A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [101]
Second, we must realize that final judgment will not be merciless or graceless, as many assume, because in God what we may think of as opposites—grace and truth, justice and mercy, kindness and strength—are beautifully and fully integrated.
And third, we must see the life and way of Jesus—not a list of laws, rules, or beliefs—to be the high and gracious standard by which history’s events and our own lives will be valued and evaluated.28 To see Jesus as God’s paradigm for judging or evaluating our lives means that it’s not the powerful and dominant who will be deemed history’s heroes, but the humble and poor in spirit, like Jesus. It’s not the pleasure-satiated hedonists who grabbed for all of life’s gusto who will be judged winners, but those who mourned the tragedy of injustice and who hungered and thirsted for a better day, like Jesus. It’s not the victors in war, but the makers of peace who will be seen as bearing God’s family resemblance, those like Jesus.
Whatever the final judgment will be, then, it will not involve God (please pardon the crudeness of this) pulling down our pants to check for circumcision or scanning our brains for certain beliefs like products being scanned at the grocery checkout. No, God will examine the story of our lives for signs of Christlikeness—for a cup of cold water or a plate of hot food given to one in need, for an atom of mercy shown to one who has been unkind or unthoughtful, for a visit to a prisoner or an open door and warm bed for a stranger, for a generous impulse indulged and a hurtful one denied, like Jesus. These are the parts of a person’s life that will be deemed worthy of being saved, remembered, rewarded, and raised for a new beginning. All the unloving, unjust, non-Christlike parts of our lives—and of our nations, tribes, civilizations, families, churches, and so on—will be burned away, counted as unworthy, condemned (which means acknowledged for what they are), and forgotten forever.29
So when we say, with the writer of Hebrews, that “it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment,” we are not saying, “and after that the condemnation” (Heb. 9:27). We are saying, with John, that to “see God,” to be in God’s unspeakable light, will purge us of all darkness:30
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are…. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 John 3:1–3)
Since “what we will be has not yet been revealed,” it is hard to say anything more, except this: in the end God will be all in all, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.31 This view may not contain all the details and terror of the old end-times charts, but I think it brings something better: hope and confidence to walk the path of Jesus. Dr. King had this hope and confidence:
To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”32
That vision of a double victory—one that reconciles rather than conquers and one that eliminates opposition by gently converting it