Sirach 10.12-18; Luke 14.1, 7-14
Today it is important to speak a word about judgment, a positive word about judgment and, specifically, to speak a positive word about God’s judgment and God judging the world and our lives. I know this isn’t a particularly popular topic. Even though we recite the Nicene Creed in worship each Sunday and say that we believe in Jesus Christ who “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” the idea of judgment is often downplayed—including from this pulpit. Much better to speak of comfort rather than correction, a God of love not of judgment, wouldn’t you agree?
Yet we need a God of judgment, a God who judges. Because, as we have seen at Annunciation school and church in Minneapolis this week, the world is not the way it is supposed to be. We are not supposed to be reading and hearing bad news every day, to say nothing of being mortified by such evil for a few passing days but never finding the resolve to make real change. The world is not supposed to be filled with earthquake, fire, and flood; with plague, pestilence, and famine—to borrow language from the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer. Genocide and disaster are not part of the Creator’s plan for the planet or for the people in it. Diseases of body and spirit are not part of God’s good plan for humanity. Human trafficking that treats people like consumable goods; terrorists who used weapons to keep people in perpetual fear and bullies who use words to do the same; drugs like meth and fentanyl that destroys lives and families—isn’t it good news that God will judge all of this and not merely offer a shoulder shrug of divine indifference?
It is important to speak a word about judgment because judgment is not the opposite of God’s love; it is a means to reveal that love. If you love someone and you see that person threatened or hurt, if you see their lives destroyed by lies or addiction, you are not indifferent. You are angry—not out of cruelty, but because you care. Love wants the best for the beloved and love acts on behalf of the beloved. How much more, then, does God who is love?
Isn’t it good news that God is not indifferent to evil, to human injustice and personal suffering, and that God will judge everything that hurts and destroys and work to set the world right? This is a judgment to look forward to in a way that some of the psalms do. Psalm 96, “The trees of the forest shout for joy…when the Lord comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with justice and peoples by his faithfulness.” And so, with all creation, we live in anticipation that God, in judgment from love, will come again to judge the living and the dead and that the kingdom of God made known in Jesus will have no end.
Today’s reading from Sirach, our first reading, also looks to the judgment of God, for God to set right a world gone off-the-rails. The book of Sirach may not be the most familiar book of the Bible. In fact, if your Bible at home only contains the Old and New Testaments, you won’t find Sirach. Rather, it is found in some editions of the Bible that include a collection of books known as the Apocrypha. Most of those editions of the Bible tuck the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments.
What are we to make of these books? The Articles of Religion, a foundational Anglican writing, say that such books are not used to establish doctrine, but they are worth reading. They guide us in a life of faith. A book like Sirach, especially, offers the wisdom of showing what life looks like when it reflects God; Sirach also warns about dangers of life that does the very opposite. If ancient nautical maps used to warn seafarers about dangerous waters they might encounter by noting, “Here be dragons,” when Sirach warns about a way of life that takes us far from God, the warning is, ‘Here be judgment.’
In Sirach today, this judgment is declared in a stark statement. “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” Pride, Sirach says, takes us away from God and into dangerous territory.
Now pride, biblically speaking, is different than a sense of being pleased or delighted by one’s accomplishments. St Paul speaks positively about it when he says, “In Christ Jesus I have reason to be proud of my work for God.” This is different than the pride Sirach describes: the self-importance that goes hand in hand with human arrogance—pridefulness. Pride is the refusal to acknowledge dependence on God or who God has created us to be. St Augustine describes our lives as being ‘turned in on themselves’ instead of outward to God. “The heart has withdrawn from its Maker.”
Pride, in this sense, is the first human sin. We see it in the fall of Adam and Eve. Instead of delighting in their humanity in relation to God, they wanted to supplant God, be like God. And the arrogance and pridefulness that begins with these biblical ancestors ripples out from them to us. This is what the church means when it talks about Original Sin. Because of the ripple effect of sin, the world and our lives are fractured. Nations exalt their power, leaders cling to their thrones, personal autonomy is elevated above reverence for God and life in harmony with God. The result is not human flourishing but ruin—for individuals and the communities we live in. This is bad news we are familiar with every day: division, exploitation, insecurity; and at a personal level anxiety, depression, and addiction. All of it shows how deeply the Fall has distorted our life and desires. God is not indifferent to it. A God that didn’t care would not be a God who is good. God judges all that hurts and destroys. “Pride was not created for human beings,” says Sirach, “or violent anger for those born of women.”
Now while all of that might seem overly grim, permeating Sirach’s word of judgment there is grace. In God, there is always grace. And from that grace, we have the assurance that God will act. In other words, there is hope.
Of pridefulness and arrogance, Sirach says, “The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place. The Lord plucks up the roots of the nations and plants the humble in their place.” Now the news that we read and hear every day will not tell us this; violent people who use weapons to keep others in perpetual fear and bullies who use words to do the same, want us to believe the opposite. Yet in the judgment of God, their days are numbered: the violent, the bullies, all that hurts and destroys. In God, human arrogance and pride are levelled. And this judgment is not the opposite of God’s love but the revealing of that love. Love wants the best for the beloved and love acts on behalf of the beloved. God’s judgment shows us there is another way to be. By bringing down human pride, God clears the way for new life—the life God gives that we are meant to live.
And if Sirach’s language about God overthrowing the proud and lifting up the lowly sound familiar, it’s because Mary echoes this very same theme in her Magnificat, the song of praise she sings after the Annunciation when the Angel Gabriel tells her that God is coming into the world through Jesus the Son. “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Like Psalm 96 with the trees of the forest rejoicing when the Lord comes to judge the earth, Mary rejoices and sings about how God “scatters the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.” In the judgment of God, the days of the proud and mighty are numbered.
Jesus himself says the same in today’s gospel. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Or in another place, “The meek will inherit the earth.” The meek. This is language of judgment, judgment that uproots human pride and prepares our hearts and lives for growth in humble faith. Jesus Christ comes to judge the living and the death. In him, God’s grace is revealed for us and through us in a kingdom that will have no end.
Sirach’s voice today belongs to a great biblical chorus, testifying that God’s judgment and grace are not contradictory but complementary; God is not indifferent to human injustice and personal suffering. How much do we need to hear that on days when it seems that evil has the upper hand? How much do we need to see in God a different, and better, way to live? “Pride was not created for human beings or violent anger for those born of women.” God will act on behalf of the beloved. God does act in and through us in Jesus.
The wisdom of God in Sirach, and of Jesus in today’s gospel, together call us to live humbly before God, trusting not in ourselves but in the One who judges in righteousness and redeems in love. Because for the humble—those who acknowledge their dependence on God and resist the allure of pride—there is life. +
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