justice and grace (mercy)

the image of hope... justice and mercy


The Last Judgement,
the decisive image of hope

by Benedict XVI


At the conclusion of the central section of the Church's great Credo
[...] we find the phrase: "he will come again in glory to judge the
living and the dead". From the earliest times, the prospect of the
Judgement has influenced Christians in their daily living as a
criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to
their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God's justice.
[...] As the iconography of the Last Judgement developed, however,
more and more prominence was given to its ominous and frightening
aspects, which obviously held more fascination for artists than the
splendour of hope, often all too well concealed beneath the horrors.

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the
background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily
oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while
reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of
progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement,
however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally
different form.

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its
origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the
injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so
much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be
the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world
would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of
morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to
create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish
justice.

If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is
understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God
actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and
intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the
greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is
grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim.

A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.
No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and
nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling
ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world.

This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism
and theism.

Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-
worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the
image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the
Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a "longing for the
totally Other" that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed
at world history.

Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which
naturally meant the exclusion of any "image" of a loving God. On the
other hand, he also constantly emphasized this "negative" dialectic
and asserted that justice —true justice—would require a world "where
not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which
is irrevocably past would be undone."

This, would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for
him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a
resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve "the
resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to
idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit."


* * *

Christians likewise can and must constantly learn from the strict
rejection of images that is contained in God's first commandment
(cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the
Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that however great
the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature,
the dissimilarity between them is always greater.

In any case, for the believer the rejection of images cannot be
carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would
like, by saying "no" to both theses—theism and atheism.

God has given himself an "image": in Christ who was made man. In him
who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an
extreme. God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer
who shares man's God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself.
This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is
a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive,
yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a
resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an "undoing"
of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright.

For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost
hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals
of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice
constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest
argument, in favour of faith in eternal life.

The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in
this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an
important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but
only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of
history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's
return and for new life become fully convincing.

To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A
world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God
can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does
so.

The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror,
but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of
hope. [...] God is justice and creates justice. This is our
consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace.
This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ.

Both these things—justice and grace—must be seen in their correct
inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not
make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything
away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of
equal value.

Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of
Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel "The Brothers Karamazov."
Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet
beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had
happened. [...]

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (cf. Lk 16:19-31), Jesus
admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and
opulence, who has created an impassable chasm between himself and
the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures;
the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then
becomes a burning and unquenchable thirst. We must note that in this
parable Jesus is not referring to the final destiny after the Last
Judgement, but is taking up a notion found, inter alia, in early
Judaism, namely that of an intermediate state between death and
resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be
pronounced. [...]


* * *

The early Church took up these concepts, and in the Western Church
they gradually developed into the doctrine of Purgatory. We do not
need to examine here the complex historical paths of this
development; it is enough to ask what it actually means.

With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands
before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life
takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be
people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and
readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie,
people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within
themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of
this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such
people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would
be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.

On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure,
completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—
people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their
entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment
what they already are.

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human
life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains
in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth,
to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is
covered over by ever new compromises with evil —much filth covers
purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-
emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.

What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge?
Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease
to matter? What else might occur?

Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea
of the differing impact of God's judgement according to each
person's particular circumstances. [...] Paul begins by saying that
Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This
foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and
built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us
even in death.

Then Paul continues: "Now if any one builds on the foundation with
gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will
become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be
revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each
one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up,
he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as
through fire" (1 Cor 3:12-15).

In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take
different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that
in order to be saved we personally have to pass through "fire" so as
to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at
the table of the eternal marriage-feast.


* * *

Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both
burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The
encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze
all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us,
transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All
that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure
bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when
the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there
lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an
undeniably painful transformation "as through fire". But it is a
blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us
like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus
totally of God.

In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also
becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our
defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued
to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed,
it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion.

At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the
overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in
ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is
clear that we cannot calculate the "duration" of this transforming
burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world.
The transforming "moment" of this encounter eludes earthly time-
reckoning—it is the heart's time, it is the time of "passage" to
communion with God in the Body of Christ.

The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because
it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things
cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question
about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of
God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear
to us all.

The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two
together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we
all work out our salvation "with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).
Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to
meet the Judge whom we know as our "advocate", or parakletos (cf. 1
Jn 2:1).

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