Two Things True: God's Judgment and Grace

We often experience the fact that more than one thing is true at the same time. Often we know conflicting things, both true and yet in tension.

So it is that we are challenged to our own settlement of two big and seemingly conflicting truths about the properties of our relationship with God. One is named judgment and the other is called grace. These two simple words have challenged us over time.

It is not uncommon to think of judgment and grace as two distinct and separate actions of God. The Bible seems to conspire in this thinking. Many scriptural texts and their commentators speak of God’s repeated acts of grace, and then when rebuffed or denied, these are followed by acts of judgment. Other texts speak of God’s judgment followed by fresh forgiveness, favor and grace. However, in our Gospel for this Sunday one act of God is spoken of as having been both judgment and grace. Two things true at the same time. That act is God’s sending Christ into the world.

How can these two seemingly conflicting truths be contained in this one act and embodiment of God?  These two truths, these two understandings of the fundamental properties of our relationship with God, can indeed be seen as being in tension.

John gives us one of the most uplifting and fulfilling verses of scripture. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” It continues, “Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

God’s grace is never-ending; it is a force in our lives that will always be offered. There is nothing we can do to stop God’s love us; of you; of me. God’s Grace is unearned, unbidden and though we can deny its existence, there is nothing we can do to stop it. It is embodied in the one sent us out of God’s love, and it is indeed worth crying over.

But then we are given something else that is true at the same time, something that seems in tension, God's judgment. And how are we to understand that it is out of this grace that the God’s judgment comes? John says, “And this is the judgment, that light has come into the world…all who do evil hate the light and do not come into the light.”  By this John means that Christ did not come to judge, but his coming is a judgment in the same way that turning on a light can be the means to expose the truth of an evil. While the light of Christ is a joy, it also for some of us, or rather for all of us some of the time, a light that shines in all those corners we’d just as soon keep hidden. Both things are true at the same time.

You see, that God loves us as we are does not mean that he leaves us as we are. His saving presence is also a disturbing presence. We are to be disturbed. We are given a light in which to grow and deepen and lean into God’s grace. And we are given a light in which to turn and change, to shake ourselves and this broken and troubled world. God’s grace and God’s judgment in light. Two things, both are true.