A Sermon for Trinity 22
October 27, 2024 at Holy Communion
Isaiah 2:10–18, Matthew 18:21–35
“The Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty” (Isaiah 2:12). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
When Theodora was baptized, a friend gave her My Book of the Church’s Year. Not too long after, another person was flipping through it and found the page for Advent, which said that during Advent we remember the “Four Last Things,” which are “death, judgement, heaven, and hell.” The person grimaced. It seemed to her like old-time religion at its worst: scaring people, guilting people, making them afraid of the wrath of an angry God. We can empathize with that person’s disgust. I don’t usually preach the “four last things” in Advent; few people do nowadays.
But we also need to challenge ourselves to think complexly. When an idea offends us, we should first seek to understand why someone would think that way. This is an attitude of generosity, trust, and openness to having our understanding stretched.
This is especially true when we are offended by the Bible or the teaching of the church. The reason we read the Bible at all is because, as God’s word, we trust it to speak truly and helpfully about God and about the human condition. So when it says something that offends us, we should not assume that the Bible is wrong, but that our understanding is incomplete.
So, even though it is not yet Advent, I want to talk about one of those four last things which turned the stomach of my friend flipping through our children’s book: judgement. Judgement has everything to do with our readings today, especially our Old Testament Lesson and our Gospel.
But I’ll jump in using two passages we didn’t read this morning. In his first letter, St Peter says that “it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17). St Paul makes a similar point when he says that we do not judge those outside the church, but we certainly do exercise judgement among ourselves within the church (1 Corinthians 5:12).
So here’s our first point: the judgement of God is not something that only happens “at the end”—at the end of life, at the end of the age, when God separates the sheep of the goats. The judgement of the world may indeed happen at the end, but both Peter and Paul say that, for the church, the time of judgement is now.
The word “judgement” in the New Testament is krisis. You’ll recognize the word “crisis,” which we borrow directly from Greek. A “crisis” is a turning point, a moment of tension, of conflict, and of decision. A crisis emerges when an existing problem is brought to light, which forces you to make a decision about how to address that problem. A crisis is a moment of judgement.
So “judgement” doesn’t just mean “condemnation,” as if every judgement had a negative outcome. A judgement is a decision which names a problem, addresses it, and sets a new way forward. Crisis and judgement are, in fact, usually what a sticky situation needs—without crisis, no judgement is reached about the way forward, and there is no resolution.
When St Peter and St Paul say that the church is a place of judgement, they certainly do not mean that the church is a space in which we are judgemental toward one another. They mean that the church is a space where everything that we are is brought before God, seen in the clear light of day, and a new direction is set as necessary.
The day of our judgement is also the day of our salvation. It is the day on which our faults are no longer our destiny, but only a diversion from the path which we have identified and corrected.
So in the church—and this is Paul’s and Peter’s point—we anticipate and even celebrate the judgement of God. We want our turning point to be now. We can’t wait until the end of days for our salvation. We volunteer to have our mess sorted out, because we trust that this will be for our health and our joy.
In today’s Old Testament reading, the message is simple: “The Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty. … The haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low” (Isaiah 2:12, 17). It’s a promise of future judgement. But notice how the purpose of announcing future judgement is actually to bring that judgement closer, to bring it home to us as something worth considering in the present. If we ignore the prophet’s warning, then we have to face up to our pride at the end of days, unprepared. But if we heed the prophet’s warning, we will face up to our pride now. The purpose of the prophecy is to put us into crisis. It invites us to examine ourselves for the pride which we know must sooner or later be brought into judgement.
The same is true of our Gospel reading. We intuitively understand that the conduct of the unforgiving servant is heinously hypocritical. And the essential problem with hypocrisy is also pride, the belief that we are above the standards we apply to other people, so there’s a connection to the Old Testament reading.
But the moment in the parable that really packs the punch is when the king discovers the unforgiving servant. This is where the Christian reader trembles. We are invited to ask ourselves, “Am I the unforgiving servant? Am I blithely walking through life pretending to enjoy God’s forgiveness while I harbour unforgiveness? Am I proud?”
The purpose of the parable is to bring the moment of judgement—the moment of self-examination and repentance—out of some hypothetical future, and into today. The purpose of the parable is to put us into crisis, forcing us to face our unforgiveness and pride. But, like all divine judgement, its purpose is never to make us wallow in guilt, but always to help us make this moment the first step in a new direction. We will be better for having passed through the fire and having been exposed by the light.
And, in fact, we can end with a word of assurance: we will—as a hope, as a certainty—we will be better for having been exposed by the light of God’s word. In our Epistle, St Paul gives us one of scripture’s most comforting promises: “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). God has begun a work in you. Day by day he brings this or that side of your inner life into his gentle judgement, by making you aware of it, by bringing it to light. He is polishing you like a precious diamond, so that when that Great Day arrives at the end of the age, you will already be prepared for the coming of the kingdom.
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