Judge Jesus

A woman is thrown down at the feet of Jesus. A group of men accuse her of having been caught in the very act of adultery. They say that, according to the law, she should be sentenced to death. And they want to know what Judge Jesus has to say.

Jesus stoops down and begins to write in the dust.

We have no idea what he might have been writing.

Perhaps he wrote down words like lust, judgmental, greed, hypocrisy. Maybe he wrote a question: Where’s the man who must have been caught in the act of adultery with this woman? Perhaps he just doodled to give himself time to think or calm down.

What the men wanted, what they demanded, based on the law, was punitive justice. They wanted her crime punished. They wanted her stoned to death.

But Jesus was about to deliver a body blow to their collective spiritual gut.

Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.

One by one the accusers dropped the stones on the ground and walked away.

Now alone with the woman—who was, remember, guilty as charged; whose sin, remember, was punishable by death—Jesus asked her:

Is anyone left to condemn you?

No one sir.

Again, she’s guilty. The law says she should be punished (punitive justice). And she has neither confessed anything nor has she repented.

And Jesus says:

Neither do I condemn you.

Incredibly, he lets her off the hook! No repentance! No confession! No promise from her to do better next time!

Only grace!

Now go, and sin no more!

Rather than dishing out punitive justice, rather than punishing her, Judge Jesus holds out a radically different form of justice:

Restorative justice.

He doesn’t condemn. He doesn’t punish. Instead, through the power of forgiveness, he puts her back together and gives her a brand-new start.

He reconciles her to himself.

He puts to right what she put to wrong.

And all of it an act of unrequested, unearned, undeserved, unexpected grace!

Hell demands a God of punitive justice.

Grace declares a God of restorative justice.

Judge Jesus stands on the side of grace.

For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. (2 Corinthians 5:19)

For God in all his fullness
    was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
    everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
    by means of Christ’s blood on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

According to what righteousness will Christ judge when he comes and is manifested as the Son of man-judge of the world? Surely this righteousness will be no different from the righteousness he himself proclaimed in his gospel and practiced in fellowship with sinners and the sick! Otherwise no one would be able to recognize him. The coming Judge is the one who was put to death on the cross. The one who will come as Judge of the world is the one ‘who bears the sins of the world’ and who has himself suffered the suffering of victims. Jurgen Moltmann

Punitive Vs Restorative Justice Comparison

Punitive Justice                                                       Restorative Justice

•  God is angry                                                            God is gracious

•  God is fair                                                                 God is gracious

• Problem: Sin as behavior                                        Sin as broken relationship

• Solution: Punish behavior                                     Restore the relationship

• Justice: Punitive                                                        Restorative

• Way out: I accept Jesus                                            Jesus reconciles me to God

God’s answer to sin is not punishment, but reconciliation.

Judge Jesus does not dispense punitive justice but uses restorative justice to welcome us home.

Here comes the Judge! And that is good news.

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

Does Christianity Matter?

Philip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace? asks some tough questions about the current state of Christianity. In reflecting on how people interacted with Jesus he noticed that people who once ran to Jesus now seem to run away from him (or at least his Church). The worse people felt about themselves the more likely they were to seek out Jesus. Today, not so much (again, at least not through the Church).

So what happened? Does the Christian story matter anymore?

Throughout history, as human beings have tried to come to terms with God (if there is a God), we’ve almost always seen God as angry; as a Being not only deeply disappointed in us but downright disgusted with us—or most of us, anyway.

Yet, this God seemingly and begrudgingly offers us a way out. If we

• Follow certain laws

• Get our act together

• Make the right sacrifices

• Believe the right things

then maybe, just maybe, God will accept us.

We see that storyline in almost every religion and spirituality known to humankind—a storyline that says that we have to earn God’s love somehow in some way. And once we’ve earned it, we’re in. And once we’re in we now have the right to judge and condemn those who are out.

All too often, Christianity, as a religion, seems to say the same thing. One doesn’t have to look far to see it:

• Christians threaten non-Christians with an eternity in a fireball of torture and despair

• Christians determine who can come to church and who can’t

• Christians become the arbitrators of who God will love and who God can’t possibly love—all the while pretty certain, of course, that God loves us!

But when anyone, Christian or not, takes a look at Jesus, they see a shockingly and scandalously different view of God. A radical view of God. A God so foreign to our impressions of God that we simply can’t believe it.

Jesus shows us a God of messy grace:

• A God who doesn’t condemn—but loves

• Who doesn’t judge—but forgives

• Who doesn’t demand right behavior—but transforms us with kindness

This view of a God of grace was so radical that Jesus was ultimately killed because of it. This view of a God of grace is so radical today that most churches built on the name of Jesus can’t fully buy into it.

And yet it’s precisely that radical, messy, scandalous, unearned, splashed-indiscriminately-on-everyone grace that makes the Christian story unique. It is the only religion or spiritual expression on planet earth that stakes its claim on God’s unconditional love.

Christianity is the story of radical grace. It’s the story of a God who always runs to us with love. It’s the story of

• A rancher who paid those who had only worked an hour a full days’ wage.

• A shepherd who leaves behind 99 sheep, risking his life to find the one lost lamb.

• A woman who rips her whole house apart to find one lost coin.

• A father who throws a feast for rebellious son.

• The God who enters into human history as one of us.

• Jesus who died for his enemies.

• The God who finds us worth dying for.

Christianity may or may not be true. I can’t answer that question for you. But what sets it apart, what makes it unique is Jesus and his unrelenting grace. And the radical go-to-the-cross promise that

• You are the one God loves

• You are the one God forgives

• God is for you

Period!

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

How Can You Believe in a God Who Allows Suffering? Part 2

Leslie D. Weatherhead, in his must read book: The Will of God, tells this story:

I was standing on the veranda of an Indian home darkened by bereavement. My Indian friend had lost his little son, the light of his eyes, in a cholera epidemic. At the end of the veranda his little daughter, the only remaining child, slept in a cot covered over with a mosquito net. We paced up and down, and I tried in my clumsy way to comfort and console him. But he said, “Well, padre, it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.” (pp. 11-12)

In the last post we looked at two main ways we try to come to terms with suffering:

The first is to ascribe it, as the father does above, to God’s will. For many people, this explanation for suffering gives hope. It holds out the promise that the senselessness of it all is not all that senseless; that there is sacred meaning and purpose behind it. At the very least is offers the assurance that God is in control. Because life would be intolerable if it is random and beyond the control of God.

But while ascribing suffering to God’s will offers hope to some, for others it makes God the actor in our suffering. And it makes God ultimately into a monster.

Weatherhead tried to make that point with his friend:

Fortunately I knew him well enough to be able to reply without being misunderstood, and I said something like this: “Supposing someone crept up the steps onto the veranda tonight, while you all slept, and deliberately put a wad of cotton soaked in cholera germ culture over your little girl’s mouth as she lay in that cot there on the veranda, what would you think about that?”

“My God,” he said, “what would I think about that? Nobody would do such a damnable thing. If he attempted it and I caught him, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would a snake, and throw him over the veranda. What do you mean by suggesting such a thing?”

“But, John,” I said quietly, “Isn’t that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was his will? Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.”

Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.

If God is the source of suffering, then the question is valid: How can anyone believe in such a God?

The second way people tend to handle suffering is to deny the existence of God or to call into question God’s character.

But, as we saw in the last post, you can take God out of the story but suffering remains. So then what?

Either God allows suffering which calls into question God’s character and love, or we live in a world of pitiless indifference (in the words of Richard Dawkins) leaving us with lots of pain but no hope.

But what if there’s a third way?

What if it’s true that God’s love and suffering are related but not in the way we have been taught? What if a loving God speaks to suffering—to this seemingly pitiless indifference—not in the way we think God should but in the way we need God to?

Does suffering automatically prove that God isn’t loving or powerful; that God doesn’t exist? Or is it possible to see the true character of God in the midst of suffering?

Christianity offers a radically different answer to the question of suffering, and it’s found in a cross.

The story of the cross is a profound story of God’s stop-at-nothing love for the world. It’s the story of a God who in Jesus:

• Enters into our solidarity with us

• Enters into the human experience with us with compassion and grace

• Suffers with us because life is broken

• Absorbs our pain so that we don’t have to carry it alone

• Transforms our points of suffering by turning death into resurrection

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says it this way:

Christianity is a faith which takes us through tragedy to beyond tragedy, by way of the cross to victory in the cross.

Suffering is not God’s will for you. God’s will for you, seen in the cross of Jesus, is to meet you in the midst of suffering with grace and love. To meet you in the senselessness of it all with hope, kindness, and goodness. And to let you know that suffering will not have the final word. Life will. Resurrection will. Grace will.

As Paul says in his letter to the church in Rome, chapter 8:

Can anything separate us from Christ’s love? Can trouble or problems or persecution separate us from his love? If we have no food or clothes or face danger or even death, will that separate us from his love? No!

I am sure that nothing can separate you from God’s love—not death, life, angels, or ruling spirits. I am sure that nothing now, nothing in the future, no powers, nothing above you or nothing below you—nothing in the whole created world—will ever be able to separate you from the love God has shown you in Christ Jesus your Lord.