We don’t very often talk about the day of the Lord as a day of wrath and judgment. For my part I am much more comfortable with Bible readings and sermons which tell the story of God’s love. However, there is a darker side to the narrative of salvation which we seek to explore week by week as we come together to study the Scriptures, to remind ourselves of the Big Picture of God’s purposes for mankind, and help us to find our own place in that picture. And to-day our readings allow no escape. We are definitely on the dark side of the moon, and the challenge we face is to find our bearings in the darkness.
Zephaniah is not alone in prophesying doom. Time and again the prophets who had a lively sense of God’s holiness as well as his loving concern for his chosen people, needed to remind them how their behaviour and especially the behaviour of their ruling classes exhibited a wilful failure to live up to the standards laid down for them in the books of the law of Moses. The prophets perceived that such behaviour would have dire consequences, sooner or later, and they were not afraid to say so. In their zeal to be heard, and in accordance with the dramatic tradition within which they functioned, they often exaggerated the likely consequences, as perhaps Zephaniah does:
On the day of the Lord’s wrath, in the fire of his passion the whole earth shall be consumed, for a full, a terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth (Zeph 1.18).
A just and holy God cannot allow evil to flourish indefinitely without consequence, but I am not alone in finding it difficult to accept that a God who loves everything that he has made, every creature and every person, would angrily destroy the objects of his love. In the short term, Zephaniah’s warnings may have played some part in encouraging a short-lived period of reform under King Josiah. In the longer term we believe that God in his mercy found a way, through the life and death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, and the gift of his Holy Spirit, to radically transform the relationship between God and humanity. There are many passages in the Old Testament which glimpse the prospect of such a transformation, even if it was not evident in this morning’s reading from Zephaniah. Jeremiah for example foresees a new covenant which will be written not on tablets of stone but on the hearts of the people. They will not need to be taught about God because they will all know the Lord, from the least of them to the greatest (Jeremiah 31.33-34). Knowing God as we do in the person of Jesus, we can indeed be confident that justice will be tempered with mercy, and that all will be governed by Love.
Even so, our gospel reading, in which St Matthew records a story told by Jesus, still envisages a day of judgment in which those like the worthless slave who have wilfully refused to serve their master will be ‘thrown into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. The master knows that some of his servants are more gifted than others, but all have some contribution to make, however modest, and woe betide those who refuse to play their part, however small. It is noticeable that the servant who uses two talents to bring in two more receives exactly the same commendation as the servant who uses five talents to make five more; and even the worthless slave who has buried his one talent in the ground could have escaped judgment by putting it into the bank to earn a spot of interest. In the light of the gospel, we still face judgment but the judge is a whole lot more generous than anything Zephaniah could foresee.
Moreover, we should remember that whilst the parables of Jesus were told to make a particular point, in isolation they don’t tell the whole story. It is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus that tells the whole story. God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that whoever places their trust in him should not die, but have eternal life. Yes, there will be a painful reckoning. We cannot know what heaven will be like, but if it is God’s home, we can expect that it will be a place where Truth and Love reign supreme. There will be no place to hide from the Truth, but also no place beyond the reach of God’s love. Seeing and facing the naked, unvarnished truth about ourselves may well be painful, deeply painful, but we shall face the truth in the presence of one who loves us so much – each and every one of us – that he laid down his life for us. With St Paul I am utterly persuaded that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Lord who loves us will not let us go, even when there is no way to hide our thoughtlessness, no way to hide even the unkind things we may have done deliberately. It will be too late to undo the things which we shall know were wrong, but perhaps not too late to forgive and to be forgiven, so that we can be at peace with one another and with ourselves. Notwithstanding the judgment on the worthless slave in this morning’s gospel, I cling to the hope with David Bentley Hart whose book we studied a year or two back, that when it comes to the point, All Shall be Saved. Indeed all have been saved through the life and death of Jesus. The process of drawing us fully into that salvation may still entail a painful confrontation with the truth about ourselves, but in the end Dame Julian of Norwich has to be right when she asserts that All Shall be Well, and all manner of things shall be well.