Abstract
It’s terribly fashionable these days to be politically correct. You can’t talk (or rather you shouldn’t talk) about God as ‘He’. In the same pc vein God can’t be an angry God, or a vengeful God, or someone (if God is indeed ‘someone’) who seeks the downfall of others.
The trouble is that all these features of God are there in the Bible. God is also described in the Bible as a judge. That’s not very pc either because in the popular mind it conjures up the image of a stern old man, glowering over half-moon spectacles commanding a fearsome presence from an elevated citadel whilst delivering judgment upon a hapless little individual in the dock below.
I get round that one myself quite easily because my niece is a judge. She’s very pretty as well and is (I hope she won’t mind me saying) now in her early forties and has long fair hair. So that’s my image of God. Thoroughly anthropomorphic I know. But God as a young, female judge with beautifully kept near blonde hair is a rather good human image of who God might be, I feel.
So with that in mind I approach the second reading set for today, namely the one from First Peter. In it God is being called on as judge. In being asked to judge all according to their deeds She (ie God) is expected to be impartial. She will, in Her judgment of people, rightly command ‘reverent fear’. By this is meant an appropriate sense of awe and respect of what She is about because of who She is.
Reverently holding God in awe surely is a good way to conduct one’s life. It might even help keep wayward behaviour under control. We expect God to save people from sin; indeed God has already done so. We expect God to bring the healing word to someone most in need of hearing it. She has. We expect God to love all equally. She does.
God, being God in this way, carries out faithfully the right and righteous actions of someone who is a secure just judge. God is. Meanwhile for those who have done wrong, and in some cases terrible wrong, we expect God to voice or exact the word of appropriate condemnation. God does. I can be personal on this one. If, for example, I do, or have done something bad then God as judge will rightly confront me with it. It’s thoroughly biblical to say this, even if not always pc.
So that’s the second reading dealt with. What about the first? In the Acts of Apostles, Peter is in full flight, preaching. Acting on behalf of God, and speaking God’s word in one of the first ever written-down sermons, Peter said things that clearly made his listeners really take notice. He had made them realise how sinful they were. All of a sudden his audience knew the wrong things of which they were guilty and upon which sentence was due.
‘What are they to do?’ was the question they were all asking one another. The answer came quickly. For them it meant repentance, baptism and accepting God as their saviour. Here again is another non-pc term. Repenting of sin is something we don’t easily promote in our fairly comfy middle class churches. And yet it is something that needs to be done.
Far more people than ever we realise are pressured into a metaphorical air-lock and coerced into doing wrong. In such contexts cheating and lying for example, in other words sinning, might be the expected norm. Little facility for escape is possible. This could be in the given business context of the firm they work for. In another context the air-lock might be a free and personally chosen lifestyle into which one has knowingly entered. And then become trapped by it. Or whatever.
In such a situation how does one get out of the vicious vortex that is sin? Likewise how does one find a way of genuinely accepting the need to vocalise what one is doing if one is in such an environment? Without exception the need to hear God’s saving word of forgiveness is the real, and very attainable, opportunity for a new start. This was what Peter’s hearers heard that day.
It is the job of the judge in dispensing justice and, if the circumstances are right, to pronounce acquittal and pardon to the person who is making that new start and who does so acknowledging the wrong that was their’s.
Moving now to the third reading, the one from Luke’s Gospel, it doesn’t easily fit with the justice ‘judgment and acquittal’ theme that has emerged from the other two. From it a new, but not unrelated, line of thought arises. The passage is the celebrated and quite wonderful story of the two chaps walking to Emmaus being joined by a stranger accompanying them along the road. As they stopped in the evening and during supper they saw, through him, the risen Christ.
Somehow the two men came to realise the place of the risen Christ in their lives. Their companion on the road opened up the narrative of what the Risen Lord was about. At supper the penny dropped. They encountered the Risen Lord personally. Nothing was going to be the same for them again. From this perspective their lives took on a whole new dimension and freshness.
They had been ‘set free’ or ‘released’ for the future. How was it for them? Let me give an example to try and show what I mean.
When cage-reared birds (eg Red Kites or Sea Eagles) are set free into the wild it isn’t, in their case, that they are being released after having done wrong. Rather they have been protected and properly reared in a particular way for a future that they couldn’t know about until it actually happened to them.
Maybe this is another way of looking at how God can free people for the future. She doesn’t just do it to free people from sin. She can do it by other ways. The time comes, so God determines, when Her people can be moved to step up to another level. To move into Her creation in a way complementary to, and truly fulfilling all that She had intended for them up to that point. All that was needed for it to happen was a new realisation of the reality of it all. This was what happened along the Emmaus Road and at supper the same day.
Being released and set free needn’t therefore be a forensic, ‘get out of jail free by accepting salvation’ card. It can also be a leaving behind of that ‘box’ (for want of a better word) that previously had been our environment and flying out into a new adventure. In this new adventure every encounter would betoken a completely new discovery both of God and of Her creation.
This has to be part of the wonderful glory of God. On the one hand God judges and sets us free from sin. God also nurtures up to the moment when just at the right time She sets us free to fulfil that purpose for which she has always intended us. To do this God has protected us through it all and has nurtured us carefully along the way; sometimes helping us up when we fall down, sometimes giving reassurance when the going gets tough, but all the time voicing the narrative of Her salvation so that in the end Her will will be done through the freedom She gives.
In all this God proves Herself to be a far wiser judge than we might ever have dared or imagined Her to be.