On Judgement

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on the Second Sunday in Advent, December 7, 2025]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

Along with Hell, the word judgement has remained quite the hot topic (please, pardon the expression) among Christians in these latter days. So, in preparation for today’s sermon I thought I should read through the Eighteenth-Century sermon by Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,”[1] a masterfully written but gravely problematic work which has heavily influenced American Christianity. My suggestion would be, should you be given the choice between reading it and the Book of Revelation, please pick Revelation.

This work is a centrepiece for one of the two prevailing but heretical views of judgement that infect modern Christianity in the West today. This first one focuses on fear, stoking the anxiety of everyone around it, further buttressed by other heresies, and exploited shamelessly by those who expressly wish this fate on others, whether because these individuals had or were perceived to have wronged them, or because these unfortunates merely belonged to a group hated without cause or reason. On the flip side of the coin, many people, professing that God is a God of Love and Mercy and Forgiveness, reject judgement as being incompatible with the nature of God. After all, who would throw someone into a pit of fire, or subject them to the endless tortures of other evil, sadistic beings, and then be able to say that they truly loved these condemned souls? Yet this too is a distortion, an unbalanced perception focusing solely on the good at the core of creation and the inherent in Humanity’s Being yet ignoring the very real corruption of Humanity’s Nature and its separation and tendency to further separate itself from God, let alone the injustices and injuries doled out upon all of Creation.

How did we get here?

The harshness of the first view arises from the supposition that Humanity has caused God slight or injury or even harm, inciting God’s enmity toward Humanity and the desire, no, the need to punish the offenders in defense of the Divine honour and majesty. In other words, judgement comes from God’s need to exact satisfaction at the end of a period of mercy, to tally up particular and universal transgressions, and to mete out punishment appropriate to the guilt incurred. If indeed we as an Order of Creation impugned the infinite, boundless, and omnipotent Divine Majesty, then the guilt is infinite, boundless, and omnipotent, and thus the punishment must be infinite, boundless, and omnipotent. The Wrath of God thus becomes a powerful hatred against the Creatures that thus caused injury to the Divine Majesty, and no torment, torture, or other sadistic imagining is too good for them. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The error in this thinking is mistaking the direction of the enmity and believing God to be able to sustain injury from His Creation, which verges if not falls into the heresy of Patripassianism, which presumes that God, whose essence is unapproachable and incomprehensible and totally alien to that of His Creatures, can take injury and suffer. The actual root of the problem is that Humanity, instead of injuring God, has instead in its pride removed itself from the protection and sustenance of God, placing itself in the position of separation from and enmity toward God. This is a very real and a very serious thing. In removing ourselves from God’s protection and sustenance of our beings, we have subjected ourselves to a condition more horrific than any torment dreamed up by the Puritans, the painful waning of our spirits as they trend toward but never quite reaching annihilation, becoming shadows gnawing upon ourselves in the Darkness apart from the Divine Energy of the Uncreated Light.

The other opinion, where judgement is not only unthinkable but impossible, ignores the fact that any created being, like their uncreated Creator, has not only a core Being and a distinct Nature, but also a fully functional and free will (so do some views of the other extreme, but more on that later). If it is possible for creatures to choose union and unity with God, it is also possible for them to reject God. To take that choice away, to eliminate free will, to coerce righteousness and love flies in the face of the definition of God’s selfless love just as much as indiscriminate, willful destruction of a fallen humanity. If the capacity is not there to reject God and to endure the consequences of separating oneself from God, then the will is not free and instead of a beloved, rational creation in communion with the Triune God of our free wills, we become hollow automatons, mere machinery, and rendering Our Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection meaningless.

Indeed, forgetting, or ignoring, or denying this free will is the fault of both camps. On the one hand, the teaching of the total depravity of humankind and its linked doctrine of double predestination are not Orthodox or Catholic doctrines and have strayed from the teachings of the Universal Church. Yes, humanity is flawed; yes, humanity is corrupt; yes, humanity without God is doomed to march toward extinction; and yes, humanity left to its own devices within its pride will continue that spiral toward Death, heaping sin upon sin as we ignore the Greatest Commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets.[2] However, even in this decayed state we still have free will, a free will that exists in the face of our “predestined” extinction and that exists in the face of our eternal salvation. The predestined path we take depends wholly upon our free will and the prevenient Grace of God that allows us the opportunity to employ that free will.[3] 

All the rational Orders of Creation have this free will, exercisable within the makeup and characteristics of their created natures and as part of the actuation of their potentials. There has come and will come in the existence of all these creatures the final decision, where their will must focus on whether to submit to communion with God, or in pride to eschew that very communion that sustains life. It is said by some, including St. Thomas Aquinas, that humans have an extended period to bring their wills into alignment with God, to effect, as St. Paul the Apostle enjoins us, “To reconcile yourselves with God,”[4] where God in His Grace and Mercy holds open the door for us. Other Created Orders, such as the various types of angels and demons, also had that opportunity, but that is their story to tell, not ours.

So, judgement hinges upon several things. First, our willing choice as a rational Order of Creation to persist in our state of separation from God or not. Have we abandoned our pride to embrace life eternal, or at the end will we cling to our pride in the face of God, look at what God is, what God begets, what God does, and say, “That is not for me.” At the very end, should we choose one, we embrace everlasting Life, but should we choose the other, and that possibility very much exists, we embrace the slow, infinite withering of our being, eternally separated from God.[5] God will not force that choice, but He will insist we make it, and that final opportunity will have eternal consequences.

“What of the judgement of our actions? What of vengeance? What of vindication? We read about that in Scripture all the time!” Yes, we do. Along with our choice we have also accountability for our actions, and they will be held up to the standard Our Lord has given us: to love God and to love our neighbour. Every action or inaction we make has a consequence both immediate and distant. These will be held up to the standard of the Kingdom of God. Did it show love for God and neighbour, or did it fail miserably? I will tell you, even with taking the new Nature recapitulated in us by Our Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, the corruption of the old Nature is still very much in play. Despite our efforts to mortify our old nature, like the Holy Apostle Paul, we quite frequently do what we do not wish to do. The judgement of these acts will be whether we built something lasting for the Kingdom of God, having conformed ourselves more closely to Christ, or whether we half-baked them, and at the end when everything is tested, we have next to nothing, or a little something, or a lot, as demonstrated in the Parable of the Talents. Were it not for the Grace of God, most of our efforts would burn up like a wheat dust explosion in a grain elevator, where we still achieve salvation, but only at great loss like those rescued from a fire. To put it another way, when our old nature is destroyed at the end of the age and all that is left is our new nature, how much of it will there be, and in what condition?

My dear ones in Christ, we should not fear judgement, but we should recognize that there will indeed be a judgement, both the judgement of our choice either to embrace eternal life or to persist in death, as well as the examination of our actions. Is it our choice to cling to our pride and certain permanent separation from God, to cling to our hereditary enmity, and to incur willingly that Wrath which is the withdrawal of the protection and sustenance of God, making ourselves subject to the emptiness of the Void and the hunger of the loss of the sustenance of the Divine Presence? Is it our choice not to live up to the potential of our new nature and turning our back on the old nature, to choose not to realize the potential of selfless love and self-giving that would make us like God? At the end, will we be weighed and found poor and wanting, or will we make free use of the grace offered to us, having stored up treasure in heaven where nothing is corrupt and where nothing fades away?

Let us strive to make our judgement an occasion for joy amidst our sorrow, and our vindication at the end of the Age.

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Edwards, Jonathan, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Enfield, CT, 1741, which may be found at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God. Again, take note this is a firmly Puritan Calvinist document and its basis is considered heretical by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

[2] Mt. 22.36-40, Lk. 25.28, cf. Jas. 2.8

[3] I highly recommend reading Romanides’ work, The Ancestral Sin, particularly the chapters “Satan” and “The Destiny of Man” for a more in-depth view on the free-will of fallen humanity and for further texts on this view of sacred anthropology. (Romanides, John S., tr. 1998 by Gabriel, George S. The Ancestral Sin: A Comparative Study of the Sin of Our Ancestors Adam and Eve According to the Paradigms and Doctrines of the First- and Second-Century Church and the Augustinian Formulation of Original Sin, Zephyr Publishing, Ridgewood, NJ 2002)

[4] Cf . Rom. 5.10, 2 Cor. 5.20

[5] Cf. 2 Thes. 1.9