Judgment day: you wouldn't want to miss it.

There have been suggestions that the problems of modern Christianity began when people stopped believing in hell. It could be placed at another level: people believe that hell may be possible for people like Hitler, but not for themselves, because God is surely too nice for that. The problem may be not that we have stopped believing in hell, but that we have stopped believing in judgment. Even if we do believe that we will be judged, we also believe that of course we will be forgiven, because God is too nice to do anything else.

The problem with this is that God's niceness is not to be found anywhere - certainly not in the Bible. God's love, certainly; God's glory, joy, anger, all sorts of things - but niceness? Some uncles are nice, and a few teachers, but not God. When Job questions him from the depths of his despair, God uses a form of sarcasm on a suffering man, and (this is the marvelous power of the book) it is a magnificent revelation of God's glory. But it isn't nice.

I bring this up because although God's love for us is frequently described as "unconditional" - meaning God will go on loving us no matter what - God's forgiveness is conditioned. The story of the unjust steward concludes, "In anger his Lord delivered him to the torturers [not "jailers," as some soft-hearted translators have rendered it], till he should pay all his debt. So my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart" (see Matthew 18: 21-35). After giving his disciples the prayer we call the "Lord's prayer," Jesus returns to one of its clauses: "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses." And of course in Matthew 25 those who failed to help the suffering are condemned for having failed to help Christ himself, and they go away into eternal punishment.

We like to think that we have grown beyond such a grim, either/or-ish approach to religion, but we may instead be tone-deaf. Dostoevsky's understanding that the damned are in the presence of God, but their eternal suffering is their inability to love to be in the presence of love, unable to love - seems absolutely persuasive to me. And it applies to forgiveness as well. We have a sentimental understanding of words like love and forgiveness. Love is romance, a strong feeling, being swept away by infatuation, hand-in-hand walks on the beach at sunset; but in Jesus we see love as something quite different. "Friday's Child," Auden's poem in memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, concludes

Now, did He really break the seal And rise again? We dare not say; But conscious unbelievers feel Quite sure of Judgment Day. Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, As dead as we shall ever be, Speaks of some total gain or loss, And you and I are free To guess from the insulted face Just what appearances He saves By suffering in a public place A death reserved for slaves.

The Epistle to the Ephesians puts this model of crucified love before us as a model of the relationship between husband and wife, which is also the model of Christ's relationship to the church. Love is the willingness to die for the other.

When Christianity gets reduced to moral behavior it loses everything. Moral behavior is important - we have a right to expect it, not only from Christians-but what Christianity says is that we are to be toward one another the way God revealed himself to be toward us, in Christ. That means a lot more than morality, and forgiveness is not a moral act, in the usual sense of the word. We are to share the Divine Life completely - this is what Orthodoxy means by theosis, echoing Athanasius: "The Word became man so that men might become God." But we will be incapable of that sharing if we have not learned to love and forgive as we have been loved and as we have been forgiven.

To forgive the enemy, to love those who hate us, simply puts us in relation to one another the way God is in relation to us. It is radically difficult. As hard as it is to forgive a wrong done to oneself, it is much harder to forgive a wrong done to someone you love. But unless we learn to do this, we will be truly incapable of being forgiven - not because there is some tit-for-tat involved, but because we will not have learned something we need to know, will not have emptied the space needed for God to enter. We will not be able to be toward one another as God is toward us. To be able to be crucified means giving up everything, including all self-regard.

God has loved us, and does, and will; and God has forgiven us. But we will be incapable of receiving any of this without transformation. To know how to forgive is to know how profoundly in need of forgiveness we are. The Lord says "I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 11: 19). But this comes in the context of a call to repentance; it requires us to know that we have hearts of stone.

That discovery means being open to a kind of brokenness that we do not want to admit into our lives. But that brokenness is the beginning of what it means to see that unless we can truly take up the cross, the resurrection will also be closed to us. This is not because God does not want to forgive us, and judge us mercifully, but because God will not force us into the life that we were meant from the beginning of time to share freely.

In biblical terms, this all comes in the context of judgment. Judgment means that we may not be judged well - that's a risk we take. If anything has gone out of certain contemporary approaches to religion, it is this sense of risk, and I think it could be argued that it is essential. Jesus' being raised is not significant because it is unique; it is significant because he is the first fruits, the first to rise of many brothers and sisters. His Resurrection is the beginning of the resurrection which will include all of us, and we are raised in order to be judged. We are blessed because having seen the mercy of Jesus we know that the one who judges us will be merciful; but we must know that we will be judged, and our failure to forgive, and to care for others, is at the center of what the result of that judgment will be.