Sometimes I joke (at least partly) about having these words of St. John the Baptist engraved over the doorway arch of our church dedicated in his name: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Or perhaps we could put that on our Christmas cards.
It’s funny because it’s true. Though John’s words aren’t fun and games, we almost have to laugh at them to realize how serious they are. We find it a little funny to imagine him there scolding the Pharisees… until we realize that he could just as well be speaking to us.
In all seriousness, there are many places in the world today where fleeing a “wrath to come” may feel quite pressing, where a reasonable person might find himself filled with anxiety just going about his business, wondering when disaster will strike, when everything he knows and cares about is threatened or destroyed. That feeling, that fear, is pretty much what John the Baptist evokes in our Gospel today. In this first half of Advent, the theme is not, as we might expect, waiting for the birth of Jesus. It is waiting for the end of the world, waiting for the Judgment, when, as John says, the Son of God will separate the wheat from the chaff and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire.
Even if you don’t know much about harvesting wheat, and don’t know what chaff is, you know this: you don’t want to be chaff. You want to be one of the good guys, the ones who are saved, the ones who avoid the unquenchable fire of judgment. But John’s message—and this is in the end why it is so difficult to hear, both then and now—is that no one is safe. You may think you have a right to be numbered among the good, but rank and position, wealth and heredity—none of these means anything. Whether you’re a Pharisee or a priest, a tenth-generation missionary, the best parent in the world, the most productive and ethical businessman in the world, or you’re the person who always seems to end up in trouble, God owes you nothing. The kind of things that mark you for success in this world are not the things that matter on the Day of Judgment.
This seems kind of scary, actually. Probably a lot scarier than many of the things that normally make us jump. And that raises for me this pretty obvious question: why aren’t we scared of God’s judgment? Why are we more worried about what a president or a pope said in the latest interview, or how the market is going to go tomorrow, or whether we will be late for school, than we are about the searing judgment of a perfect and righteous God?
Being modern, enlightened people, we’re not really supposed to worry about this. We’re supposed to dismiss it as the worry of another, less educated age. But sometimes I wonder if that easy dismissal is just a way of hiding ourselves from the possibility that maybe it’s all real.
It is real. Christ is coming again to judge the living and the dead. But this is not necessarily a scary thing. We know this judge, after all. Or at least we have the opportunity to know him. He came to us as a child in history, lived among us, died and rose again. The whole logic of Advent is that if we prepare to meet Jesus again for the first time at Christmas, we will at the same time prepare to meet him when he comes again as judge.
Judgment doesn’t have to be scary, because judgment isn’t a question of Jesus going down a list of pluses and minuses and figuring out whether you pass or fail some abstract moral law. It’s a question of whether you know the judge, whether you have tried to know him, because in the end, he is not a judge in a human sense.
I’ve met a few judges in my life, and I think all of them would say that their job is to apply the law as impartially as possible. Our system is supposed to be about not the judge, but the law. In God, there is no such distinction. God is the law, and the law is God. And this God became man, of the Virgin Mary, so that we might know him and pursue his goodness and justice, motivated not by fear, but by love.
But here’s the thing: it’s still not easy. It sounds great to say that judgment is about love more than fear, but it’s still judgment. We don’t get to just lie back and make it up as we go along, forgetting about rules and traditions, because those things are how relationships sustain themselves. If you think you can get to know God without getting to know the complicated relational and institutional life of his Church and its people, you may be getting to know not God at all, but your own reflection. And that is why we have these classic lists of what you should do and not do: do go to Mass and say your prayers; do contribute to the Church and help those in need; do read the scriptures and stories of the saints; do your work well; do not waste your resources or talents; do not use your bodies in ways that cheapen their purpose; do not lie to yourself or others.
Advent is a time to remember these basic disciplines—not because we’re terrified that God is going to tackle us from behind like a petty criminal looking to catch us off guard, but because these disciplines help us, in the end, to know and receive the beautiful and wonderful gift of God’s own life to us at Christmas. Amen.