‘Mother of Pure Evil’ screamed Friday’s headlines after the conviction of the kidnappers of Shannon Matthews. Those headlines were a reminder, as if one were needed, that judgement is a theme that fascinates and implicates us in equal measure.
For more than four years before I came to St Peter’s I worshipped every Sunday underneath something almost as cataclysmic as a red-top headline: painted above the chancel arch of St Thomas’s, Salisbury it dates from the late fifteenth century and is one of the largest surviving mediaeval frescoes in England. The tabloids’ judgement of the kidnappers is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper; but the subject of the painting is, of course, the Doom, or The Last Judgment, the theme of this second address in our Advent series.
It depicts Christ robed in majesty outside the walls of the New Jerusalem. He is the judge of all creation. Beneath his feet sit the apostles in their long-promised places of honour. To the north and south of the chancel arch, and to the right and left of Christ, members of our race go to the fate decreed for them. Angels give the righteous a helping hand and they are raised to life, while the damned are dragged towards the gaping maw of hell. Numbered among them are crowned, mitred and tonsured heads.
No doubt the citizens of late-mediaeval Salisbury would have marvelled at the painting’s colour and detailed sophistication; no doubt they would have been cheered by the rewards promised to the saved; no doubt they would have shivered at the gruesome end of the condemned. To twenty-first century eyes the colours have faded, the detail appears crude, and the rewards and the gruesome end cruder still.
Today few are prepared to argue seriously for the existence of hellfire; fewer still accept that the fate of the unrighteous will be to be tortured for all eternity. Yet our principled loss of faith in hell’s gaping maw has not heralded an equally principled new era of faith in compassionate, forgiving human judgement. Friday’s headlines and the public reaction to every conviction of a child abuser testify to that. And we should not dismiss such outrage as mere populism of little consequence. It does not happen in a vacuum – it influences public policy. The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales has recently reminded all judges that their primary purpose in passing sentence is the punishment of the accused. Deterrence of others from committing crime, let alone the rehabilitation of the offender, is a secondary consideration. We inhabit a punishing society.
Our standards conflict in this as in so many spheres of life and faith. God cannot condemn us, we insist. He must love us just as we are, coming alongside us and responding to our needs and concerns. Yet we may (indeed we must) condemn the offender in our midst. We have learned a new way of understanding God – we have not learned a new way of understanding judgement. Our model is still the one painted above the chancel arch in Salisbury. It’s just that we’ll no longer allow Christ to sit in majesty. Preferring the court of public opinion, we’ve enthroned ourselves.
My belief is that it’s time to rediscover and renew our understanding of divine judgement, and that in the light of that understanding we’ll find our view of human judgement changing too. For if we remove God from the judgement seat and turn him into a divine social worker then we turn our backs on our tradition. Punch the word ‘judge’ into your Bible software and you’ll find that it occurs no fewer than 587 times between the books Genesis and Revelation; while ‘saviour’ appears 59 times and ‘creator’ 21. God is our judge: that is a non-negotiable Christian doctrine.
Yet if God is our judge then we must ask: what sort of judge is God? Is he like our own punishing judges, only on bigger scale? In the Salisbury Doom painting Christ holds his hands up in blessing. He is bare-chested and his feet are unshod. At the end of time, all things being complete, blood still streams from his wounds. All-powerful and glorified, his humanity is ever present, ever visible. Christ is transformed from suffering prophet to omniscient judge; yet the omniscient judge is still the suffering prophet. God’s longing is not for the obliteration of humanity (hence the painting’s rainbow throne, token of God’s promise to Noah that never again would humankind be destroyed); his longing is for its transformation. His judicial concern is not with our rehabilitation. He does not want to make us into different people, but to make us more fully the people we essentially are, the people he loves and knows we might become.
And how is this transformation effected? The mediaeval artist shows the cross, spear and crown of thorns brandished trophy-like behind the throne. Christ’s victory is complete, but he is a wounded victor, and his victory is a victory of love. It is love that keeps Christ faithful to his vocation and bears him to the cross; it is love that scars him with eternal wounds; it is in love that we will judge us. On the last day, however we conceive of that, we will discover what it is to stand in the presence of pure love. What would a human court of law look like if it were constructed on a similar foundation?
For no one should imagine that that will be a reassuring or comforting thing. Imagine the light of a love so intense that it shines like a penetrating laser into the darkest corners of our souls. Imagine the heat of a love so coruscating that it burns away the dross and filth that have accumulated within us. Imagine the gaze of a love so clear that it knows us better than we know ourselves and has held us in being from the moment of our first creation.
Demons, fires and toasting forks are terrifying; but to see ourselves as we really are and to let ourselves be changed – that is the judgement of Christ. Perhaps that’s why we remain stuck, content with our overcrowded and unsanitary prisons, content with religion that constrains and demeans, and content with the Doom: because the reality is even more terrifying. Amen.
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