Just as Jesus called in the vision of the unseen world to redress the
balance of the visible world, when He said that there was more joy in
heaven over the penitent sinner than over ninety and nine just men who
needed no repentance, so in His final addresses to His followers He
again discloses the unseen world. These final addresses deal with the
tremendous problem of a future judgment. Over no problem does the
human mind hover with such breathless interest, such unfeigned alarm.
But with characteristic perversity the elements in Christ's vision of
the judgment on which men have seized most tenaciously, are precisely
those elements which are least intelligible, and least capable of
strict definition. It is around the word "eternal" and the nature of
the punishment suggested, that the theological battles of centuries
have centred. Yet the really central point of both the vision and the
teaching, is not here at all; and it is only man's habitual love of
enigma which can explain the passion with which men have opposed one
another over the interpretation of words and phrases which must always
remain enigmatic.
Let us turn to Christ's vision of the Judgment, as recorded by St.
Matthew, and what do we find? First that the same Son of Man, whose
whole life was an exposition of the law of love, is Himself the final
judge of men and nations. "_The Son of Man shall sit on the throne of
His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the nations, and He
shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the
sheep from the goats_." No alien judge, observe, unacquainted with the
nature of man, but one who knows human life so thoroughly that He is
the representative man--"the Son of Man"; and although He is now the
Judge, yet He still calls Himself by the tender name of the Shepherd.
The tribunal is therefore the tribunal of love, and the court is the
court of love. He who shall judge mankind is He who judges Peter and
the woman who was a sinner, He of whose tenderness and sympathy we have
assurance in a hundred acts of mercy, pity, and magnanimity. Yet for
centuries the Church has sung its terrible _Dies Irae_, has clothed the
judgment seat with thunder, has put into the hands of Jesus bolts of
flame, and has applauded and enthroned in His sanctuaries such
pictorial blasphemies as Michael Angelo's _Last Judgment_, which
represents Jesus as an angry Hercules, and even gratifies the private
spite of the artist by overwhelming in a sea of fire one who had
offered him a personal affront.
Blasphemy indeed, and falsehood too; for the second thing we find is
that the one principle which governs the entire vision of Jesus is that
Love judges, and that it is by Love that men are tested. The men and
women of loving disposition, who have wrought many little acts of
kindness which were to them so natural and simple that they do not so
much as recollect them, find themselves mysteriously selected for
infinite rewards. The men and women of opposite disposition, in spite
of all their outward rectitude of behaviour, find themselves numbered
with the goats. A cup of cold water given to a child, a meal bestowed
upon a beggar, a garment shared with the naked--these things purchase
heaven. One who Himself had been thirsty, hungry, and naked, judges
their worth, and He judges by His own remembered need. It is love
alone that is divine, love alone that prepares the soul for divine
felicity. With a beautiful unconsciousness of any merit, the people
who have lived lovingly plead ignorance of their own lovely acts and
tempers; but they have been witnessed by the hierarchies of heaven, the
morning stars have sung of them, they have made glad the heart of God;
and the reward of these humble servitors of love now is that having
added to the joy of God, henceforth they shall share that joy forever.
Never was there vision at once so exquisite and so surprising. It is
like a child's dream of heaven and judgment, so untouched is it by the
conventions of the world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly imagined,
and so impossibly probable. Alas, that most of us are too wise to
understand it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in nothing that
Jesus uttered is there clearer evidence of deliberation. And it is of
a piece with all He taught; so much so indeed that without it, His
teaching would be incomplete.
Truly, we may say, the Heaven of Jesus is a strangely ordered Kingdom;
for in it beggars are comforted for apparently no other reason than
that they need comfort; the doers of forgotten kindnesses are crowned
with sudden splendours of divine approval while the lords of genius and
the makers of empire are forgotten; and the very anthems of the blessed
are hushed into silent wondering and joy when solitary penitents turn
homewards from the roads of sin! But it is not stranger than that
kingdom in which Jesus lived habitually, the kingdom He created round
Him in His earthly life. In that kingdom also love was lord, and she
who anointed the tired feet of the Master against His burial was
promised everlasting remembrance, and she who out of her penury gave
her mite to the poor was praised as having done more than all the rich,
who from their abundance distributed careless and unmissed
benefactions. In all that Jesus says and does the same sequence of
thought runs clear, the same master principle rules the various result.
Life is a unity either here or hereafter, and love is, and must
evermore remain, the one temper that gives significance to life.