Grace and Judgment
A Sermon by Randy Harris
Highland Presbyterian Church
March 18, 2012
Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21
So, at our Dinner for 8 gathering last night, we’re standing on the back porch
looking out into the lovely woods, and what is it that we begin discussing? Snakes. Yep,
that’s right. And oh, the snake stories came out. The snake in the garage story, the child
who ran over the snake with the bicycle story, the “I didn’t want to kill the snake, but…”
story, the “Oh yeah, we killed it” story. I think everybody there had one. You know,
prior to the reality of terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction, we
Americans were more afraid of snakes than anything else—including fear of speaking in
public and fear of heights. It’s amazing to me how visceral these feelings are. Indeed,
you may be shuddering even now as you think of the creature that our Mike Culler calls
“Mr. No-Shoulders.”
It’s not hard to imagine these creatures as agents of God’s judgment! These
serpents play a role in our Old Testament reading this morning—a story to which Jesus
points in our New Testament reading as well. Both stories speak powerfully of God’s
grace and love, and we like that. We are a people born of grace, shaped by grace. Yet
both stories also speak a word of God’s judgment, and such judgment we may not like as
much. What do we do with this divine judgment? How does it fit into the overall
scheme of things between God and us? Those are good Lenten questions to ponder.
One thing I’ll say about these stories of grace and judgment: you know, there are so
many uninteresting gods out there—gods whose primary concern is prosperity, or
morality, or power. Really, those pagan gods aren’t very interesting. But a God who
says to Moses, “Put one of those poisonous snakes on a pole, and everyone who looks at
it will live”—now, that’s an interesting God! Strange, yes. A little odd, yes. But never
dull. No, amidst our modern pantheon of pedestrian gods, here we have a God whose
dealings are with life and death, sin and grace, light and darkness, not just with whether
we’re being good enough, or whether our faith might enable us to get that new car we’ve
been wanting.
As we read along in Numbers, these serpents in the wilderness are sent by God
because the people are murmuring, grumbling, ungrateful. If it weren’t such a painful
story that raises so many difficult questions, it would be almost funny. Like kids who’ve
been riding in the car on a trip that’s gotten just a little too long, the Israelites have been
wandering in the wilderness for a long time—nearly 40 years at this point—and they’re
fussing about it. They still remember the good ol’ days back in Egypt. They may have
been slaves, but at least they had dinner every night. But the story is painful—painful
because it speaks a word of judgment that God has pronounced on this wandering people.
But here’s the curious part. The very means by which the people are judged
become the means by which God saves them. It seems hard to understand, but as the
story goes, the same poisonous serpents that enact a word of judgment are then used as
the means by which God wondrously rescues this wandering people as Moses lifts up the
serpent on the pole. Somehow God works to hold judgment and grace together.
2
In this beloved text from John 3, John tells a similar story. For sake of love God
sends Jesus into the world. But even here in this third chapter, Jesus is talking about
being lifted up on the cross, and as John goes on to speak of the significance of Jesus he
tells once again of grace, and of judgment. For John, sin is primarily a relational
concept,1 and as the end of our reading this morning makes clear, its opposite is faith.
For sake of love, God sends Jesus into the world, and yet the very world that God loves
rejects God’s Son, crucifying him. The cross serves as a word of judgment, exposing the
darkness of our human hearts, our failures in our relationships with God and with one
another, our rampant consumerism and callous neglect of the poor. In the light of the
cross, we are able see that we, too, struggle to believe who Jesus says he is, we fall short
of what he calls us to be and do. Frankly, like the Israelites in the wilderness, most of us
don’t get through a day without our own murmuring doubts. We fail to trust, to believe,
and the cross judges us—our murmuring, our doubting, our falling short, our failures to
love, our rejection of the very God who is with us and for us.
And yet here is the paradox that lies at the heart of our faith. Like Moses with the
poisonous serpent in the wilderness, the very thing that judges us is also our salvation.
Even as the cross speaks God’s “no” to our sin, it is also the means by which God is at
work for our wellbeing, our healing, our salvation. Every gospel, every letter, each voice
within the canon of the New Testament affirms the news that in the cross and resurrection
of Jesus, God acts for sake of love and grace to forgive us, to heal us, and to restore our
relationship. In the cross, judgment and grace aren’t separated—they are held together in
the wonder of God’s love.
Not that we don’t try to keep them apart. The truth of the matter is that we often
think of matters of faith and life in an “either/or” sort of way. Either you experience
God’s judgment, or you experience God’s grace. Either you are in the light, or you are in
the darkness. Most of us, and it doesn’t matter who the “us” is, would put ourselves in
the camp of light and grace. I mean, who would come to a church that promised an
unfailing message of God’s judgment for those who came to worship? There are many
churches that would speak a word of grace for those who believe the right things, who
say the right things, who do the right things and sometimes more importantly didn’t do
the wrong things; and if you don’t believe and do rightly, then too bad for you, but you’re
out. In the community in South Carolina where we used to live, it was not uncommon for
our church kids to come to youth group and say, “My best friend at school told me that
her preacher said that the Presbyterians are going to hell because they don’t believe in
getting saved.” Yes, it’s not difficult for us to separate judgment from grace, and in so
doing to create a group of “us” and a group of “them” in the process.
But both of our readings this morning bear witness to a God who holds judgment
and grace together, not as opposite sides of a coin, but the one enfolded within the other.
Karl Barth gets this just right when he reminds us that in saying “Yes” to us in Christ,
God also says “No” to our sin. But this word of judgment isn’t some independent thing
off on its own. Judgment is a servant of grace, and both judgment and grace are held
together within the larger reality of God’s unfailing and purifying love.2 Like parents
who say “No” to a child’s inappropriate or dangerous behavior for sake of love, so God’s
judgment and grace go together. And to that end, I wonder: might the word of judgment
1
2
So says Craig R. Koester in The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2008), 65 ff.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2.771-73.
3
itself be a word of grace? A word that calls us away from our brokenness toward God
and one another as God intends us to be?
As a way of exploring that question, I invite you to stroll with me past the self-help
section of the bookstore, which is no help at all here, to the fiction and literature section,
instead—particularly, to the short story “Revelation,” by Flannery O’Connor3 —the best
short story ever written, I think. As some of you may recall from your reading of it, the
story begins with Mrs. Turpin, sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office with her
husband Claud, where she is carefully sizing up the people sitting around her. Mrs.
Turpin is acutely aware of social class. At night, rather than count sheep, she reviews the
categories of peoples in her 1950’s rural Georgia world. At the bottom are what she
refers to as the “colored” people, followed by what she calls the “white trash.” Next are
the “home owners,” followed by the “land-and-home owners” (the class to which she and
Claud belong). Next are the people with a lot more money, and bigger houses and a lot
of land—but a lot of those folks were common and really belonged below she and Claud.
In short, in her estimation Mrs. Turpin sits on the top of her world, and she is grateful for
it. There in the doctor’s office, Mrs. Turpin basks in her gratitude, having carefully
elevated herself above all the others—particularly a young woman named Mary Grace,
an overweight college student with bad skin and peculiar eyes, who sits reading a book
called Human Development. Particularly, Mrs. Turpin gives thanks that God didn’t make
her like any of them. “It’s one thing I am,’ Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, ‘it’s grateful.
When I think of who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of
everything and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you Jesus, for
making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different’....’Oh thank you Jesus,
Jesus, thank you!’ she cried aloud.” 4
As she utters these words, Mrs. Turpin’s carefully ordered world is crucified by
grace in the first “revelation” in O’Connor’s story. Mary Grace throws the book at her,
literally. Mrs. Turpin is hit by the book Mary Grace was reading, just over her left eye,
and Mary Grace pounces on her. When she regains her senses and Mary Grace has been
restrained and sedated, Mrs. Turpin asks Mary Grace if she has anything to say to her.
Mary Grace tells her quite clearly, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old
warthog.” O’Connor adds that Mary Grace’s “eyes burned for a moment as if she saw
with pleasure that her message had struck its target.”
And Mrs. Turpin has no response as she slumps back in her chair. For perhaps the
first time in her life, Mrs. Turpin is confronted with her brokenness, her sinfulness—and
she realizes it is true. The foundations of her very life are shaken.
That night, at home, she cries out into the sky in a low fierce voice, “What do you
send me a message like that for?....How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and
from hell too?” Pointing at the hogs on her farm, she says “How am I a hog?....There
was plenty of trash there. It didn’t have to be me.” “If you like trash better, go get
yourself some trash then.” Shaken by a final surge of fury, Mrs. Turpin roars into the
night sky, “Who do you think you are?”
Then, like Moses at the burning bush, O’Connor says that “the color of everything,
field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity.... Until the sun
3
All references to “Revelation” come from Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of
Faith, ed. by Paula J. Carlson and Peter S. Hawkins (Augsburg Fortress, 1994), pp. 18-35.
4
“Revelation,” p. 27.
4
slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to [the
hogs in the pen] as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last
she lifted her head.”
And here, Mrs. Turpin finally sees that good news for what it is when she receives
the second revelation in O’Connor’s story. There is only a purple streak in the sky, but in
her vision she sees the streak
as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of
living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.
There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their
lives, and bands of black [folks] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and
lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the
end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as
those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and
the God-given wit to use it right….They were marching behind the others
with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and
common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she
could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being
burned away.
As she walked home, the crickets were chirping, but what Mrs. Turpin heard were
the voices of those souls climbing into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. 5
So then, what of Mrs. Turpin? In the last analysis, does she experience judgment?
Or does she experience grace? Or is the judgment she receives also grace? What about
you, for that matter, and me? What do you think? Is there some part of our lives where
we can hear a word of God’s judgment—our relationships, our addiction to stuff, our
willingness to cut ourselves off from those who are different from us, our failure to trust
God in matters small and large? Do we hear God’s judgment on who we are, and how
we live? Might that word of judgment be a word of grace for us? And if so, what
difference does it make? Amen.
5
Listening for God, p. 35.