No Greater Love: HE WILL COME AGAIN TO JUDGE THE LIVING AND THE DEAD 

​

Jesus Christ’s coming as the judge of the living and the dead is next discussed in Part II of Professor Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. Rudolf Bultmann reckons that the belief in an "end of the world" signaled by the return of the Lord in judgment is one of those ideas, like the Lord’s descent into hell and Ascension into-heaven, which for modern man are "disposed of". Every reasonable person, he declares, is convinced 'that the world will go on as it has done now for nearly two thousand years since the eschatological proclamation of the New Testament. It seems all the more important to clarify our thinking on this point since the biblical treatment of it unquestionably contains marked cosmological elements and therefore reaches into the domain that we view as the field of natural science. Of course, in the phrase about the end of the world, the word "world" does not mean primarily the physical structure-of the cosmos but the world of man, human -history; thus in the first instance this manner of speaking means that this kind of world---the human world---will come to an end that is dictated and achieved by God. But it cannot be denied that the Bible presents this essentially anthropological event in cosmological (and also partly in political) imagery. How-far it is a question only of imagery and how close the imagery is to the reality is difficult to determine.

​

The New Testament has much to say about the end of the world because the New Testament is about Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the ultimate goal of humanity. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev 22:13) For those who love Jesus Christ and unite themselves to Him, the end of the world is the ultimate fulfillment. The cosmic upheavals depicted in the New Testament are not a problem since the cosmos is under the dominion of Christ. On the other hand, those who wish to live in a world without God will see the end of the world as extremely frightening because they reject what the end of the world is really about. According to Professor Ratzinger: Thus it becomes evident here once again how very much end-eschatology and the breakthrough represented by Jesus’ Resurrection are in reality one and the same thing; it becomes clear once again that the New Testament rightly 'depicts this Resurrection as the eschatological- happening. 

​

While the end of the world is focused on Christ, what is our role in this event? If the breakthrough to the ultra-complexity of the final phase is based on spirit and freedom, then it is by no-means a neutral, cosmic drift; it includes- responsibility. It does not happen of its own accord, like physical process, but is based on decisions. That is why the second coming of the Lord is not only salvation, not only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment. Indeed, at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the talk of judgement. It is precisely this, that the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom. This must also be regarded as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at the end men are judged "by their works" and that no one can escape giving account of the way he has lived his life. There is a freedom that is not cancelled out even by grace and, indeed, is brought by it face to face with itself: man's final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the decisions he has made in his life. This assertion is in any case also necessary in order to draw the line between faith and false dogmatism or a false Christian self-confidence. This line alone confirms the equality of men by confirming the identity of their responsibility. Since the days of the early Church Fathers, it has always been an essential task of Christian preaching to make people aware of this identity of responsibility and to contrast it with the false confidence engendered by merely saying, "Lord, Lord!" It is reasonable to say that our salvation at the end of the world is the Lord’s doing, but we need to cooperate with the abundant graces which we have been given. We shall be judged on the how we have utilized whatever has been given us. 

​

Professor Ratzinger explains this further: Perhaps in the last analysis it is impossible to escape a paradox whose logic is completely disclosed only to the experience of a life based on faith. Anyone who entrusts himself to faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of the grace that frees helpless man and, no less, the abiding seriousness of the-responsibility that summons man day after day. Both together mean that the Christian enjoys, on the one hand, the liberating, detached tranquility of him who lives on that excess of divine justice known as Jesus Christ. There is a tranquility that knows: in the last analysis, I cannot destroy what he has built up., For in himself man lives with the dreadful knowledge that his power to destroy is infinitely greater than his power to build up. But this same man knows that in Christ the power to build up has proved infinitely stronger. This is the source of a profound freedom, a knowledge of God's unrepentant love; he sees through all our errors and remains well disposed to us. It becomes possible to do one's own work fearlessly; it has shed its sinister aspect because it has lost its power to destroy: the issue of the world does not depend on us but is in God's hands. At the same time the Christian knows, however, that he is not free to do whatever he pleases, that his activity is not a game that God allows him and does not take seriously. He knows that he must answer for his actions, that he owes an account as a steward of what has been entrusted to him. There can only be responsibility where there is someone to be responsible to, someone to put the questions. Faith in the Last Judgment holds this questioning of our life over our heads so that we cannot forget it for a moment. Nothing and no one empowers us to trivialize the tremendous seriousness involved in such knowledge; it shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doing so gives it its dignity.

​

"To judge the living and the dead"---this also means that no one but he has the right to judge in the end. This implies that the unrighteousness of the world does not have the last word, not even by being wiped out indiscriminately in a universal act of grace; on the contrary, there is a last court of appeal that preserves justice in order thus to be able to perfect love: A love that overthrew justice would create injustice and thus cease to be anything but a caricature of love. True love is excess of justice, excess that goes farther than justice, but never destruction of justice, which must be and must remain the basic form of love. God is always just with love in mind and loving with an “excess of justice” in mind.

​

According to Professor Ratzinger, this is the real meaning of the Creed article on judgement. Here the real emphasis of this article of the Creed becomes evident: it is not simply---as one might expect---God, the Infinite, the Unknown, the Eternal, who judges. On the contrary, he has handed the judgment over to one who, as man, is our brother. It is not a stranger who judges us but he whom we know in faith. The judge will not advance to meet us as the ‘entirely Other, but as one’ of us, who knows human existence from inside-and has suffered.  

​

Thus over the judgment glows the dawn of hope; it is not only the day of wrath but also the second coming of our Lord. One is reminded of the mighty vision of Christ with which the Book of Revelation begins (1:9-19): the seer sinks down as though dead before this being full of unearthly power. But the Lord lays his hand on him and says to him as once in the days when they were crossing the Lake of Gennesaret in wind and storm: "Fear not, it is I" (cf. 1:I7). The Lord of all power is that Jesus whose comrade the visionary had once become in faith. The article in the Creed about the judgment transfers this very idea to our meeting with the judge of the world. On that day of fear, the Christian will be allowed to see in happy wonder that he to whom "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given" (Mt 28:18) was the companion in faith of his days on earth, and it is as if through the words of the Creed Jesus were already laying his hands on him and saying: Be without fear, it is I. Perhaps the problem of the intertwining of justice and mercy can be answered in no more beautiful way than it is in the idea that stands in the background of our Creed. The Lord who judges us is certainly all powerful, but He is also all loving and full of mercy and justice. We have nothing to fear unless we willfully reject Him, and He was not our “companion in faith”. --Jim Nugent, CFP