On judgment

From the most recent Christian Century (dated May 2, 2006), a poem by G. Wayne Glick:

Emancipation?
(Matthew 13:47-50)

Many fields, many treasures, many pearls
(One chosen). Here, fish netted, many kinds,
But singularity is not the point,
The point is, good are kept, and bad destroyed.
Are these the gentle Galilean's words?
If so, a strange form of gentility:
The angels throw the evil in the fire,
And there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
O, how we twist and turn and rationalize,
Assured Matthew was victim of his time,
And heaven's kingdom never need be forced,
And "way that leads to life" is easy, smooth.
Shall we amend, then, the Apostles' Creed:
"To judge the quick and dead"? This we don't need.

I'm struck by the wisdom of this poem. The parable of the dragnet, the focus of the poem, reads thusly:

" Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Glick looks at this parable and warns us that "singularity is not the point." The parable is not a celebration of what makes each one of these diverse fish unique and therefore wonderful. The point is, he notes, that "good are kept, and bad destroyed."

The two parables that directly precede this parable, the pearl of great price and the treasure in a field, are alluded to in the first two lines of the poem. Together, these three parables suggest that there is a particular Gospel way of living that is worth pursuing. To miss it is to miss the true treasure, the greatest pearl. To miss the truth is to, in effect, condemn oneself to a self-destructive way of living.

Glick's wisdom shines in the second half of the poem: he sees the amazing way we humans rationalize, always reading through our cultural lenses. We are so assured that Matthew's perspective is so much more limited than ours, that if Matthew had only known what we know, he never would have recorded these parables. And so, even in light of these urgent words from the Savior, we are convinced that his way is not difficult, not worth pursuing in any objective sense. Instead, we are sure that God's way is really our way, and that Jesus and Matthew would say as much if they lived today.

Forget for a second the incredible presumption of thinking, "If only the eyewitnesses to Jesus had lived today, they would have really understood life." Beyond the simple arrogance of that statement, we need to realize that this kind of thinking completely blunts the force of these parables. If we automatically say that because this parable is at odds with our modern mindset, it cannot be so, then we do not worship Christ so much as ourselves. It is not Christ we feel is infallible--it is ourselves and our sense of right and wrong.

The parables--and indeed, all of Jesus' teaching--would be warm arms, enfolding us and keeping us close to our Source of life. When we thoughtlessly cast them off, we are not liberating ourselves from a constricting judgmentalism; instead, we are "freeing" ourselves from the only way that leads to true life. And so, fittingly, Glick titles his poem "Emancipation?" An "emancipation" from the idea of right and wrong is no emancipation at all.