for living a better life, for following God’s plan. But in themselves they are not a recipe for salvation. Would the Prodigal Son have been better off, in the end, staying home with his father, instead of going off and doing his own thing? Would the context of our faith (not necessarily of our religion) actually make our lives better, as opposed to just following the rules?

Don: The Prodigal’s brother seemed to resent the fact that his brother was out having a good time while he himself was hard at work.

David: The Prodigal was favored over his brother. There is an inequality of reward in this parable, whereas in all the others, the reward is equal. I can’t see how judgment and grace can possibly be reconciled unless we establish different contexts for them. Perhaps there are two judgments: One, a provisional judgment that applies to living life on earth (with ramifications concerning the kingdom of heaven on earth); the other, a final judgment that applies to life after death.

Kiran: If I were the vineyard owner, I would know that the better workers would grumble about equal pay, so if I wanted to establish the principle that all are rewarded equally while retaining favor with my entire workforce, I would probably slip the better workers an extra denarius or two on the side, out of sight of the other workers. Otherwise, my message to the harder workers would be that their effort was wasted. But that is precisely the message God wants us to understand: That to Him, our efforts to deserve His grace are not just puny but even offensive given that He is offering all of us—no matter what we may think of ourselves and what we deserve—His grace as a free gift.

Robin: The elder brother of the Prodigal seemed to be working hard to get a reward—hence, his anger when the Prodigal got a better reward. He failed to understand that the father loved both sons equally; that they had no need to earn his love.

Kiran: I too would feel offended. It’s natural. But that’s because I’m human—I cannot think like God, though I sense that He must feel offended when we, thinking we have bought and paid for a reward, reject His free gift of grace.

Don: The inequality of reward in the case of the Prodigal and his brother complicates the issue further.

Robin: The father had unconditional love for his children, but the elder son’s love for his father appears to have been conditional. In the parable of the Lost Sheep, too, the father has unconditional love for the whole flock, including the sheep that strayed.

Jay: It’s easy to think of the older brother as the bad guy, but maybe he’s not. The father never admonishes him for complaining—indeed, he acknowledges that he has been a good son and says “All I have is yours”—in the end, you will inherit everything. So the kid got a party and a fatted calf! Big deal! There’s no doubt, in my opinion, that judgment is divine and has a grace component. That makes it very difficult for humans to wrap their minds around it—hence our surprise at the judgments Jesus illustrates. To me, they serve to emphasize that judgment is none of our business.

When Jesus talked about the Unpardonable Sin in the context of forgiving sin, he was saying much the same thing. It’s none of our business to judge. We are incapable of knowing. It is a divine business. It was not enough to have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That does not mean we should not try to be good, but we should not judge. Religions fall into the trap of prescribing behaviors “guaranteed” to produce a good result—salvation—at judgment.

Kiran: The Prodigal’s elder brother was offended, but it may also have served as a providential lesson to him, in helping him see his own fault, that would serve him well later.

David: If there has to be a bad guy in the parable, perhaps it was the father! 😉

Jay: As humans, we always look for the bad guy, but in these parables, there isn’t one. We want a checklist of things to do to earn salvation, but we don’t like the checklist Jesus gave us: Turn the other cheek, go to the back of the line, give up all your wealth, abandon your family, bear my cross. This checklist is a lot harder to cross off than the checklist of Ten Commandments.

Kiran: As humans, we readily recognize inequality. God does not, That’s why grace troubles us.

Don: It does. Why wouldn’t the loner at the wedding feast accept the wedding garment?

Robin: He didn’t think he needed it. He thought he was good enough as he was.

David: I have a theory that the loner is the Devil, the only Being of pure evil, unadulterated by goodness. The wedding garment is transparent, like the fairy tale Emperor’s New Clothes. It returns the state of the wedding guests to the state of naked innocence that prevailed before the Fall. If the Devil had donned it, it would expose his evil.

As for grace: It can come during mortal life and (we believe) after it. We assume it comes to us all equally upon death, though other religions have different views about the afterlife and judgment. In any case, no matter the religion, grace is there when we reach the end of our tether, including our tether to life itself. It was there for the Prodigal Son when he reached the end of his tether. No judgment was necessary.

I’m not sure I fully agree that we don’t know how to judge. Jesus taught us about visiting people in prison, and so on. We know whether or not we follow His teaching. The question is whether we follow it to earn  brownie points or because the person in prison commands our sympathy and love.

Kiran: It’s easy to judge Harvey Weinstein, yet God surely loves and accepts Harvey just much as He loves and accepts me! It’s hard to be equated with a Harvey Weinstein, or worse.

Donald: Harvey’s wicked life seemed to give him joy. Are we supposed, then, just to enjoy life and not worry about judgment? If we live life with the goal of earning salvation, it seems not to work. A good marriage is not the result of constant, conscious effort—it is just a matter of love and acceptance.

Jay: We tend to judge the sin, the evil in one another, rather than the good. Perhaps God looks only for the good in us. Perhaps that’s why the lazy vineyard workers, the Prodigal, and so on deserve grace—there is some good in them, and that, to God, seems to be a reason to rejoice.

Chris: We always have an end in sight, some goal we want to achieve or some complication we want to avoid. If only we would stop worrying about the end result and focus instead on loving our fellow man. When we don’t worry about the end, we don’t worry about judgment.

Don: But then, if judgment is not about the end product, the outcome, what is it about? How can we re-frame a theology of the importance, universality, and correctness of judgment without looking at the end product?

David: I think Jay had the answer: “Some amount of good” is what God desires, and judges. The wedding garment—grace—would seem to amplify what little goodness may be in the wedding guest to the exclusion of all evil, but if there is not a smidgeon of good (as there always is in all God’s children) it will reveal it. We might not see it, but God can.

Michael: I don’t think grace overthrows judgment. But if we remove the quantitative (hours worked) and qualitative (effort put in) measurements as criteria of judgment, what else is there to judge?

Don: Given the many Scriptural references (including in the Gospels) to judgment, I agree that grace does not exactly supplant it. It does exist. Yet grace does throw a wrench into judgment. A Muslim friend too has expressed to me great skepticism about the concept of grace on the grounds that it lets people get away with anything.

Donald: It is a very frustrating and discomforting question.

* * *

Judgment: Outer Darkness

Don: All the great faiths seek to explain the afterlife. The prevailing notion is, and has long been, that this mortal life is not the end of the story; that something happens after death, and that what we do in this life affects what happens then.

In the Parable of the Wedding Feast, which we discussed not long ago, the guest who refused to wear the wedding garment was thrown into “outer darkness.”

Jesus spoke three times about the outer darkness. First, he mentioned it in the context of the Roman Centurion who had absolute faith in Him, in contrast with his fellow Israelites who did not:

“I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8:10-12)

Second, the wedding feast guest who did not wear the wedding garment:

Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ (Matthew 22:13)

And third, in the Parable of the Talents, the servant who hoarded the talent (coin; a metaphor for God’s grace) his master gave him was thrown into outer darkness:

For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. Throw out the worthless slave [i.e., the servant who hoarded the talent] into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 25:29-30)

If there is outer darkness, logically there would seem to exist inner darkness as well. The implication of outer darkness is that it is so far away that light cannot reach it. The “black darkness” mentioned in the following passages, relating to the eventual destination of the fallen angels, also sound like outer darkness:

These are springs without water and mists driven by a storm, for whom the black darkness has been reserved. (2 Peter 2:17)

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; (2 Peter 2:4)

The Book of Revelation is replete with the contrast between light with darkness. So too was the story of Creation:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:1-5)

The light and dark discussed here are not the presence and absence of photons from the sun and moon (which were not created until the fourth day). They are the presence and the absence of—the unity with and the separation from—God. John wrote of it:

This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10)

and:

… the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.

Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard. On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining. The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John 2:6-11)

And the concept is contained also in the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.… There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. (John 1:1-5;9)

The Gospel goes on to link the concepts of judgment and light/darkness:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:16-21)

Jesus Himself said:

“I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.” (John 8:12)

And when He died, the light died with Him:

When the sixth hour came, darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour. (Mark 15:33)

Could it be then that consignment to outer darkness simply means eternal separation from God, condemned to exist in a place where there is no God and therefore no enlightenment, as opposed to the fiery, burning Hell of Dante’s Inferno and the Book of Revelation?…

Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.” (Revelation 14:9-12)

We accept that the Book of Revelation is heavily weighted in symbolism. It is full of beasts and fire and fury and apocalyptic language, yet we tend to take passages such as this literally. The genius of the Book is that regardless of one’s time and place of origin, one can find one’s place within it. We of the Seventh Day Adventist Church have a very elaborate interpretation of the Book and find ourselves there, as do all others who study it and have studied it through the ages. Martin Luther and others took heart by finding themselves represented there and seeing that, in the end, good triumphs over evil.

An eternal flame suggests to me a metaphor that once judgment has been passed, evil will be gone for ever. There will be no ashes from which the Phoenix can arise. It is a flame that quenches evil.

Jesus said:

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)

This contrasts with the broad and all-encompassing invitation to the Wedding Feast but is in concord with the Book of Revelation:

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands;… (Revelation 7:9)

How can we reconcile the apparent contradiction? Jesus said He was the way:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6)

and that He was the door:

I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:9-10)

and that…

…he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber. (John 10:1)

The key is that in the story of the shepherd, it is not that people find the door—it is that the door finds people. The way is so narrow that we cannot find it; it must find us. But it is also narrow in the sense that it admits us individually, in single file, one by one. The invitation to the Wedding Feast is broad, but at the door to the banquet hall, each individual receives a custom-fitted wedding garment. The lone guest lacking a garment must have come like the thief, over the wall or through the window. Had he gone through the door, he could not have avoided wearing the garment.

The narrow way is not intended to exclude; it is intended to prepare each and every individual so that s/he is fit to enter the banqueting hall—the kingdom of heaven. Grace is to fit you just right: That is how the judgment works. This is how I reconcile the seeming contradiction between the narrowness of the gate and the vast multitude who get through it.

Anonymous: It makes sense that the fire of hell is not literal. The Biblical notion of eternity sometimes seemed to me not to mean it. There seems to be hell that is eternal and hell whose fire can be extinguished. I have come to the conclusion that the fire is not literal. Eternal separation from God is worse than eternal exposure to fire. Separated, we cease to exist. The Bible can be read literally or symbolically, but to me the symbolic interpretation makes more sense.

Robin: If there were eternal suffering in a fiery hell, it would make God a torturer. How could a God of love and mercy tolerate such torture?

Don: It would be worse: It would require a continual, active miracle to keep the damned alive in order to be continually burned. What is puzzling is that we accept the Book of Revelation as symbolic in all but the aspect of hell. Consistency alone would suggest that a fiery hell too, is symbolic, metaphorical. It is a holy fire which suppresses evil forever. Some young Baptist clergy have come under fire (!) recently for suggesting a similar interpretation. It seems most people prefer the literal interpretation.

Anonymous: Such people are represented in the Prodigal Son’s older brother, who could not accept that instead of being punished for his waywardness, his younger brother would actually be rewarded in the end. But how could people saved by the grace of God possibly be at peace if they knew that friends, family, and others were not saved? God’s mercy would not allow it. It is impossible to conceive of any benefit or joy to God from people who are not saved, whether they are in outer darkness or screaming in pain.

Robin: People assume the pain of hell is eternal because the joy of heaven is eternal. When we punish children, do we not punish them for ever?

Anonymous: The Bible says that evil necessarily exists on Earth. In this life, we need the contrast in order to understand good. But in the next life, it will not be necessary.

Mikiko: The “lake of fire” ((Revelation 19:20; 20:10, 14, 15; 21:8)) is a symbol rather than a literal lake. The symbol of destruction is the same as Gehenna—Jerusalem’s garbage dump—but this is not hell. The Bible says that the lake of fire “means the second death.” (Revelation 20:14; 21:8) The first kind of death mentioned in the Bible resulted from Adam’s sin. This death can be reversed by resurrection and will eventually be eliminated by God (1 Corinthians 15:21, 22, 26.)

Kevin: I was brought up to believe in the literal interpretation. I personally take comfort in the symbolic interpretation. 😉

Anonymous: Perhaps there is a purpose behind a symbol so frightening as to be taken literally. Perhaps it helps to drive people to repentance, to bring them back to God.

Don: It has always scared people, especially children and the wealthy, and has been made more vivid and real through pictures and stories depicting it. The symbolic interpretation, and therefore the judgment, seems, on its face, less frightening—more watered-down—than the literal interpretation.

Anonymous: Maybe judgment is executed here during life on Earth, in the form of the hardships—the misery and sickness and remorse—we face in life.

Mikiko: There is no hell of torment. After Armageddon, the unrighteous simply die and that’s that. The righteous go on to live forever.

David: In (non-religious) Daosim there is no judgment. There is the Way, and one is on it whether one likes it or not. You may or may not reach enlightenment by the end of it. The whole question of a burning hell is made moot if everyone is saved—as Jesus said they are. We’ve talked about the kingdom of heaven on Earth, so why not a hell on Earth as well?

Don: …as Anonymous suggests…

David: Yes. And we consign ourselves to one or the other. Perhaps the way into heaven on Earth is narrow while the way into hell on earth is broad. But at the end of the day—at death—the outer darkness is for evil and evil alone. None of us can claim to be perfectly good, but neither can we claim to be perfectly evil. Some people try, but give themselves away when they smile at a puppy. There can be no ultimate hell for people who have some good in them—and everyone has some!

* * *

Judgment: Surprise, surprise!

Don: It seems that God’s plan was for Him and us to live together in harmonious unity. In the garden of Eden, the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil made it unnecessary for us to discriminate between good and bad, right and wrong. It was God’s divine prerogative to make such judgment.

On the face of it, though, the difference between good and bad seems obvious enough to us and we make judgments all the time about whether an action is consequently good or bad. But our perspective, vision, and context is limited, incomplete, and (often) self-serving. God’s view is whole, complete, infinite, and unbiased.

Turning points we encounter in life often seem different in retrospect than they seemed at the time when they occurred. Things that looked good once may look bad later. Without omniscience, ultimate assurance of right or wrong, good or bad, is difficult if not impossible.

All the great religions believe that God judges wo/men at the conclusion of their lives, and rewards or punishes them according to how well and how badly they behaved in life. Furthermore, they believe that God’s judgments are actionable in the afterlife—that we are punished with hell or rewarded with heaven.

Archaeologists have unearthed prehistoric burial pots containing articles of daily life—food, clothing, jewelry, shoes, tools—implying that even prehistoric people had belief in life after death.

The parables we have discussed recently have all touched upon the issue of judgment and revealed the teaching of Jesus on the topic. This one is worth repeating for our discussion today:

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the market place; and to those he said, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ And so they went. Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did the same thing. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around; and he *said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’ They *said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He *said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’

“When evening came, the owner of the vineyard *said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last group to the first.’ When those hired about the eleventh hour came, each one received a denarius. When those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ So the last shall be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:1-16)

Three clear concepts emerge from this parable: First, there is a clear invitation to enter into a relationship with God (“to work in the landowner’s vineyard”). It is very similar to the message in the parable of the Wedding Feast, to which everyone is invited. While the landowner invites everyone to work, the host of the wedding feast invites everyone to party; but the point is that everyone is invited in either case.

The second concept to note is that God’s initiation of the invitations is persistent. The landowner hires workers all day long,…

But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. (2 Peter 3:8)

The point is that the invitation to enter the kingdom of heaven is always open.

The third concept is that judgment and reward are the prerogative of the landowner and the host of the wedding feast—i.e., of God.

It seems both counterintuitive and unfair that workers hired near the end of the day should be paid as much as those who came first thing in the morning and worked all day. But it shows that God’s grace is overwhelmingly operative in judgment. Our human concepts of cause and effect, of the proper ordering of first and last, and of “earnings” are not God’s concepts, not His way. The parable shows that the amount of our work is neither here nor there: All that matters is that we show up, that we accept the invitation.

Judgment is full of surprises. Those who worked all day were surprised that those who only worked for an hour received the same pay. (The parable doesn’t say so explicitly but we can assume that the people who only worked an hour were just as surprised.) The wedding guests, too–especially the down-and-outs—would have been surprised to be invited off the street.

Jesus emphasized that judgment was a divine matter, and not for us:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:21-23)

And:

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, 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 brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:1-5)

He warned, too, that we would be in for a surprise:

“But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.

“Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’

“Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’ Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 7:31-46)

Everyone is surprised. Nobody seems able correctly to predict the outcome of their judgment. Should we be concerned about that? How can we rely on our own self-assessment, especially one based on the cause-and-effect model we so slavishly rely on in daily life but which is irrelevant on the day of judgment? Why bother to try to be good if it makes no difference in the end? Would it not be more fun to be bad? If we are saved by grace anyway, why is judgment even necessary? What is the relationship between grace and judgment?

David: Going back as far as we can in human history, or at least 2000 years back to the time of Christ, we might ask if we are more moral than people back then. I don’t think so. I think modern Wo/Man is just as surprised at the judgment Jesus described as were His contemporaries and as (I believe) would have been prehistoric Wo/Man. However, surprise was not justified then nor is it justified today, because we have always had the inner light to show us the way, to tell us what is right and wrong. Surprised or not, we are attracted by the notion of judgment as Jesus described it because it confirms what we already know, albeit vaguely. We can tell right from wrong because God is inside us telling us—or, at least, hinting at—what is right and wrong. But when we ignore or smother the divine inner light and turn instead to our human intellect to determine right and wrong (which is exactly what we tend to do) then we are bound to end up being surprised at the divine judgment.

Kiran: The wedding guest who did not wear the robe was surprised to be cast out. He evidently thought his own garment was OK since he was “in” already. Likewise, the workers who worked all day were surprised to discover that earnings were not based on time worked. They thought that they would be the landowner’s favorites, as measured by the difference in earnings between them and the tardier workers.

So I too sometimes wonder: Why not be bad? But the answer always comes back that I am bound by the goodness of God. He is so gracious to me; how can I not pass that on to others? I stray sometimes, but I always come back. Some people have a hard time accepting the message so struggle with making the change, though.

Donald: Making a bad decision—showing poor judgment—is not necessarily sinful. Human judgment and divine judgment are not the same. I am much more comfortable with the idea that at my judgment, God will find me to have been faithful, than I am with the idea that He will find me to have made few or no bad decisions. I know I am a sinner. God knows I try not to be, but I am. We are all different, but God knows the heart of each of us. We have to have faith in Him independent of our sinful nature.

Should we try to be good to be saved at the judgment, or simply because it is the right way to live? Why do we want to be bad?

John: If you eat well, it gives you peace and satisfaction. You don’t have to worry about anything. You sleep well.

Kiran: If I am selfish, I don’t care about the consequences of my actions on others. Now, I concentrate on thinking about such consequences, as a way to avoid them. When you love God, that is what you have to do. Whether you will go to heaven or hell is irrelevant. Sometimes I sleep badly, but not from fear of hell—only from fear that my behavior might have hurt someone else.

Don: I find our surprise at the judgment puzzling and even distressing. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, because of the inner light; but we are so prone to measuring ourselves against our own standards that we are surprised when told we don’t measure up. Are the parables designed to show us that our behavior is really inconsequential?

John: Sometimes trying to be good to others has unintended bad consequences. Sometimes others tempt us to join them in some bad behavior. Sometimes they try to prevent our doing good because they feel we are taking something from them, as the all-day vineyard workers probably felt about the one-hour workers. Maybe all things work together for good, but sometimes life doesn’t feel like it is working out that way!

Donald: The crux of the matter seems to be selfishness.

David: In old times, people were terrified of the (to them, literally hellish) consequences of being judged wanting. Today’s Christians seem less concerned about this consequence. Is it because they place more faith in God’s grace than the early Christians did? I am less surprised at the divine judgment Jesus described than I am about the consequences He described. It concerns me that He talked about being cast into outer darkness and burning in everlasting fire and so on.

Humans and perhaps some of the higher animals seem to me to have the capacity to divine (a telling verb!) right from wrong. But it is not an intellectual capacity—it is a spiritual capacity. Any surprise we feel at judgment is intellectual surprise, not spiritual surprise.

Donald: We’ve been taught that if we end up in heaven we may be horrified to think of those who do not make it there with us, but will come to understand why they did not—we will come to understand God’s judgment. It is not for us to criticize His judgment.

Don: Yet that picture is not what the parables suggest. He rounded up all of humanity—good and bad, tardy and prompt—it didn’t matter to Him—to come to the wedding feast, to be paid full wages in the vineyard. At the wedding, the fact that there was only one single guest—among an uncountable number—who was thrown out serves to emphasize how easy it is to get into heaven!

Donald: Yet we are also taught that the way is so narrow that we might as well consider ourselves doomed!

David: The goodness or badness of people for whom the way is broad is irrelevant, for they are sufferers. They are the blessed of the Beatitudes.

(Question: With regard to the single rejection at the wedding feast: Could that have been the Devil?)

Kiran: It’s hard to love people regardless of how they treat you, but it’s what we must do.

Donald: We want to be told exactly what the rules are, so that we know exactly what to do. The uncertainty bothers us.

Don: And surprises us.

Donald: Yet we have the truth!

* * *

Judgment at the Wedding

Don: Many people believe that the way we live today affects our future. Most religions link a life well lived to a future of contented opportunity, if not bliss. The concept goes by many names: Heaven, paradise, moksha, nirvana, Valhalla, the heavenly garden of Eden, and so on. For the most part, these places are a desirable destination reachable by those who do the “right” thing in this life. Most of all, in most cases, they are the dwelling place of God.

The alternative place also goes by many names: Hell, the lake of fire, the underworld, the nether word, Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, the second dead, and for most part is a destination reserved for those who have led a wretched life. It is a place of eternal punishment and loss. It is the dwelling place of the Devil.

Throughout the ages, Mankind has been alternatively offered Heaven as a place to desire and Hell as a place to shun. Men and women and (especially) children have long lived in mortal fear of an ever-burning lake of fire. On the other hand, Heaven is a place full of pleasure and contentment. In the Islamic paradise, wine (prohibited on Earth) may be drunk and men may consort with nubile virgins (which makes one wonder what reason a woman might have to want to go to heaven.)

Of course, the “facts” about the afterlife are assumed by faith. In essence, paradise is a place where whatever we think of as pleasant or “good” is plentiful, while whatever we think of as unpleasant or “bad” is absent.

Ideas about the afterlife have been heavily leveraged by religion as a way of controlling people’s behavior. For centuries, to be in good standing with one’s church meant one was eligible for salvation. Excommunication from the Church meant extended death and eternal damnation. These were real fears, deeply held and defining the way to live, especially in the Middle Ages. Dante’s Divine Comedy (especially Book One, the Inferno) stoked people’s imagination of eternal torture following judgment at death. Today, few have such fear. Some may fear hell, but few fear the Church. They do not accept that an institution holds the keys to hell for them.

Do we fear judgment today? Might it change our behavior? In the Parable of the Marriage Feast, a man appears to be judged unworthy of heaven (a place at the wedding feast) and is therefore cast into hell (“outer darkness”):

Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. And he sent out his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come. Again he sent out other slaves saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.”’ But they paid no attention and went their way, one to his own farm, another to his business, and the rest seized his slaves and mistreated them and killed them. But the king was enraged, and he sent his armies and destroyed those murderers and set their city on fire. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.

“But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?’ And the man was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:1-14)

This is the third in a series of parables about the relationship of the Jewish authorities with God. Like the Parable of the Landowner before it, some are deprived of the kingdom of heaven and some are admitted to it. The people judged ostensibly most worthy to be guests are singled out to be invited first but reject the invitation, some violently. So God sends out invitations indiscriminately, to just anybody, worthy (good) or not. What does this tell us about judgment? One would think that there would be at least a modicum of discretion about who to invite. Why not allow some bad people in but exclude the thoroughly evil people? But God wants as many as can be found. No-one is to be left behind. The number is very large:

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands;… (Revelation 7:9)

Counting is not complex. It is ordinary, routine, and predictable. So a number “which no one could count” is truly a staggering notion, showing the breathtaking breadth of the invitation.

The parable implies that those who enter the kingdom (the wedding hall) are transformed into good subjects (wedding guests), no matter their status upon entry. That a single individual in this uncountable throng stood out as being unworthy, as not belonging, is astonishing. He must have been exceptionally distinctive in his dress. Perhaps he wore black while everyone else wore white, or vice versa, or whatever was in starkest contrast to whatever color the king had chosen for the wedding guests’ uniform dress.

In the garden of Evil, Adam and Eve were clothed in robes of light, which represented the righteousness of God. The first manifestation of Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden was the loss of their robes and instinctive need therefore to cover their nakedness, using fig leaves. But our efforts to clothe ourselves are ultimately hopeless:

For all of us have become like one who is unclean,
And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;
And all of us wither like a leaf
And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. (Isaiah 64:6)

The alternative is:

I will rejoice greatly in the Lord,
My soul will exult in my God;
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation,
He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
For as the earth brings forth its sprouts,
And as a garden causes the things sown in it to spring up,
So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
To spring up before all the nations. (Isaiah 61:10-11)

It would seem that to enter the wedding hall (the kingdom of heaven) then, guests must take off their own clothing—they must become naked—and don the robe (of light) provided by the host. The idea of changing clothes was mentioned elsewhere in Scripture:

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. [This is very much a judgment scene.] The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! Indeed, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and standing before the angel. He spoke and said to those who were standing before him, saying, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” Again he said to him, “See, I have taken your iniquity away from you and will clothe you with festal robes.” Then I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments, while the angel of the Lord was standing by.

And the angel of the Lord admonished Joshua, saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My service, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here. (Zechariah 3:1-7)

This is a restoration of what was lost in the garden of Eden—bad garments replaced by good garments, nakedness covered by a cloak of light. In a sea of light, a point of darkness would be very noticeable. It would stick out like a sore thumb. What does this darkness mean? Why did its possessor not respond to the polite request for an explanation—“Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?”? (As an interesting aside, be it noted that Jesus often addressed people as “Friend”, including Judas when Judas was about to betray Him.) The outcome of the judgment is that this man without the robe is consigned to “outer darkness”—he goes from temporal (therefore temporary) darkness to eternal darkness for failing to have donned the robe of light.

Darkness and light are often mentioned in Scripture; for example:

This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10)

Is judgment something to be feared? Or is it just another bogeyman designed to scare us into swallowing and following religious precepts?

David: Why did the Man in Dark accept the invitation—why did he want to join in at all? Evidently, most people in the kingdom didn’t really care to go, and some even hated the idea of going! Why? After all, it was no ordinary free meal—it was a free banquet, fit for a king! Second, the Man in Dark was clearly judged to be evil, yet evil people from the street were welcome. Was there something different about his evil?

Jay: There seem to be two judgment scenes. The first is the judgment of the original invitees, some of whom were violent in their rejection of the invitation. This group was “destroyed.” Second is the judgment of the Man in Dark, who was consigned to outer darkness. Are the two judgments different?—the two punishments appear to be. As for differences in the guests: The only condition set for participation was to wear the wedding garment.

Kiran: Could the Man in Dark have forgotten to don the garment? If not, he was bold and presumptuous in thinking his own garments were somehow preferable to the wedding garments. Given that this was a royal wedding, a dress protocol was to be expected. To ignore the protocol was tantamount to lèse-majesté.

Jay: His failure to explain himself might be simply that there can be no good reason not to don the wedding garment. He could not claim he didn’t have the money or the time to get a wedding garment, since it was free. Since there was just no excuse, he didn’t even try to produce one.

Kiran: Why were the original invitees so mean to their king in rejecting his invitation to the wedding? Was he a bad king?

David: Clearly, people were not afraid of this king, so presumably he had never been in any way harsh with them—until now. Clearly, also, in this kingdom, evil was neither here nor there. It just didn’t matter. Don asked whether we should be good during life, so as to avoid judgment, and the answer according to this parable is not at all! Hedonism is fine, as long as you don the garment—you acknowledge God—before you die.

Don: One of the great criticisms of Christianity is that grace supplants behavior. It is very difficult for people of other faiths, particularly Jews and Muslims, to comprehend and accept. Yet the alternative, that goodness in life is necessary for a “passing grade” judgment, immediately introduces the problem of weighing and measuring the amount of goodness in a person and deciding how much is enough or not enough for entry to paradise.

Donald: In light of the New Testament, are we to suppose that the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments can be taken as mere suggestions? If “goodness” is the right way to live, as Jesus seemed unequivocally to say, is it then enough to define and measure “goodness” by our adherence to the Commandments?

Aishwarya: My Hindu grandparents used tell me to be good because God was watching and weighing, and would judge me when I die. As an adult I have come to believe that I am responsible for judging myself, and that how “good” I am is up to me.

David: It is asking a great deal to expect people to buy the notion that it doesn’t matter whether or not we are good in this life. We have often noted (what I would describe as) the absolute primacy of God’s desire (according to Scripture) to be reunited with us, and this would explain why our behavior in this life is immaterial, since all that matters to God is that we reunite with Him when we die. I too have a problem with that! The concept of grace and a gracious God willing to forgive sin is wonderful; but the Prodigal Son was a monster compared to his elder brother, yet received better treatment from their father. It was as though the elder brother’s good behavior had no value, it didn’t matter. That parable and the one we are discussing seem to suggest that human life doesn’t matter—it’s only death that matters.

Don: That’s the opposite of what Aishwarya said.

David: Yes. And it’s the opposite of humanism, as well as of other religions. Yet the Bible also teaches us we should be good in this life. That’s what the Commandments are all about. It surely can’t be acceptable that we are forgiven for breaking the commandments and hurting other people. Forgiveness and grace are good, but surely not at the expense of those hurt by our sin.

Mikiko: Judgment came as a result of the wicked conduct of people in their daily lives. For example, Jehovah God brought the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ruin because of the heavy sins of their inhabitants. But God is love, God is merciful, so when a particular group of nations of mankind are called to account by God it may be the time when those already judged to be deserving of death are executed. Or, the judgment may offer some the opportunity to be delivered even to everlasting life. Jesus Christ and His apostles pointed to a future Judgment Day involving not only the living but also the dead.

Kiran: Hinduism has several somewhat contradictory concepts concerning judgment. The first is that when Brahma creates people, he holds their skulls behind him so that he is not biased when He writes their life stories on their foreheads. So what people do in life is predestined. And yet, the second concept holds that after death souls enter purgatory, where another god, Yama, judges them and assigns them to heaven or hell depending on how good or bad they were in life. But hell is for a fixed term, not for eternity, and after doing time in hell the soul is transferred to heaven. But according to the third concept, the soul will eventually be reincarnated, and confusingly here too there is judgment, because depending on how good or bad the soul’s “karma” accrued when it lived as a human, it could be reincarnated as a lower form of life. Viewed from outside the religion, the concepts seem contradictory, but from inside they seem to make sense.

Donald: We talk about “a greater power” because we marvel at the creation we see all around us, and seek its source, and because we seek to understand our own creation and the purpose of our existence. As we grow older, we then start to ask “What’s next?” but that is a fundamentally different question from “Who is my maker?” because it brings our own behavior in life into question. To complicate things further, our assessment of the answers to these questions may change as we age.

Don: When I was about 6 or 7 I was consumed with concern about dying suddenly in a state of sin, before I had a chance to confess my sins and be absolved of them by God. I even worried that I might have sinned and not known it, or have forgotten to confess one sin or another. This fear doesn’t bother me today, but it really did then and maybe it should today—maybe it serves as a deterrent against sin.

Kiran: I felt that same concern for a while after I converted to Christianity. And when others expressed the opinion that I worried too much about sinning, I judged them to be bad people. It took a great deal of struggle with my own ego, but now I accept that “all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” as Isaiah said. If I am that bad, I am in no position to judge anybody else. The effect of this realization was equalizing. I went from being unique (in my ego-driven self-assessment) to being the same as everyone else.

Donald: We do tend to think that proactive good behavior earns salvation, whereas it is the passive presence of love that really matters.

Jay: That’s why the presence of the wedding garment is so critical. It distinguishes good from bad. We tend to define good as obeying the Ten Commandments, as going out to do good works, as praying for forgiveness, as keeping the Sabbath, and so on. These have become ingrained in our religions as constituting the way to salvation. But the wedding garment seems to dispute that. Any and everybody gets the garment and is saved if they put it on.

Kiran: The guest who did not put it on was not killed, only bound and cast into outer darkness. Perhaps he could find his way back or be brought back into the light later?

Robin: Jesus said of the Roman centurion who had faith in the power of Jesus to heal his paralyzed servant from afar:

“Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8:10-12)

This was a criticism of the Jewish religious hierarchy.

David: For me, the parable serves to bring contradictory Scriptural passages about judgment and grace into stark relief. Some passages say or imply there is either judgment, where it matters how good/bad you are, or grace, where it does not matter how good/bad you are. Yet other passages say or imply that there is both judgment and grace, and they can work both ways: First, you are judged but then granted God’s grace anyway; or (and this would be an almost humanistic viewpoint) you start with God’s grace and are later judged on what you did with it. The wedding garment seems to me to reflect both the concept of grace followed by judgment (the Man in Dark) and judgment followed by grace (the other guests).

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God’s Favorite Religion

Don: We’ve discussed two parables involving vineyards: One in which the vineyard workers were all paid the same wages regardless of how many hours they worked, and one in which the vineyard owner asked his two sons to go do some work in his vineyard (with one promising to do so but then reneging on his promise, and the other refusing but then relenting).

Here’s a third, the Parable of the Landowner:

“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey. When the harvest time approached, he sent his slaves to the vine-growers to receive his produce. The vine-growers took his slaves and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third. Again he sent another group of slaves larger than the first; and they did the same thing to them. But afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ They took him, and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Therefore when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine-growers?” They said to Him, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.” Jesus said to them, “Did you never read in the Scriptures,

‘The stone which the builders rejected,
This became the chief corner stone;
This came about from the Lord,
And it is marvelous in our eyes’?

Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of it. And he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they understood that He was speaking about them. When they sought to seize Him, they feared the people, because they considered Him to be a prophet. (Matthew 21:33-46)

Notice the thoroughness with which the owner had planned and constructed his vineyard. It had a security fence and a guard tower. It had a wine-press, dug out and ready for the pressing of grapes. He clearly intended for this to be a successful operation. The work in the vineyard (the making of good wine) is a clear metaphor for the work in delivering the message and continuing the mission of Jesus, as described rather well in this sentence:

You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. (Acts 10:38-39)

To “go about doing good” is a picture of the message and the mission of Jesus. The vineyard owner—Jesus—provided the optimum and secure conditions for delivering His message and perpetuating His mission while He went away. “You are planted here,” Jesus was saying, “to do good. That is my mission and yours. To bear maximum fruit I have established a secure, work-friendly, optimum environment and am leaving you in charge while I am away. But I will be back, in the form of my representatives.”

He sent three sets of such representatives to collect his share of the harvest. To the Jews at the time, this would have been as familiar a scenario as share-cropping is today. Tenant farmers pay rent by paying an agreed percentage of the crop yield. The first two sets of representatives were servants from the landowner’s household. They are a metaphor for the prophets and messengers of God coming to share in the distribution of the fruit. But the tenant farmers hoard all the fruit for themselves. The third was his own son, who could be expected be shown more respect, but the tenant farmers showed him no more respect than they had shown the servants.

The judgment against the hoarders was that the kingdom of God be taken away from them and given instead to a nation that produced and did not hoard its fruit. Which leads to our question for today: Does God have favorite nations, peoples, and religions? All religions think that God entrusted them and only them with the Truth. God’s favor for them is recorded in their histories and Scriptures and religious writings and commentaries and interpretations.

Ever since God’s covenant with Abraham, the Jews have believed they are special to God. Their miraculous release from bondage in Egypt to a future in the Promised Land (at the expense of the unfortunate Canaanites who were dispossessed of their land) seems evidence of this. But the pilgrims seeking their own Promised Land in America also saw the hand of Providence at work in providing them with a New World, without much thought for the native Americans dispossessed of their old world. Moslems see their religion as special to God since He made Mohammed His Last Prophet and the Koran His final word, thereby completing, and perfecting the faults and the errors of, the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity. The numerous branches and sects of Christianity—Catholics (Roman, Orthodox, Coptic, etc.) and Protestants (Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Anglican, etc.)—all claim to have God’s favor.

What did Jesus mean when He said the fruit of the kingdom would be take away from those who hoarded it and given to those who would not hoard it? Is there such a things as God’s chosen people, and if so what identifies them as such? How does a people apply for the position? No faith will admit that another has been chosen by God over itself. Shouldn’t God make it clear who His people are?

On the next day, as they were on their way and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray. But he became hungry and was desiring to eat; but while they were making preparations, he fell into a trance; and he *saw the sky opened up, and an object like a great sheet coming down, lowered by four corners to the ground, and there were in it all kinds of four-footed animals and crawling creatures of the earth and birds of the air. A voice came to him, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat!” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything unholy and unclean.” Again a voice came to him a second time, “What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.” This happened three times, and immediately the object was taken up into the sky….

And he said to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a man who is a Jew to associate with a foreigner or to visit him; and yet God has shown me that I should not call any man unholy or unclean. (Acts 10:9-16; 28

Jesus clearly told us who His people are:

By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)

The Book of Revelation, too, makes clear that God’s people are as diverse as can be—all are included:

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice, (Revelation 7:9-10)

But then, I ask again, what did Jesus mean when He talked about taking the kingdom away from some people? Is God partial to specific peoples and religions or sects today? How can He take something from one and give it to another? Why are there so many religions and sects anyway? Is there a reason? How can we tell if one is better than another? Did Jesus come to start a religion, or to do something else? What about Mohammed? Buddha? Or do religions emerge in some other way? Why are there so many?

We’ve seen from Scripture that God loves all of Mankind equally. His rain and sunshine falls on everyone. Yet each religion thinks God’s blessings fall on it and not on the other religions; that it has the real Truth. Jesus did say, after all, that His kingdom would be taken away from some and given instead to others; and God’s favoritism shows up in other passages of the Bible; for example:

“He has brought down rulers from their thrones,
And has exalted those who were humble.
“He has filled the hungry with good things;
And sent away the rich empty-handed.
“He has given help to Israel His servant,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and his descendants forever.” (Luke 1:52-55)

And:

All the trees of the field will know that I am the Lord; I bring down the high tree, exalt the low tree, dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will perform it.” (Ezekiel 17:24)

And:

…thus says the Lord God, ‘Remove the turban and take off the crown; this will no longer be the same. Exalt that which is low and abase that which is high. (Ezekiel 21:26)

And:

“He raises the poor from the dust,
He lifts the needy from the ash heap
To make them sit with nobles,
And inherit a seat of honor;
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,
And He set the world on them.” (1 Samuel 2:8)

Not least, in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5) it is clear that God favors the oppressed and the poor in spirit, etc.

Do we each see ourselves as one of God’s favorites?

Jay: It’s an interesting topic. Certainly, humans define the characteristics they think God wants to see in people—to define His favorite people, then they seek to characterize themselves in alignment with their definition. It seems to me that since “God’s people” would, by definition, be bound neither by time nor culture nor religion as we are, then none of our distinctive definitions will suffice. God’s definition of His people is broad; ours is narrow. From the parable of the Landowner, we know that His people are those who produce the fruit of God’s kingdom.

It seems to me the point Jesus was making is not about the transfer of the kingdom from a group that doesn’t deserve it to one that does, but is simply that the kingdom is only for people who have the right stuff—that is, who have the ability to bear God’s fruit.

Robin: The people in the kingdom are those entrusted with the message. If that makes them proud and judgmental, they no longer deserve their place.

Don: All three of the Abrahamic religions believe that theirs is the authentic voice of God. Do other religions feel that way? What about Hinduism, for instance?

Aishwarya: There are so many Gods in Hinduism, each with its devotees, so that is a difficult question to answer! I’m sure some Hindus consider Hinduism as a whole superior to other religions, though I personally think it’s more a matter of cosmetics than of substance.

David: Jay seemed to suggest that our presence in the kingdom is a matter for us to decide based on the way we behave, whereas in the parable Jesus said clearly that it is not up to us: The kingdom will be actively taken away from us and given to someone else. We will not just passively exclude ourselves; rather, we will be thrown out.

Jay: Does God judge us or do we judge ourselves? Christians consider God to be the judge and that to be judged as “good” we need to present evidence on our own behalf. We tend to see it as a forensic process. Yet what’s the point of a process for a God who already knows everything? We struggle with this issue, and Scripture perhaps tends to confuse in this case.

Robin: Perhaps the parable of the two sons sheds some light on this—a son who refuses to work but repents, and a son who promises to work but reneges.

Don: The parable of the Landowner says that the vineyard (the kingdom) will be opened to tenant farmers who produce fruit, yet even the wicked farmers produced fruit, so that appears not to be the issue. Perhaps the issue is that they would not share the fruit they produced. The issue is: What happens to the fruit?

Jay: Is their fruit good or bad? There are many questions that arise once we introduce the concept of fruit.

Don: Does it mean then that a religion should be judged not on the basis of its beliefs, teachings, and claimed truths, but by the fruit it produces? If so, does this level the religious playing field and make irrelevant the multiplicity of religions?

David: An anthropological argument says that gods were invented by primitive leaders to lend them authority. Most people are followers, not leaders. We seek leadership and guidance, often for pragmatic reasons of maintaining peace, security, mutual assistance, and so on. Ancient China had a large pantheon of minor earth gods, each with limited functions and powers, but it has never had a popular, unitary, deistic religion (Buddha was not a God). Confucianism was developed as a humanistic philosophy to provide guidance and support by codifying the degrees of respect and obedience to be afforded within family and society.

What I am trying to say is that humanity has invented more than one way to guide people in how to live life, from God-centric religions such as the Abrahamic, to pantheon-based religions such as Hinduism and Shintoism, to SBNR (spiritual but not religious) bodies such as Buddhism, to philosophies such as Confucianism and original Daoism and indeed Humanism. These are all the same in the sense of existing to provide guidance on how to live life in society. Fundamentally, they must be altruistic, otherwise there would be chaos and destruction. Whether religious, quasi-religious, or non-religious, these powerful forces have to be, and are, basically good.

Mikiko: Japan had no unifying Scripture and relied like many other countries on human philosophies for guidance. But since:

God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. (John 4:24)

…then the Bible, which contains God’s Word—the truth (Your word is truth.—John 17:17) is what should be followed. Christ brought salvation:

…let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by this name this man stands here before you in good health. He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:10-12)

The Bible contains God’s Word; other religions and philosophies contain only human words.

David: Just after announcing the judgment to be made on bad tenant farmers, Jesus mentioned a stone, which I think is intended to mean Himself.

Jay: To fall on the stone, as mentioned in the parable, is to sacrifice your self, making you salvageable; the alternative is that the stone falls on you, in which case you cannot be saved.

David: I am not clear on why Jesus brought up the stone at all, though. It seems a non-sequitur, unconnected to a story about producing fruit. It’s also unclear to me whether Jesus approved of the Pharisees answer to the parable.

Don: I think He agreed with their answer but had trapped them into a self-indictment. They realized too late that they represented the bad tenant farmers in the story.

Is it possible to think about God without putting Him into the human context? The 2nd Commandment prohibits the making of images of God. Christians tend to think of images just as idols, statues, yet we imagine God in our own image. We put hands, feet, a mouth, and so on, on Him. We anthropomorphize Him. He warns us about that, yet we package Him up as being like us and “sell” Him to others on the basis of what—for all we know—is a false assumption. Even in the Old Testament, Moses went “behind” God, implying that God has a back.

The anthropomorphic concept grows out of Man’s desire to make religion. Can we have a religion that does not depend on that concept, given that we have no other context than the human and our human perceptions in which to build one? It seems inadequate, error-prone, and dangerous. Does the parable of the Landowner shed any light on this?

Jay: You seem to be asking whether the establishment of a religion breaks the 2nd Commandment.

Russell: We can’t even understand other cultures without putting them in the context of our own, and understanding God goes far beyond understanding another culture. Is it possible to understand God without putting our own spin on Him?

Jay: We’ve made the 2nd Commandment about idols, but if we broaden it to mean “Don’t try to define God” it makes a significant difference, and the parable of the Landowner reflects the impact of using the broader meaning. For one thing, it means we cannot define what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. We anthropomorphize everything to do with God, including His kingdom, His people, and (fair enough!) ourselves.

David: On the other hand, Scripture tells us that about half of us (the male half) were indeed made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 11:7, Genesis 5:1, Genesis 9:6, ) So the Bible lets us have our cake but forbids us from eating it: We are the image of God, but we can’t make an image of God.

Jay: Scripture can be contradictory, or at least puzzling, when we seek to align it with our own concepts. We struggle in trying to make the Scriptural picture of God fit our 2017, Seventh-Day Adventist picture of God. When we try to broaden our picture, alarm bells sound—it seems heretical, it opens the door a crack to let the Devil creep in. If we broaden our picture to one that is not bound by our present time (allowing it to stretch, for instance, all the way back to ancient China) there has to be a common characteristic—of fruit, of God. A timeless, culture-free definition of God is difficult if not impossible to conceive, so we introduce time and culture to make it easier for ourselves to define the indefinable.

Don: Is it not at the central core of all the major religions to provide some sort of moral compass to people? A stabilizing social influence? Is it not their common goal to lead us to “bear fruit”—which means “do good” in the case of all the great religions and sects? They dress in very different ways but they are the same inside, providing the same stabilizing moral guidance to people,  with commandments equivalent to the Ten with which we are familiar. If all this is so, then the kingdom of God is indeed very broad—even all-encompassing, as Revelation says.

Aishwarya: I agree that the core values of religion are the same, but the different trappings of religion cause each to stigmatize the others. Dissidents within one religion rebel on that basis too—they don’t like something about the trappings of their religion, so they start a sect of their own. But the core values remain the same. The splintering into many different religions and sects might be the result of focusing on trappings rather than core values.

David: I believe in the core of every religion and every great humanistic philosophy, but I also believe that the message and mission of Jesus—the core of Christianity—is also the core of all the great religions, quasi religions, and non-religious great philosophies. The message is: “Be good and do good.” Judging by the absence in the Gospels of questions such as whether or not we are made in God’s image, Jesus evidently did not care about such questions. They were quite beside His point. The Christian Bible could (and in my opinion most definitely should) be edited down to the actual messages of Jesus in the Gospels. Everything else should be left on the cutting-room floor, because they comprise the trappings that lead to disagreement, disunity, and destructiveness. The trappings produce the bitter fruit of hatred—the very opposite of the fruit of love all our great religions call for at their core.

Aishwarya: But the core should not be open for interpretation. The definition of Love should not be open to question, because that’s how trappings get made!

David: How will we enforce that?

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