Lent and Judgment

I have a recurring nightmare some variation of which, I believe, is a very common experience.  It involves being in school and showing up for the final exam without having studied for it, or sometimes it takes the form of not showing up at all because I can’t remember where it is supposed to be.  It is a very bad feeling.  As a priest, once or twice, I have had another variation of it, which involves showing up for church and finding out I was scheduled to preach but not having a sermon prepared.  I have spoken to many people who have some variation of the same nightmare.  I suspect many of you do.  The theme of this particular nightmare is judgment.

On the other hand, I also know that I have never actually sat for an exam, or taken a test, or written a paper without some sense of anticipation and even excitement and a longing to get my paper back and see how I’d done. 

So here’s the paradox.  On the one hand, we have a strong aversion to being judged and failing.  It is enough to give us nightmares long after one would hope we’d grown out of such childish things.  On the other hand, we are drawn to being judged like a moth to light because part of us longs to be tried and found worthy, judged and affirmed, tested and passed “with distinction.” 

With that in mind we come to a teaching in the Gospel of Luke, which is assigned for the third Sunday of Lent this year, having to do with a group of Galileans apparently killed by Pilate when they had come to sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem and a group of eighteen people also killed in Jerusalem but this time in an accident when the tower of Siloam fell on them.  It was an event that caused the people of Jesus’ day to wonder—to wonder what it meant, to wonder what God was up to, to wonder about how to make sense of it in any spiritual way.  It is not at all unlike how we are wondering in our own day, our own day in which 26 innocent people, 20 of them first graders, are killed by a gunman in Newtown, Connecticut. 

I don’t think Jesus had nightmares about judgment or encouraged others to have them either.  As to the Galileans killed by Pilate, he asked, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?’”  As to the 18 killed in the collapse of the tower of Siloam, he asked “do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?”  He not only asked.  He answered emphatically.  “No.”  This is not about judgment, Jesus said.

And then there is the paradox.  This is not about judgment and still Jesus calls on those who were listening to him—and us—to repent.  “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”  It is a curious thing.  It is not about judgment.  When it comes to things like this, Jesus says, judgment is entirely beside the point. 

And still, the message is to repent.  How can the message be to repent when the judgment is rendered irrelevant?

It seems to me that there are two ways to approach living, at least as a Christian.  There is the “nightmare that you show up for the exam without having studied” way of approaching life and there is the joy of being affirmed by God way of approaching life.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not at all saying that God approves of anything and everything.  I could give you a whole list of things I don’t believe God approves of and that deserve judgment.  What I am saying is that either we respond to what God wants of us out of fear of judgment, out of fear of showing up at the exam without having studied, which gives us nightmares, or we respond to what God wants to us out of gratitude that in Christ the judgment has been made irrelevant.  It isn’t that judgment is made not real.  Judgment is real enough.  But with God, that doesn’t mean it is eternally relevant either.  Our response is in how we look at it, from the perspective of fear of judgment or from the perspective of grateful for grace.

Peace,
+Stacy