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4 Last Things: Judgment
BY Mark Shea
November 16-22, 2008 Issue |
Posted 11/11/08 at 1:32 PM
The second of
what the Catholic Tradition calls the “Four Last Things” is judgment.
Judgment is about as popular a
concept as root canals. And yet, the desire for judgment never really goes away
in the human soul. Every other episode of the still-popular-after-50-years
“Twilight Zone” was a story about judgment. So are our eternally popular myths
and fairy tales. Our ongoing need for such tales testifies to something in our
souls that thirsts for judgment.
Of course, judgment is often seen as
the Irritable Old Gentleman on the cloud letting fly with a lot of arbitrary
rage at a humanity that cringes before his power, not his justice or his love.
Such picture-thinking has no small
influence on New Atheist types who tell us we must grow up, stop fearing such a
god, and take our place as mature adults who decide for ourselves what is good
and evil. Such sentiments are invariably popular with human beings just before
they commit the next massacre or holocaust.
However, the astonishing thing the
Catechism tells us is: “Each man receives his eternal retribution in his
immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that
refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven —
through a purification or immediately — or immediate and everlasting damnation.
“At the evening of life, we shall be
judged on our love” (No. 1022).
This surprisingly quiet
picture of the judgment that awaits us is basically the same thing Jesus says:
“I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was
a stranger and you welcomed me; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and
you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35-36).
All the stuff you did out of love
for your neighbor — even the boring stuff and even the boring neighbor — is
what makes the difference between eternal happiness and everlasting loss of the
life of God.
If the news that God’s judgment is
based on love and not servile terror isn’t news enough, newsier still is the
news that judgment takes place in two movements.
The judgment we just considered
above is what is called the “particular judgment.” It occurs in the moment of
our death and can have only two possible outcomes: heaven or hell (of which
there is more in my next two columns).
Popular religiosity more or less
stops there and basically envisions the soul of the dearly departed floating up
to heaven in a white robe with wings and a harp or being escorted with a
pitchfork at his back into a cave with flames. End of story.
Except that it’s not the end of the
story. To be sure, the blessed dead will, sooner or later, enjoy the beatific
vision, seeing God “face to face” in the ecstasy of heaven. To be sure, the
damned are damned everlastingly. But that ain’t all, and the proof of this is
the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Recall that the apostles were quite
ready to believe in “life after death” in the conventional sense. Like us, they
could buy the idea that a ghost of Jesus might be manifesting itself out of the
ectoplasm.
What they were no more ready for
than we are was a Jesus who was raised in a glorified body that was at once
both physical and yet beyond the physics of this world — a Jesus who could eat
fish, break bread and be touched, and yet, who could also appear and disappear,
walk through walls, and somehow not appear as he had in his earthly body.
The New Testament strains at the
limits of language to get this reality across — which is one of the marks that
the apostles are telling the plain truth. And what it means for us is this: as
with Jesus, so with us. We are promised not mere “life after death,” but in the
words of New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, “life after
life after death.”
That’s why the particular judgment
is not the only judgment. Rather, we are promised a Last Judgment in “the hour
when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Son of Man’s] voice and come
forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who
have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (Catechism, No. 1038).
The Last Judgment entails the fact
that human beings are necessarily incarnate beings and not mere “souls”
floating around in the ether. When that day comes, we will live, not as spooks
on a cloud, but as fully alive human beings in a recreated and renewed creation
of the New Heaven and the New Earth.
Mark
Shea is senior content editor
for
CatholicExchange.com.
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