Some thoughts on Judgment

I've finally finished some books!!

The last third of one of the books I've been reading deals with judgment- here are some introductory thoughts:

As a preacher, I can, with the greatest of ease tell people that God is going to get them, and I can be sure that they will believe every word I say. But what I cannot do, without inviting utter disbelief and serious doubts about my sanity, is proclaim that he has in fact taken away all the sins of the world and that he has, accordingly, solved all the problems he once had with sin. I cannot tell them, as John does, that he 'did not come to judge the world but to save the world'. Nor can I ask them, as Paul does, to believe the logical consequence of that statement, namely, that 'there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus'. Because if I do, the same old question will come pouring out : 'What about Hitler? What about child molesters? What about my skunk of a brother-in-law?' Their one pressing worry is always, 'What have you done with the hell we know and love?'

It is a mistake to come to them (Jesus' parables on judgment) as if we already understood what judgment is all about and were simply trying to see how they can be made to confirm what we think. Come to them that way and you will get only what so many preachers have gotten: a Messiah playing cops and robbers, a vindictive God bent on putting all the baddies under flat rocks. But come to them as the words of a Savior who has just spent weeks or months making death the principal device of his parables of gracious love- and which is now, under the compulsion of the same gracious love, about to die in order to activate the device once and for all- and you will see something new. You will see Gospel, not law; good news, not bad; vindication, not vindictiveness.

If I have anything to contribute to the interpretation of the parables of judgment, it is my steadfast refusal to separate them from the rest of Jesus' parables...Therefore I am convinced that anyone who interprets them as if Jesus had decided simply to abandon his previous palette...is making a crashing mistake.

As a general rule- and especially in his specific parables of judgment- Jesus is at pains to show that no one is kicked out who wasn't already in.