Maybe Judgment Isn't So Bad

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. - Jeremiah 23:1-2

So many of us have rejected the idea of judgment because of how it’s been used against people to belittle and to shame. But is there still a place for it?

This week as we lean into the prophecy of the Messiah in Jeremiah 23, we see the Spirit starting off this chapter with a strong word of judgment. The leaders who were supposed to care for the people were not doing so - in fact, they are doing just the opposite and taking advantage of those most vulnerable . So many of us have experienced this personally - there’s so much church trauma in the lives of people who attend City Church. And there’s other failures in leadership that we’ve experience - in our families, our schools, and many have experienced a sense of abandonment in the pandemic by the federal government which has largely gone silent as the virus rages.

Perhaps there’s a place for judgment - if it is God who equals the playing field, who raises up the week and brings down the violent.

What is your visceral response to Jeremiah’s prophecy against the leaders of his people? Do you ever pray for judgment? Are their healthy and unhealthy ways to think about and pray for judgment? Talk with Jesus about these things.

(If you’d like to ponder this further, there’s a quote below to think about from a Croatian theologian who’s family endured ethnic cleansing by the Serbs.)

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

- Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace