Divine Judgement

Just two days ago I was standing in St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta on the island of Malta, gazing at one of Caravaggio’s most ambitious paintings. Nearly 4 by 5 metres, this oil painting depicts the death of John the Baptist. Caravaggio uses light and shadow in a particularly powerful way. But there is something brutal about this painting. John is pinned to the ground by his executioner, while Salome stands expectantly with a platter waiting for her prize. There is no ambiguity about what is going on.

But one of the things that is clear from the reading we’ve just heard is that John the Baptist was a difficult person to pin down. There is an elusiveness about John’s character. And in this passage from the beginning of John’s Gospel, note that John refuses to be imprisoned by the preconceptions of his audience. But John suffers from all sorts of projections and fantasies in the minds of the people he meets. In this passage, the crowds speculate wildly about who he really is.

To understand the story, you need to remember that this story is full of references to the Old Testament. It’s in understanding those references that we understand the story.

The crowds ask him, ‘Are you Elijah?’, the prophet who was promised to return to herald the messianic era. John says ‘No!’ Are you the prophet? A question that referred to Moses’ promise in Deuteronomy that God ‘would send a prophet’ just like him.

So the crowds are stumped, ‘Who are you then? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ John responds with a passage from the prophecy of Isaiah, ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’

So what does this quotation mean? Isaiah was a prophet who spoke to the people of Israel in the light of an experience of exile. And this experience of exile informs much of the Old Testament. To be in exile means that you share the experience of the refugee or the asylum seeker. Somehow a crucial element of your identity (all those settled patterns of family and friends that many of us take for granted) are thrown into question. You are quite literally ‘unsettled’. You are challenged to think about your identity in a new way.

But this doesn’t mean that you suddenly become a different person. By placing himself in the wilderness, John reminds Israel of her true identity. He reminds the people of their foundational narrative, not the story of exile, but the story of the exodus, when the people wandered through the wilderness for forty years as they journeyed towards the promised land. This was a people freed from slavery, a people who cherished the promise of freedom. And the place where their ancestors crossed into the promised land? The river Jordan.

By bringing people back to the Jordan, plunging them through the waters again, John is dramatically calling for the renewal of Israel. He is saying that things are a mess. We have lost our way. We need to make a fresh start. That is the core of John’s prophetic ministry: he invites the people to renew their relationship with the God, to observe the commandments which God has given them. And John prophesies about a coming Messiah, who will proclaim and inaugurate the kingdom of God. 

But this kind of prophetic ministry can be a risky enterprise. John does not always tell his listeners what they want to hear and after a while, after the excitement and the expectation, John’s followers begin to drift away. Some follow Jesus, this new Galilean prophet. Others fall away.

But John carries on - he still goes on calling for the renewal of Israel. He calls the leaders of the nation to show the people of Israel by example, to observe the commandments of the Law. The problem is that it is all a bit too much for Herod Antipas, whose lifestyle was a source of scandal to many in Galilee. He had married his brother’s wife, which was explicitly forbidden by the law. And of course John can’t help himself. We know that John berated Antipas for his behaviour, which is why John ended up banged up in prison, in the fortress of Machaerus, Herod Antipas’ summer palace in Galilee.

When we read the teachings attributed to John the Baptist, we are struck by his uncompromising and unsettling teaching. In responding to the events of the day, John makes a judgement – and judgement is one of the great themes of the Advent season.

Now when preachers start talking about judgement, we think instinctively in terms of the language of guilt and condemnation. There is a lot of unhelpful baggage here. And the preacher can be tempted to excise the language of judgement completely from the theological vocabulary in order to dispense with some of that unhelpful baggage.

But this preacher will tell you that judgement is not dispensable. And the gospel reading tells us today that we make judgements all the time: ‘Are you Elijah?’ ‘Are you a prophet?’ The problem is that most of these judgements are off-beam.

Perhaps the word ‘judgement’ merits further analysis. The Greek word for judgement is krisis. It is the root of words in the English language like ‘critical’, ‘criticism’ and ‘critique’. When we exercise judgement we need to use all our critical faculties. We cannot be satisfied with half-truths and illusions or the manipulation of reality. We need to be honest and truthful. We need that clarity of mind that is characteristic of the prophetic tradition. And that clarity of mind, that relentless truth-telling, is an essential part of the prophetic task. John the Baptist did not baulk at telling the truth, even though he was eventually killed for it.

But the other aspect of judgement is that it often speaks into a moment of crisis. I wonder what John the Baptist would have made of the world today? War in Ukraine, conflict in the Holy Land, the impact of climate change, the cost of living crisis. Things are a mess. People have lost their way. We sometimes need to return to our foundational narratives in order to rediscover who we are and maybe to lament what we have become. Sometimes it takes a moment of crisis to shake us out of our complacency.

But here’s the thing. When we speak of ‘divine judgement’, this is not about pretending that it is wicked to be you, or wallowing in guilt or self-pity. There is no room, no time, for pretence here because the prophets have taught us that divine judgement is about justice and about hope.

To speak of God’s judgement is to be reminded of God’s justice. And to speak of God’s justice is to put all our human attempts to administer justice under scrutiny and in question. By reflecting and meditating on God’s justice during the season of Advent, we may discover that our own passion for justice is found wanting.

The purpose of prophetic language, the purpose of the theology of hope, in the scriptures, is to point to God’s kingdom in such a way as to reveal and bring to light the injustices of the present. John the Baptist may be an elusive character – but his ministry serves to strip away the illusions that conceal the truth of ourselves and mask the injustices of the present. And as Caravaggio saw in that extraordinary all-encompassing image, John the Baptist’s ministry, even the character of his death, brings to light the injustice and cruelty of so much human behaviour, which often lie concealed in the shadows.

In the season of Advent, things which are hidden are brought to light. And yet the good news is that there is nothing to fear here. Whatever the vagaries and conjectures of human judgement (which are not always generous or truthful), we discover that God’s judgement is never the enemy of human nature. It can only be the source of human flourishing. It is always merciful. This is the promise that John the Baptist points towards. This is the promise of redemption – for the miracle of Christmas is that the divine image is restored in the humanity of Jesus Christ. For in Jesus Christ, we discover anew what it means to be human, what it means to love, what it means to live, and what it means to hope.