NOT TO JUDGE BUT TO SAVE
November 6, 2005
Texts – Amos 5: 18-24
John 12: 44-50
It is a bold, self-confident statement. “I have come as light into the world,” Jesus says,
“that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” [John 12: 46-47]
That’s a far cry (isn’t it?) from the voice we hear through the prophets. “Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light,” Amos thunders, “and gloom with no brightness in it?” [Amos 5: 20] Need I add that there is judgment aplenty in those words?
I confess I rather like the righteous indignation of Amos, not to mention that of Micah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest of the Old Testament prophets. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies,” he roars.
“Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” [Amos 5: 21, 23-24]
You want to have your blood pressure medication near at hand before you start reciting such incendiary phrases. This is fire and brimstone to a fair-thee-wall, and he’s just getting warmed up. “Go get ‘m Amos!” part of me wants to say. “You tell ‘m . . . you show ‘m . . . you roast ‘m!”
Righteous indignation is a feast fit for a king. Novelists and screenwriters know well our appetite for it. For some of us, it is insatiable. My favorite television characters all seem to be able to let it fly on a moment’s notice. Their dialogue is always fast and tight, cutting but witty. Sometimes after I’ve watched a program like “The West Wing,” I just shake my head and say, “Boy, they really let them have it tonight! I wish I could be half as sharp.” Truth is, of course, I never am. Are you?
Oh, it is “a feast fit for a king” . . . I like that phrase! Years ago Frederich Buechner offered it as part of what he called his theological definition of revenge. “Revenge is a feast fit for a king,” he wrote, “ but you must remember that with every toothsome morsel what you are wolfing down is ultimately your self.” That’s also true of much of our anger. The fire burns hot, but the fuel it consumes is too often our better selves. “His face was dark with rage,” we say; “her anger cast a pall over the room.” Isn’t that how we experience it?
For better or worse, that is also the way our Hebrew forebears in the prophetic tradition frequently described the presence of God. “It is darkness, not light,” Amos says; “as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.” [5: 18c-19] His message? “Be careful what you pray for!” Why? Because God’s anger . . . God’s righteous indignation . . . burns hot against those who fail to keep
class=Section2>the commandments.
But now, hear again John’s gospel, for it offers something completely different. “I have come as light into the world,” Jesus says, “that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.” [v. 46] Step away from the anger, in other words. Walk away from the rage. The fear which for so long has characterized and dominated our inner most feelings need no longer terrorize or control us. “If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” [v. 47]
Jesus turns the prophetic metaphor upside down, doesn’t he? My message, he says . . . my reason for being here . . . does not lie in that age-old judgment day scenario we all grew up with – a time of “darkness, not light . . . (of) gloom with no brightness in it.” Quite the contrary – I am here in the same way that the sun rises each day, flooding the world with light. You welcome its coming, he says in effect; it brings warmth and security back into our lives. Many of the gifts with which we are all endowed are severely circumscribed by the night. We cannot take care of ourselves or our loved ones at midnight in the same way we can in broad daylight.
So my presence here, he says to the disciples and to us, is as natural as the sun rising each morning, flooding the places where we live with light. “Whoever believes in me,” he goes on . . . whoever “lives by me” (that’s the literal translation of “belief” . . . another way to put it is to say whoever “lives like me”) . . . will find that life flows more smoothly, just as it is easier to live in the daylight than it is to walk in the dark.
Don’t think of me as your judge, he goes on to say. “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.” [12: 47] You have enough judges already. My mission is to save, not to judge; to help, not to hinder; to heal, not to afflict.
Now let me stop here for a minute and ask – How does this sound? It is not the way many of us grew up believing, is it? Whatever the intellectual content of our religious upbringing may have been, the feeling tone which underlaid it . . . the non-verbal, emotional content of it . . . was hardly non-judgmental. “Thou Shalt Not!” was the phrase that echoed through many of my earliest years. Concepts like “sin” and “guilt,” to say nothing of “hell” and “damnation,” dominated my adolescent religious vocabulary. Did they yours? We learned well the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament prophets; many of us still carry their message buried deep in our subconscious. Alas, it does not therefore serve us well. Too often it erupts in anger and indignation when we do not get what we want . . . when our sense of “the way things ought to be” is thwarted . . . or when we stumble or fall and experience ourselves as less than we ought to be.
There is a marvelous passage in the book of Jonah which offers a telling critique of this way of being in the world. Jonah has faithfully carried out his prophetic assignment. He has gone to Nineveh, capital city of his generation’s “evil empire,” and has delivered God’s message of warning and repentance. Alas, the Ninevites take it to heart: they repent and God relents – the city is spared. Jonah is ripped. “O Lord!” he cries.
“Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” [Jonah 4: 2-3]
Jonah is having a temper tantrum. And God just stands there, patiently waiting for it to subside. Twice God says to him, “Do you do well to be angry?” Both times Jonah replies – “You bet! Angry enough even to die!” [4: 4, 9]
It is (isn’t it?) a “feast fit for a king,” but “with every toothsome morsel what you are wolfing down is ultimately your self.” The same is true of our anger and self-loathing and rage, but we do not therefore repudiate it, do we? No, most of us just sublimate it. We store it up and then we transfer it to any number of unwitting targets. Authority figures are popular marks. Sometimes all it takes is a look or a word that we can translate into judgment, and boom – we unload.
“I have come as light into the world,” Jesus says; “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.”
This table symbolizes the extravagant welcome of a loving God. “Come not because you must but because you may,” we say. “Come not because you are fulfilled, but because in your emptiness you stand in need of God’s mercy and forgiveness . . . Come, sisters and brothers, simply as you are. It is spread for you and for me . . .” May it remind us today of the light which God gives us each day, and of the power which is ours to live with dignity and with grace. Christ has come not to judge or condemn any one of us, but to welcome us as his sisters and brothers, children of a loving God. So let us come. Amen.