Embracing the Embrace of God (Week 19, Jan 1)
Reading
Luke 15
Silent Reflection
Remarks
“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him.”
Luke 15:28 (NIV)
“Judgment” is a scary word. I hear it as a sound more than the word itself. When the sound ˈjəj-mənt hits my ear, what I tend to hear is a door slamming, a gavel pounding, people murmuring, and someone yelling angrily.
God as judge is one of the predominant images in my Christian tradition, as well it should be because it’s a predominant image in Scripture. However, I always thought of judgment as being a matter of meting out consequences, and the judge as the one whose sole job it is to decide how severe the consequences are going to be. For much of my life, God as judge has been God as a gavel-pounding punisher.
Eugene Peterson once wrote something along the lines of, “Judgment in the Hebrew Scriptures is always preparation for salvation.” In other words, judgment is never an end in itself; rather, it’s a necessary precursor for rescue, in the way that intense physical training is a necessary precursor for winning the Super Bowl. What that often means in Scripture is dispelling illusions—lighting up darkness. The point of judgment isn’t to condemn so much as it is to expose. Here we are, running around in our greed and apathy and lust, destroying the world and each other, and we have no idea the reality of what we’re doing because we are like blind people in a dark room. Judgment is God turning on the lights and giving us eyes to see the destruction in our wake. Only then do we have the capacity to genuinely repent.
When it comes to the condemning sort of judgment, I think we really do a much better job of that than God.
Jesus taught about big ideas (like judgment) in parables. What do we see when we look at judgment in the parables? I think at least two things come to the fore. One, as Robert Farrar Capon noted (he actually called this the “master key” to understanding parables about judgment), is that inclusion before exclusion is the chief interpretative principle for them. That means, when it comes to people being cast into outer darkness (as in the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22), or having the door shut in their faces (as in the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25), no one is ever “kicked out” who wasn’t already “in” in the first place. Judgment is not a pronouncement based on the bad things someone has done; it’s a pronouncement based on how they’ve responded to the grace they already received.
And the second thing comes on the heels of the first: In the parables, exclusion is often self-imposed. The grace of God includes us and, I believe, never stops wanting to include us. When we refuse that grace (and in the parables, we do this for many reasons), it’s a judgment we pronounce on ourselves. Think of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. The servant who buried the talent did so, he says, because he knew the master was a hard man and so he was afraid. But is the master really a hard man, one to be afraid of? The parable doesn’t say this. The master doesn’t indicate this in any way. It’s a fear the servant holds based on his own assumptions, and so he excludes himself by listening to that voice rather than trusting as the other servants did.
Let me illustrate again by looking at one parable in more detail.
The parable of the prodigal son is really a parable of two sons, both of whom have decided to exclude themselves from their father’s house. The first is the more famous son—the one who comes to his father and says, in effect, “You’re dead to me. I want nothing to do with you anymore, so give me my inheritance and I’ll go make a life for myself.”
We know the story. The father obliges. The son runs off to Vegas or wherever and squanders all his money on cocktails and hotels until one day he wakes up broke, rifling through dumpsters for food. He comes to his senses and goes home.
As he’s hitchhiking his way home, what is he thinking about his father? What response does he expect? Wrath and fury, probably. “I told you so. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. You’ll get nothing more from me!” The son practices his speech all the way home.
“Sir, I know I was stupid. I have made so many huge mistakes, and honestly, I know I’m not even worthy to be called your son. But if you’ll just let me back in as a groundskeeper or something, I’ll work this off and pay my own way and do everything I need to do to earn your favor again.”
What he doesn’t know is that his dad has been waiting for him to come back since the day he left. He doesn’t know that his father sits on his porch with eager eyes, watching the horizon day after day, week after week, month after month, to see if his son’s silhouette would appear. He doesn’t know that his father has no interest in making him work off his debt.
So when the son finally gets back to the property and begins his speech, he hardly gets two words out before the father sweeps him up in the biggest hug that had been hugged at that point in history, and he kisses him, and he says to his other servants, “Quick as you can! Bring the best robe and put it on my boy! Fire up the grill and throw on the best steaks! Get out all the finest decorations and get the loudest sound system you can find! For this son of mine was dead and is alive again!” And the party went on for a long time.
There’s a second son, though. And he is also in a position of self-exclusion, even though he never left the grounds of his father’s house. At some point during the party, the father realizes he hasn’t seen his older son around, so he goes looking for him (as God does—God is always looking, isn’t he?). And when he finds him, the older son is fuming mad. He refuses to join the party. Notice that he’s already at the party, but he’s refusing to join in the joy. (Maybe that’s what hell is really like.) And the older son says, “I never left. I did everything right. I never ran off and squandered anything, but you never gave me a party like this.” And the father says, “Everything I have is already yours. You’re always with me. Let’s party.”
What excluded the younger brother was his recklessness, and what excluded the older brother was his righteousness. The first let go of his self-imposed judgment, but what will the older brother do? Will he embrace his father’s embrace? Or will he continue to keep himself just outside the party? In the end, this is all that matters for any of us. What determines the judgment we come under isn’t how poorly or how excellently we’ve lived our lives. All that matters, be us wretches or saints, is whether we choose to lean into the grace that’s already ours and embrace the God who’s always reaching out to embrace us.
Silent Reflection
Response
What has God’s judgment meant to you in the past? What does it mean to you now?
Which brother are you? What are you allowing to exclude you from God’s party?
Are there others you’re judging? How do you think God wants to respond to them?