Judgement - Seeing Ourselves in the Light of Love

Judgement – Seeing Ourselves in the Light of Love

In around 1995 I was in the early stages of becoming a lay preacher.  I was just getting on my feet as a preacher after a wobbly start when I had thought a few times of just giving it up. 

On one particular Sunday I preached a sermon on a topic I can’t remember, but somewhere in the sermon I had made some kind of illustration by making a rather derogatory remark about time-share salesmen.  I don’t know how the timeshare industry is regulated or operated here, but in South Africa, the time-share industry had a reputation of creating contracts that were easy to sign but very difficult if not impossible to get out of.  

After the service one of the more senior members of the church came past to shake my hand at the door.  All he said to me was: Brian, I am a time share salesman.  To be quite honest, I don’t think he was a time-share salesman, but was putting himself in the shoes of a time-share salesman I order to make a point. 

And in that moment I suddenly realised what I had done.  It was for me a moment of searing pain in which I instantaneously recognised not only how sweeping and prejudiced a statement I had made from the pulpit, but the potential hurt and shame I may have caused for anyone in the congregation who was a time share salesman or perhaps had a family member who was one. I felt ashamed that the words had come out of my mouth so glibly without having considered what they could mean for some who were listening.   One could say that it was a moment of judgement. A very painful moment, that in fact lasted like a dreadful shadow for hours afterwards, and in fact probably for quite a number of days.   But it was also a moment of growth. One could say even a moment of salvation from that moment for myself and for anyone who would listen to my preaching from that moment onwards.  I would from that moment onwards be far more mindful of how  I spoke from the pulpit and hopefully never again make derisive, sweeping and prejudiced comments from the pulpit again. I hope I have never done so again. It is entirely possible that I have, because we all have blind-spots, things we are not fully aware of unless someone points them out to us. 

Today I would like to reflect on the concept of judgement.  What is judgement? What does judgement look like and feel like. In a way, this is an epilogue to the sermon series we have just completed. 

The idea of the Last Judgement is one that is deeply etched into our Western Psyche. Some of the greatest artworks of Western Civilization are depictions of the last judgement.  And I think especially of the scene of the Last Judgement painted by Michelangelo on the Altar Wall of the Sistine Chapel between 1536 and 1541. 

Interestingly, in Michelangelo’s depiction of the Last Judgement, almost all the human figures in the painting are depicted naked.   One might simply put that down to the fact that it is a renaissance painting in which it had become more and more common to depict the naked human form. But in doing so, it appears that he was actually trying to communicate something of the deeper meaning of judgement: The sense that the process or experience of judgement is an experience in which our ability to cover up is removed.  Judgement is the experience of no longer being able to hide ourselves from the light of truth, the truth of who we are and what we have done. 

One gets a sense of that in the Genesis story.  When Adam and Eve in the story disobey the Divine command, they feel exposed  and vulnerable and so try and cover up their nakedness by hiding in the garden and sewing together fig leaves.  It is a story that is true not because it happened, but because it happens to all of us. It conveys an archetypal truth. 

It is surely symbolic of our human tendency to become defensive in trying to cover over our flaws and faults.  None of us enjoy being criticized and having our faults and weaknesses identified, even when we know that the criticism might be true. In fact often it is when the criticism is true that we become the most defensive because we feel so vulnerable. We don’t like to be exposed and so we try to cover over our faults, because we don’t want others to see us as we really are. And more often because we don’t want to see ourselves as we really are.  We are afraid of the light, because in it we feel exposed and vulnerable. And so we prefer to hide our flaws and faults in the dark so that we can avoid looking at them in the hope that others won’t see them as well. 

And this brings us to our passage from John’s Gospel today in which the writer shares his perspective on what judgement is:  

John 3:19-20 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.  (And we should note that the Greek word for evil in this passage comes from the root Greek word ponos meaning hurtful. Our tendency to cause hurt and harm. It is not saying we are inherently evil.)

I wonder if that gives us a clue as to what the so-called final judgement is about:  Is it perhaps that the metaphor of the final judgement refers to that moment when the Light of Truth will shine upon us in such a way that we can no longer hide the truth of who we are and what we have done.  It is a searing and painful moment, because we don’t like what we see it and we especially don’t like others to see it as well.  The metaphor of the Last Judgement is the experience where we stand naked before God and we can no longer cover ourselves up. 

I think of someone like Vladimir Putin.  No-one likes to think of themselves as a bad person.  You can be almost certain that Vladimir Putin does not think of himself as a bad person.  In his mind he has a whole lot of stories to justify to himself and to other people why he is doing what he is doing. In his propaganda he constantly tries to show himself in the best light.  What will judgement look like for Putin? It will look exactly the same as it will be for each of us. It will be a moment or an experience of no longer being able to hide behind the stories that we tell ourselves, and having the truth about our actions exposed will surely be a most painful experience.  

But what we don’t realise is that the Light of Truth that illuminates our darkness and exposes it is also at the very same time the Light of Divine Love.  And while it might be painful to have the truth about ourselves revealed by Divine Light, it is also in that moment that we can begin to experience the embrace of divine love. 

What will the judgement and accountability look like? That is a question that is difficult to answer, because we are in the territory of things that are beyond our full comprehension.   But what I would suggest is that at the very least judgement and moral accountability when we stand naked before God will look something like my experience standing at the door of the church shaking hands.  At the very least the final judgement will be a lifting of the veil of the true nature of our crimes of commission and omission.  It will be seeing our acts of cruelty and indifference in the full light of love.  It will be a coming to know and to experience the full impact of our actions upon those whom we have hurt, abused or perhaps neglected.  And that seeing of ourselves and our actions unveiled completely before us will be an experience searing and inescapable pain for it is a dreadfully painful thing when we have nowhere left to hide and our deeds of darkness are exposed to ourselves and others.  But the good news will also be that this searing pain of having our deeds and misdeeds exposed by the Light of Divine Love will also be our healing and for our final salvation. 

When one thinks of these things in terms of victims and perpetrators, when a victim wishes pain on a perpetrator is it not that what they are really wanting is for the perpetrator to fully know and to fully understand and in some way to fully experience for themselves the full extent of the pain they have caused the victim.  And generally, where perpetrators have been able to bring themselves to the point of doing so with deep contrition, then a true and real reconciliation is able to happen between victim and perpetrator.   

Does that possibly give us a glimpse of what the final reconciliation of all things will be:  On the one hand, it will be the experience of the complete healing of the pain and wounds of the victim which will be mirrored and facilitated by the complete accountability and the complete contrition and healing of the perpetrator as well in which the perpetrators of this world will come to fully know and fully experience from the inside the true depth of pain inflicted upon their victims. And this process of healing of the perpetrator will not be without pain or without cost, but it will be full and it will be complete, just as the healing of the wounds and pain of the victim will also be full and complete aided by the fact that the perpetrator has fully understood and experienced in their own spirits the pain that he or she has caused.  

In Ephesians 5:13 we read: ‘But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes light.’

The exposing of our darkness might be a painful experience, but it is also the experience of our ultimate healing.  The Light of Divine Judgement turns out to be the Light of Divine Healing and Love because “...everything that is illuminated becomes light.”