There is a saying from St. John of the Cross: "Love is the measure by which we shall be judged." I heard it often from Dorothy Day. These few words summarize much of the gospel and have to do with God's final weighing of our lives.
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.
Then the King will say to those on his right hand, "Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me."
Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you ...?" And the King will answer them, "Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me."
Then he will say to those at his left hand, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food ..."
Then they will answer, "Lord, when did we see you hungry ... and did not minister to you?" Then he will answer them, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.
-- Matthew 25:31-37, 40-42, 44-45
In practically any ancient church in Europe, one finds at least one visual representation of the Last Judgment, the blessed processing off complacently to the left, the damned -- rather pathetic figures -- being shoveled by grotesque devils into the fiery jaws of a dragon.
On the south porch of the Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres in France, one of the world's most unhellish places, this scene is carved in stone. In medieval times, the stone was brilliantly painted. The effect must have been stunning -- and perhaps alarming. In Moscow's Kremlin, over the entrance to the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel, summoner of the Last Judgment, there is a large icon portraying the same scene.
At both churches, I have heard similar answers to the question "Why are we judged together and not one by one when we die?" One reason is that we really are in life together. No life exists on its own. Every word we speak is a borrowed word. Every skill we acquire is given to us and has mainly been refined by people who died long before we were born. We share the same air, drink the same water, and walk on the same earth. We live together in one history, all part of one story, and we will finish history in each other's company.
There is another reason: No one's life is finished with death. Our acts of love and failures to love continue to have consequences until the end of history. The acts of Adam and Eve, Moses, Herod, Pilate, the apostles, Caesar, Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day -- all these lives continue to matter and have particular consequences every single day.
This same principle applies equally to the least person. The consequences of what we did or didn't do can only be seen at the end of time. What you and I do, and what we fail to do, will matter forever.
While looking at the stone carving of the Last Judgment at Chartres, I heard another American say, "How the hell can God allow hell?" It weighs heavily on many people that Jesus preached not only heaven but hell. There are quite a lot of references to hell in the gospels, many of them in the Sermon on the Mount. How can a loving God allow a place devoid of love?
The only response to that question which makes sense to me was in a sermon I heard in an old Gothic church in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1964, during an assembly of the Christian Peace Conference. The preacher was a particularly courageous man who had seen a great deal of prison from the inside. It is now too many years for me to recall his exact words, but this is what I remember of it, or perhaps what it has become for me in the passage of nearly 25 years.
God allows us to go wherever we are going. We are not forced to love. We are not forced to recognize God's presence. It is all an invitation. We can choose. Perhaps, in God's mercy, we can even make the choice of heaven in hell. But very likely we will make the same kinds of choices after death that we made before death. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis tells of a tour bus leaving daily from hell to heaven; it is never full, and it tends to return with as many passengers as it took on the trip out of hell.
Anyone with more than one white hair knows that the older we are, the more we live by old choices, and defend those choices, and make ideologies, philosophies, and even theologies out of our choices. We canonize our choices by repetition.
We can say not just once but forever, "I do not know the man." We can say he is worthless, that he has no one to blame for his troubles but himself, that his problems aren't our business, that he is an enemy, that he deserves to die.
The Way
If I cannot find the face of Jesus in the face of those who are my enemies, if I cannot find him in the unbeautiful, if I cannot find him in those who have the "wrong ideas," if I cannot find him in the poor and the defeated, how will I find him in bread and wine, or in the life after death? If I do not reach out in this world to those with whom he has identified himself, why do I imagine that I will want to be with him, and them, in heaven? Why would I want to be, for all eternity, in the company of those whom I avoided every day of my life?
The peaceable kingdom would be hell for those who avoided peace and devoted their lives to division.
Teaching about the Last Judgment, Jesus describes the coming together of every last person who has ever lived, the vast majority of them needing to be raised from the dead for the event. This taxes the imagination. It is nearly as hard to believe as creation itself and the surprise of life.
At the heart of what Jesus says in every act and parable is this: Now, this minute, we can be on the way to the peaceable kingdom. The way into it is simply to live in awareness of God's presence in those around us. Doing that, we learn the truth of what St. Catherine of Siena said: "All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, 'I am the way.'" One could add, "and all the way to hell is hell." To the extent I fail to love, hell is in my life already.
Perhaps there have been church people who occasionally have admitted to disappointment over Jesus' teaching on the Last Judgment. Could he not have said something about the advantages of having been baptized and belonging to the right church? Wouldn't this have been the right place for Jesus to have said, "If you want to inherit eternal life, confess me as Lord and Savior and be saved"? Could he not have said that the Last Judgment would be a theological test and those who got the right answers would get the ultimate high grades?
It seems Jesus is not a leading institutionalist. The churches are probably among his heaviest burdens.
Then what is the whole point of the church? Doesn't the church matter?
Two black women, Celie and Shug, discuss this question in Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple:
"You telling me God love you," Celie says to Shug, "and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean not go to church, not sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?"
"But if God love me, Celie," Shug responds, "I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of things I can do that I speck God likes."
"Like what?"
"Oh, I can lay back and admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time."
"Well, this sounds like blasphemy sure nuff."
"Celie," Shug says, "tell the truth; have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think the other folks did too. They come to share God, not find God."
CHURCH MEMBERSHIP WILL NOT save us. Yet we need the church. We need the church, the community of believers, as a place of sharing God. We need a place to gather where it isn't considered strange to talk about God or to care about the gospels. We need the church as a school of holiness, which means living in the mercy of God. We need the church because we need to be part of a community of praise, remembrance, and reflection; a community seeking to be aware of God's presence in the world and in our lives.
We need the church because Jesus has said he is with us whenever two or three gather together in his name. We need the church because he called us to recognize him in bread broken and wine poured out. We need the church because we need a community that will help us learn to respond to people we might otherwise despise and treat as enemies. We need the church to help us see beyond, and reach beyond, national borders.
We need a community of faith to help us experience God's mercy and forgiveness when, like those who preceded the Samaritan on the road to Jericho, we find ourselves living blind, merciless lives, unaware that Jesus is hidden in those whom we avoid or are ready to destroy. We need to be within the community of believers as a place of remembrance of Jesus' life and words. We need the church because we need each other.
Yet we have to be on guard about the church's tendency to make an idol of itself, to be pleased with itself, and to consign to hell those who don't fit. We need to be on guard about the church's tendency -- our own tendency -- to forget or explain away or bury in footnotes the more inconvenient parts of the gospel.
Whatever church we are part of, we need to remember what Jesus himself says matters most. He asks us to recognize him in the least person. He says there will be those who do so even though they aren't aware of him and think they have denied him. Yet their merciful care for others is enough. They are welcomed into the kingdom "prepared for you from the foundation of the world."
Jesus' kingdom opens itself to us not because we deserve it or belong to the right church (or any church), or have remarkable intelligence, or are theologically astute, or write religious books, or achieve recognition, or because we know bishops, or even know saints.
The kingdom receives us, Jesus says, because we are willing to care for the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. We are saved because we care for unattractive strangers, annoying relatives, even those who threaten us. We are saved because we allow the mercy of God not just to enter our lives, as if one's life were private property and God a personal acquisition, but because we let God's mercy pass through our lives.
We are saved because we respond to others as if they were Jesus.
Jim Forest was general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.
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