Reflection: Judgement: scale and perspective

Some thoughts triggered by Isaiah 40 and 41: 

The Last Judgement. Jean Cousin the Younger, The Louvre.

Judgement has been a bit of a theme in the weeks leading up to the end of the liturgical year,

We all judge others much of the time. It's a key way in which. as social animals, we locate ourselves in relation to other people. It is a continuous, instinctive  and potentially emotional process.

But Christians use the term in other ways, not least to know oneself (or to place oneself) over against God. This shifts the frame of reference from other people to God who is beyond us.

Secular judgement
In our secular society judgement too has been secularized.

In part this is a conscious rejection of earlier Christian teaching which equated divine judgement with a question of morality: was our behaviour - and our intent - acceptable to God?

There is nothing wrong with this question in itself. The false step was to seek to answer it for other people. Those who had power in the Church assumed that such power meant that they were able to speak and judge on God's behalf. And all too often they equated their grasp of God's judgement with the condemnation of others. They forgot first, that none of us can speak for God and, second, that the Christian God is a God of love with a presumption in favour of compassion and forgiveness.

We are known utterly by God, and  loved.

In our secular judgement we try not to use irrelevant criteria (skin colour, for example) but we're quite happy to use money - wealth and income - as a basis for (and evidence of) public judgement.

It's easier to see this by reversing the telescope: it's the poor that get's the blame. Those who have a little look down on those who have less. Housing, for example, could be a fundamental human right. Instead those who become homeless are regarded with disdain.

This is a very secular form of judgement which says little or nothing about morality and everything about material gain.

Our secular judgements give us ways to know who we are in relation to others in part - whether we like it or not - by 'irrelevant' dimensions (gender, ethnicity, disability, age etc.) and in part by where we locate ourselves on the scales of wealth and income.

Divine judgement

We are utterly insignificant in the universe
and precious in God's sight.

But if we place ourselves over against God we inherently judge ourselves very differently. After all, money is irrelevant to God.

First, God, who is perfection, puts all of us in the shade.

We are, so to speak, spiritually turned inside out: the public and personal skin by which we protect ourselves from others is stripped away and we are known to our core.

Our smallness, inadequacy, self-centredness is exposed to our own sight.

This has to be a scary place. All our instincts are to protect ourselves, to assert our own worth and our value to others, to construct a 'self' comfortable to ourself and to others. Our skin is there for good reason: to protect what is vulnerable.

Scale and perspective
It is very easy in both public and personal judgement to get everything out of perspective: to only condemn (ourselves and others) or to only excuse.

What I took from Isaiah 40 was to hold together first the greatness of God and the tininess of humanity - not least the self-important:

He [God] brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner do they take root in the ground, than he blows on them and they wither, and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff. (40: 23, 24, NIV)

And, the second thing was to hold together both judgement and forgiveness, condemnation and affirmation.

I said, ‘You are my servant’; I have chosen you and have not rejected you. So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (41: 9b, 10, NIV)

If we don't hold the opposites together - God's overwhelming greatness and his affirming love for each one us - our collective and personal failure and inadequacy and acceptance that we are forgiven and loved - then we distort and diminish both God and ourselves.

To know that we are judged and forgiven by God is to step out of the secular frame of judgement (at least for a while) and to set our selves in a different, spiritual, framework by which we know who we are in ourselves and in the world.

“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying