Judgment isn't Justice, or Witness

Let’s start at the beginning, literally. Creation, we and world we live it, is both an expression of the love of the Triune God and an extension of that love. Creation is and is intended to be a manifestation of the Triune nature of God: Beloved, Lover, and Love itself.

Humanity, made in God’s image, is intended to be a conscious expression of and participation in that divine love. As stewards of God’s intention for creation we should be to the whole of creation, and to one another; lover, beloved, and love itself. Adam’s primal act of naming was his participation in this distinctly Trinitarian love. Name-giving re-creates the Trinitarian model within creation, allowing love to be differentiated into lover, beloved, and love itself. 

Sin is the assertion of our independence from God’s love. Sin is us breaking our world into subjects and objects rather lovers and beloved. Sin is humans substituting power for love in the relationship between creatures. 

Sin begins when we seek to possess, indeed ingest and incorporate into our sense of self that knowledge of the difference between good and evil that justifies our dividing and judging the world, our assertion of power over another. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the garden they gained a new capacity for division and judgment, but they did not gain the capacity for the justice that restores us to love. Nor, as the Apostle Paul makes clear, has anything since restored the capacity of law to create justice. 

The long term manifestation of our capacity, and indeed lust for judging, without the related capacity for justice, is endless conflict and war: the story of our personal lives, our societies, and our world. We know this story.

We should also know that Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, came to reconcile and restore us to the love of God that recreates the unity of lover, beloved, and love itself. Christ offers us the possibility of turning away from judgment without justice, away from the division of subject and object, to living as lovers and beloved within God’s love. 

Yes, I know. The world remains broken, and we must live in it with our awful knowledge of the difference between good and evil. We are thus forced to judge. We are forced to choose sides and exercise power for one side or the other. We say we want a ministry of reconciliation, but we know that in a sin-broken world we must show solidarity with good and exercise judgment against that which is evil. 

What we forget is that the necessity of choosing sides is a symptom of our human disease of preferring judging to reconciling. Our judgments are a symptom of our sinful nature to divide our world into subjects and objects in the spirit of power rather that lovers and beloved in the spirit of love. 

And because we’ve forgotten that judging is a symptom of our disease, we’ve convinced ourselves that it can actually become the cure.

We valorize our choosing and our choices. We valorize our use of the power to distinguish and divide as if it is participation in God’s own work of redemption. In Matthew 25 Jesus lifts up as exemplary the ministry of those who went to the aid of least and the lost, who treated as beloved those objectified and oppressed by the world. We are not content with this. We also take on the work of the judge, separating the sheep from the goats. Indeed we don’t merely take it on, we revel in it so much that we take to be God’s laws a and spin them into vast books of ecclesial law. 

This is the inevitable result of that evolution in which the church not only took on the task of witnessing to God’s love in Christ, but convinced itself that judging between an objectified good and an objectified evil was somehow such a witness. The former is a return to humanity’s original vocation, but the latter is our continued embrace of humanity’s original sin.

It isn’t surprising that with our belief that judging and choosing is righteous we find the pervasive self-righteousness characteristic of our church and its leaders.

When Adam and Even chose to live as judges, as those who separate out good and evil, they fell from Eden and from the fullness of their humanity. When we follow that path by rendering judgement, even what we consider necessary judgments, we follow the path of sin. Far from feeling self-righteous, we should grieve that we have created a world, and a church, in which division is inevitable, and choosing involves every choice save love.

The real choice before us in the United Methodist Church in the coming years isn’t how to remain united, because our current self understanding insures that we cannot. We cannot because all sides of our conflicts have embraced the idea that their choices, their judgments, are righteous; that their half-digested knowledge of the single fruit of an ancient tree gives them the capacity for justice. It hasn't. At best our faith in Christ and sensitivity to the working of the Holy Spirit allows us to sometimes make judgements that while sinful by nature, are apparently less bad than the alternatives. So even as we judge we should beat our breasts and call out "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner."

The real challenge is to purge from our sense of self the desire to judge, and restore our community to its original calling as a witness to God’s love.