we wage and take seriously their moral anguish and guilt. We fear judgment
because we see bad forms of it all around us. Luther saw bad forms of judgment and rejected them. We fear self-righteous judg- ment, that is, judg- ment without solidar- ity (Matthew 7:5). We fear judgment that cuts off, that condemns and abandons us (certainly not how Jesus treated sinners), that refuses
Jesus … is a judge
who came not to con- demn the world but to gather the lost.
Stuck in the muck and mire of
sin, which turns us in on ourselves and against our neighbors, which corrupts our desires and warps our relationships, we need more than the cheap grace that says “don’t worry about it” while doing little or nothing to actually change our sin-sick con- dition. Impunity is not good news. This is why theologian James Cone reminds us that a God without wrath does not liberate. And why scholar Marie Fortune can tell of working with perpetrators of sexual abuse, who do not want the easy absolution we peddle but long for redemptive change, for healing of their sin. And why soldiers suffering from moral injury reject the yellow ribbons and accolades that mask our refusal to confront the truth about the wars
to bear one another’s burdens (Gala- tians 6:2). We fear judgment that feeds a static, paralyzing guilt instead of a judgment animated by a godly grief (2 Corinthians 7:9-10) that promises new life.
Retributionist age We fear judgment because we live in a retributionist age. Heirs of Lamech (Genesis 4), we can only conceive of judgment as punishment, as revenge, as the prelude to compensatory suf- fering that extracts every ounce of what is owed, demands every last debt be settled in full, insists every penalty be enforced to the fullest. But we need not fear the judgment
of Jesus. This is so precisely because it is Jesus who is the judge, and this is a judge who came not to condemn the world (John 3:16) but to gather the lost. This is a judgment not of con- demnation but of grace—judgment as good news, as a means of grace, of life, healing, sanctification, restora- tion, reconciliation. This is a judg- ment that brings the civil war that is
sin to a close, that breaks down the dividing walls and hostility between people (Ephesians 2:14). This isn’t the cheap grace that
merely anesthetizes us in our sin and amounts to little more than a recipe for sociopaths—guilt-free sin. Rather, this judgment is the tonic, the balm, of the great physician who came not only to pardon sin but to take it away (John 1:29). All this brings us back to the lit-
urgy. One of the reasons Luther was critical of the practice of confession and penance was that it had become disconnected from baptism. That is, confession and penance had been reduced from a characteristic of the whole tenor of our lives—the daily living out of our baptismal judg- ment/renunciation/death to sin—to an occasional practice. As he wrote in the 95 Theses: “When our Lord said, ‘repent,’ he meant the whole life of the Christian was to be repentance.” Thus, what cheapens the grace
and so dulls the radiance of the litur- gical gift of absolution is its being unmoored from the means of grace, the disciplines through which the Spirit sanctifies and makes a holy people. The graceful radiance of absolution is properly mated with and intensified by the beauty of the gift of holiness, a gift given to us through Christ’s judgment of grace.
Author bio: Bell is professor of theology and ethics at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary (Lenoir Rhyne University) in Columbia, S.C. He is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.
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