A nation's shame

Christ separating the sheep from the goats

Judgment, along with the idea of eternal fire and separation from God, is not a particularly fashionable sermon topic these days, except perhaps in the context of certain dubious religious sects. But Jesus speaks of it on a number of occasions and in the starkest terms. In St. Matthew’s gospel we read of a time of sifting and separation between ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ (Matt.23: 31-46).

Goats were the sin-bearers in early Jewish tradition. The animal had the sins of the community symbolically heaped upon it and was then driven out of the town into the wilderness, from which we get the term ‘scapegoat’. 

The scapegoat story from the old testament has left us with some top-heavy theologies of atonement which derive from a deep need to blame someone else for what is wrong with our lives, our relationships and our world. In the old testament, the scapegoat represents a collective need for a retribution which purges rather than forgives. This old covenant theological inheritance was transposed to the cross and remained unquestioned by the Churches for centuries, so contributing to a great deal of psycho-religious illness. [1] 

Such a view of Christ’s atoning action on the cross also skews the way we think about ultimate judgment and the reward or condemnation which is to follow. In the story of the sheep being separated from the goats, we are being shown two classes of human beings, and two qualities which pertain in greater or lesser measure to every person on earth.

Jesus puts it quite simply. There are those who love and who live out their lives, to the best of their ability, in love. They may not think of themselves as Christian. Indeed, as it is told in the story, they are not aware of ever having met Christ. In other words, they make no particular connection between compassionate actions, including compassionate politics, and loving God. In the moment of judgment they are told not to be too concerned about this because their attitude of heart has effectively done all the ‘faith’ work that could ever be needed. They are already in paradise. They are ‘in their element’, which is the element of Love itself.

Ironically, the ‘goats’ who are, figuratively speaking, in the same element, suffer and ‘burn’. This interpretation of the story suggests that the burning fires of hell are not those of hatred, but of love. If you are a person who, for whatever reason, refuses to love, you quite literally ‘burn’. You burn when the pure refining fire of love starts to make itself felt, first as shame, then as what used to be called ‘compunction’ and, finally, as the capitulation of love to Love. So the sheep and goat story is an allegory for the ultimate and eternal judgment which awaits us all with respect to our attitude to refugees.

At present, we as a nation, and the government which we have elected to represent us, should be starting to feel the ‘burning’ of this refining fire of God’s love in regard to our refusal to accept our fair share of refugees and asylum seekers. This, of course, entails obvious risks. Might they not deprive us of our livelihoods – ‘burn’ them perhaps? Become a burden to our social services and health care – ‘burn’ them also? Threaten our ‘way of life’ by ‘burning’ and completely consuming all that is selfish, hypocritical and destructive of life and the human spirit in the love which they will bring? The answer may be ‘yes’ in a small measure to all of these fears because their very presence will ‘judge’, or ‘interrogate’, our common life, so providing the political sifting which this nation, in its shame, so badly needs.

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[1] For more on this see my Making Sense of God’s Love: Atonement and Redemption (SPCK)

On Dying

Last week I was privileged to be at the bedside of a man who was dying. I say privileged because the experience was akin to what I feel when I approach the altar before celebrating the Eucharist, a sense of being on holy ground, in the immanent presence of God and, like a number of Old Testament prophets who found themselves in a comparable situation, having nothing to say. It’s not that I had nothing to say to the man who was dying. I had nothing to say to the fact of death itself. There is a built-in instinct to talk in the presence of death, knowing that a person’s sense of hearing is the last to go, and in the mistaken belief that our talking will somehow assuage their loneliness, or their fear of oblivion, as well as our own. Being at the bedside of someone who is dying obliges us to think about our own mortality.

As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being the only person left alive on earth except for one ancient spectral figure who would one day meet me over the brow of a sunny hill. I later recognised different versions of the same nightmare in my everyday unnameable fears. Most of us experience unnameable fear from time to time. It is like waking from sleep, disorientated, having dreamed of being in some unfamiliar and perhaps threatening dimension from which one has not fully returned. These are the disorientating fears which inform all our other fears and return us to the fear of oblivion which is the fear of death itself.

Viewed as part of our fear landscape, the idea of death has something to teach us about the everyday fears which beset our lives. Am I intelligent? Will I be accepted? Will I fail? Am I loved? Will I be remembered? Each of these fears is, in its way, the spectral figure waiting to confront us over the brow of the next hill. They embody the fear of ultimate nothingness, the fear of oblivion. They also return us to ourselves and to our own life span, to who we are in relation to other human beings and in the continuity of time as we know it. They are the fear that we have not done enough, been enough, lived enough.

Who we think we are, or want to be, will often accord with the perceived expectations of someone who we may have feared in earlier life, a parent, a teacher, an admired or envied sibling or friend. All of these fears can be summed up in the fear of failure which is closely linked to that of loss. Loss begins from the moment we are conscious of our own mortality. Failure and loss are both significant because they pertain to the concept of judgment and to what lies beyond judgment, the unknowableness of death.

The fear of judgment is greater than the fear of death itself because judgment determines what will ultimately happen to us. The fear of judgment pertains as much to the present moment as it does to the dimension of eternity or, if we are young enough, to what we will make of our lives in the relatively near future. In terms of existence itself, there is, in the human psyche, a sense of the determining moment, one which has to do with oblivion, or death, versus eternal life. This sense of the ultimate, of something following death (even if that something is oblivion or nothingness) is common to everyone, irrespective of whether or not they have a faith. For those who do have a faith, a deeply embedded fear of judgment therefore governs who we are, and what we do with the present moment.

But for us at the moment, whether or not we are accompanying someone who is dying, or perhaps facing death ourselves, facing the emptiness, the ‘nothing’, can become the beginning of a fullness, a presence which consumes all fears. In it, we are reminded not only of our mortality but of the mystery and joy of our existence. We sense that some greater creative power deliberately, of his own will, desired, and continues to desire, that we not simply exist but that we be fully alive from the moment of our conception into eternity itself. He desires and purposes this eternal life within the re-creative energy of his own love and we are invited to play an active part, to make conscious choices which will accord with this purpose. To this end we are given two great gifts, the ability to think and the capacity for love. We deploy these gifts in the present moment. Both work together, but it is the capacity for love which determines the outcome of judgment and our ultimate destiny.

Love is not something that we can resource from within ourselves, or plan and deploy in a bounded and rational way. It is sourced from within God and therefore unlimited, unbounded. The choice we are given, beginning in the present moment, lies in allowing this God, who is love itself, to claim our lives as they have been, as they are, and as they will ultimately be in death and in the decisive moment of judgment. So judgment is a two-way decision, but one in which God has already chosen us. All that remains is for us to say ‘yes’ to his invitation to be in union with him.