The Judgment Day an Object of Intense Desire

“Arise, O God, and judge Thou the earth: for Thou shalt take all heathen to Thine inheritance.”—Psalm lxxxii. 8 (Prayer-book Version).

In the Collect for this day we give thanks that Christ has come in great humility, and we pray for grace to meet Him when He comes again in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead. We are used to thinking of one Advent as full of blessing and the other as full of terror: we bid men hope because Christ was born and died for them, and tremble because He will come to judge all nations.

The Psalmists and Prophets did not speak this way. They earnestly desired that God would arise to judge the earth — not for their own sakes, as though they alone would be spared what others must suffer, but for the earth’s sake, as its deliverance from misery and bondage. Nor did they desire it chiefly as victory for Israel, though they expected that too; they believed God would take the heathen for His inheritance, that this judgment would be the full establishment of His kingdom.

There is another difference, no less startling. We divide the Advent of Mercy from the Advent of Judgment by a vast stretch of time — a long day of grace since Christ came as Saviour, and only at its end will He come as Judge upon those who rejected Him. But the Prophets bring the two Advents together as parts of one transaction, scarcely separable. I will give two instances, both from Isaiah, the Advent Prophet, both quoted in the Gospels. The first opens Isaiah 42, quoted by St. Matthew when Jesus withdrew from the Pharisees’ plotting, healed the multitudes, and charged them not to make Him known — fulfilling the words: “Behold my Servant… He shall not strive, nor cry… till He send forth judgment unto victory. And in His name shall the Gentiles trust.” Here are the marks of a King coming in great humility; St. Matthew sees Christ’s silencing of those He healed as fulfilling this description — yet he will not sever from it the words “He shall send forth judgment unto victory,” for to do so would destroy the sense.

The other instance opens Isaiah 61, the passage our Lord read in the synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me… to preach good tidings unto the meek… to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” What fuller account of a deliverer could there be? Jesus applies it to Himself: “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.” But His hearers knew what followed in that very sentence — “and the day of vengeance of our God” — interposed between words of comfort on either side.

If these were isolated or doubtful texts, we might explain them away. But they are type sentences, chosen in the New Testament precisely to help us understand others like them. This joining of opposite subjects — times far apart — marks the Evangelists and Apostles as much as the older prophets. They rarely speak of Christ as having come without also bidding His followers wait and watch for His coming. The writer to the Hebrews says, “Yet a very little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry” — written for the most practical purpose, to warn men clinging to old institutions that these must give way to something greater. It was no time for playing with double meanings; the Christians of Palestine faced an actual crisis, and this was the language an inspired teacher judged fittest to prepare them. How is this habit of speech to be explained? What made it natural to the Apostles? What does it clash with in our own thinking? I think a little reflection will show.

I. The Church does not separate our Lord’s Advent from His Incarnation; His coming to earth was His coming into our nature. This is what the Collect means by coming “in great humility” — He stooped into a condition not properly His own, as St. Paul says: “He being in the form of God, took upon Him the form of a servant.” The Apostles joined to this another thought, without which it is incomplete: that man was made in God’s image, and that He who is the perfect Image of God alone can show forth true manhood. God could not, as in Hindu fictions, become incarnate in a mere animal; for the Son to become Man was to fulfil His own purpose in creating the world. Yet this did not lessen His condescension to the conditions of fallen man, for men were also chosen by Christ to be God’s children. Hebrews reconciles both: “Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same.” Flesh and blood did not belong to Him — He assumed them, to show forth in them the perfect mind of God and the perfect mind of Man, His child and servant.

What follows? This Advent was the Advent of the true King, Head, and Judge of men — it could be nothing else, being the Advent of the Son of God, after whose likeness men were made. Those who did not receive Him felt this to be so. They found themselves before a terrible heart-searcher, One who saw what was in them and brought it to light. He was like them, spoke with them, ate and drank with them — yet He still made them tremble, still made them feel God near. You say He was meek and gentle, that He did not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. True — but is there nothing terrible in a meekness that sets my own lack of it in relief? If I do break the bruised reed, is not One who never does so an awful presence to me? Am I meant to be like Him? What does His coming in my nature mean if I am not? And if I am meant to be like Him, then His very presence judges me for failing to be.

That was the feeling of Scribes and Pharisees, and the secret of their hatred. But did He not say, “I am not come to judge the world, but to save it”? He did, and proved it true — He passed sentence on no one, Scribe, Pharisee, Publican, or Adulteress. He came to unite all to Himself, to be the Light of the World, saying to every one, “Follow me.” This was the promise of salvation for every man who wished to be a man — that he could rise from a selfish life into a true human one; the promise of salvation for mankind. The Head of the race had come; its members were no longer meant to be atoms warring against each other. The Son of David was proving the sacredness of every Greek and Barbarian, freeman and bondsman. But a promise must be fulfilled. Christ’s coming in humility did not complete either the Salvation or the Judgment; His Resurrection and Ascension were to carry forward what the Incarnation began. The message of full redemption and of an Advent to judgment had to rest on those.

II. And it did. Christ, said the Apostles, died for our sins and rose for our justification. This was Peter’s message to his own people: “God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.” The gift of the Spirit witnessed that He was exalted “to be both Lord and Christ” — but that same Spirit prepared them for a great and terrible day of the Lord. Peter, apostle to the circumcised, was taught that his message could not be confined to his own people: what concerned the union of God with man was false unless it was universal. God was judging the earth and claiming the heathen for His inheritance.

Paul saw this more deeply and clearly still. He was the witness of a justification for every man, for mankind — Christ sent for the remission of sins to Gentile as well as Jew, the Gentiles fellow-heirs, members of Christ’s body. And therefore Paul was the great preacher of judgment: the revelation of God’s righteousness for men’s justification was itself, he said, “the revelation of God’s wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness.” The Jewish hypocrites had not been mistaken — One without guile had come, condemning their guile, and able to raise them out of it; therefore He pronounced accursed those who clung to falsehood. This truth, imperfectly brought home to consciences by Him appearing in humility, must be brought home in full power by Him clothed in His Father’s glory. He had gone up on high, the Apostles said, not to be separated from men but to claim His kingdom over them, to claim for each his true inheritance as a child of God. The Father exalted Him, and in Him the whole race He had joined Himself to. Men’s desire for immortality and fellowship with God — a desire that had taken strange, even monstrous forms, that had never died out in any nation or man, strongest in the noblest nations and wisest men, yet distorted by pride, ambition, tyranny — this desire, when it seemed most exhausted, Christ had vindicated and fulfilled, not for one elect nation but for all nations, not for sages and saints but for serfs and outcasts.

And therefore the judgment of men and nations was at hand. The Son of Man who had appeared in humility would be revealed in His own glory to every people, and to each person within them; all nations gathered before Him, every eye seeing Him. Call this language figurative if you like — but if the fact of an incarnation is admitted, if it means anything definite, the language is exact: there must be exactly this trial of nations, and of every man, to see where they stand. The nation that rejected the Son of Man, that tried to hold together without Him, was rent apart with a great crash; fragments of a building two thousand years in the rising were scattered to the ends of the earth. In that crash the illuminated eye saw the sentence on the nations — God had come to judge the earth, was taking the heathen for His inheritance; an old age was passing, a new one beginning. And what concerned mankind must concern every man. He may never have heard the Apostles’ announcement, but he must stand before the Son of Man; by the very law of his existence he must be brought into the Light that had always been his light, that had made him aware of his own acts and thoughts, that had shown him to himself. He may have found ways to shrink from that light, to quench it — such arts will then be impossible. He must be seen as he is, in the full brightness of noonday, not amid mists and shadows.

III. So you see how impossible it was for this Advent to judgment not to be part of the Gospel the Apostles preached — how inconsistent that Gospel would have been without it. Was Christ truly the Being they said, and yet to remain forever hidden? Was not His revelation to man implied in His own existence and man’s? Must not that revelation be infinitely desirable, if His coming in the flesh was to be desired? Must it not have seemed to the Apostles their highest duty to declare this revelation and judgment not as a distant possibility but as the certainty on which men might act, whatever else remained uncertain?

But now substitute for this idea of an Advent the mere notion of a birth at a certain time in Bethlehem, the birth of the Founder of our religion, from which we date our calendar as Muslims date theirs from the flight to Medina — and see how unnatural and incredible all the Apostles’ conclusions become to us. We may give Christ whatever glorious titles we please, but then He is only a Man exalted above men, not the Root and Head of Humanity. There is no “great humility” in His life on earth; instead He seems to rise by degrees from the lowest ground. And though we say we believe He will come to judge us, we mean it only as we might say anyone else will judge us — not the judgment of a Person near to us, concerned with our lives at every moment, to whom our thoughts are always open, but of one standing aloof, leaving us till that day to take our own course. How can the thought of such a being suddenly appearing to decide the eternal destinies of us all be anything but a thought we shrink from — for others’ sake if we think ourselves better, for our own if we honestly measure our faults? What keeps this expectation from being appalling except our feeble, vague, rare thoughts of it? No warning from divines stops us falling back on the old question, “Where is the promise of His coming,” the old argument, “since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the foundation of the world.” Can even Churchmen help saying in their hearts, “the Lord delayeth His coming,” and so treating the household He seems to have deserted as fair game for their own tyranny?

IV. But the question can be answered, the argument overturned — more clearly for Churchmen than for others. All things have not continued as they were since the fathers fell asleep. There have been changes and revolutions; the mere garments of truth have worn out, untruths laid bare, the world subjected to continual trials; only what could not be shaken has remained. Christ’s ministers have claimed all His powers delegated to them, free to use for cursing as for blessing — in vain; He has kept His word, “Lo, I am with you always,” appearing to avenge their presumption, to defend the helpless they oppressed, to show how little He needed them to vindicate His truth. Because He sat on the throne judging right, the Eastern Churches, withered by controversy, morally spent, blaspheming His name through their divisions, quailed before the Muslim armies possessed by a fierce conviction of one God. Because He sat on the throne judging right, the Western Churches, still grounded in His divinity and manhood, withstood that shock and grew into a united Christendom. Because He sat on the throne judging right, the might of Emperors and Popes could not withstand the words from the cell of a poor German monk. Because He has sat on the throne judging right, the dogmas of sects have proved as powerless as those of the hierarchy to hold any lasting sway over mankind — both feeble except where they testified to some part of His character or His dominion. These are assurances that the veil over the nations, hiding their true King and Deliverer, will at last be lifted, that all things will be gathered together in Christ. And though fanciful pictures of this final judgment have never restrained a crime or encouraged a virtue, the simple proclamation of it as truth has not been powerless: God has been testifying in every conscience that the hour is at hand when each must be tried, asked by the Son of Man whether he owned or despised Him in the least of his brethren.

We will not be able to thrust the thought of a Judgment Day into a corner, reducing it to a school dogma or a child’s picture. It will come with the sternest reality, meeting us in the council chamber and the exchange, glaring at us through Indian mutinies and commercial panics. We will feel that One we thought far off in Heaven is concerned with our deeds and schemes on earth. Shall we not learn that it is good to be judged, and most miserable to escape judgment? That what makes things manifest is Light, that Light is armor to put on and darkness an enemy to fight? That Christ came in great humility to deliver us from our own darkness into His marvellous light? That to possess and enjoy that light fully is to rise to the immortal life He has won, which dwells perfectly in Him? Shall we not look forward, as Apostles and Saints did, to His full revelation, believing He will indeed take the nations for His inheritance and fill the earth with His glory? Shall we need confused notions of space and time to trouble our belief that when He is seen as He is, all the living and the dead, in every age, who have shared His light — whether they knew His name or never heard it, walked in His Light or their own darkness — must be brought into judgment? Shall we not rejoice in that judgment, sure it will be without error or corruption, that it will scatter all that is vile and false, being the judgment of Him who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time?