Here Comes Da Judge!

Generally speaking, most of us, if asked, tend to think of experiencing judgment and appearing before judges in predominantly negative ways. We are quick to raise our hackles if a judgmental barb is directed at us; and, when a summons to appear in court is found in our mailbox, we might be more apt to volunteer for root canal than submit to that potential humiliation. Given our visceral response to judges and judgment, it is not surprising that our initial reaction to identifying God as Judge is quickly mired in contemplations of condemnation and punishment. Frankly, the biblical image of God as Judge sits rather uncomfortably with most of us. I am rather sure that when we recite in the creed, as we do, that God in Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, we instantly cringe with the thought of what side of the divide we (or, justifiably so, “They”) will end up on for all eternity. At its worse, this inclination has led the Church to generate and exploit peoples’ fears in an ill-begotten attempt to maintain control over people. We see this promoted through the oddly macabre art depicting the so-called Last Judgment wherein the faces of the saved are filled with glee as they look down on the horrors inflicted upon the damned. Personally, I believe such sentiments are both inconsistent with creedal theology and scriptural witness.

In our contemplation of the biblical image of God as King, we raised the likelihood that it developed in opposition to the general experience biblical peoples had of the hardly impressive reality of that institution in the world. In many ways, the image of God as King developed as a product of an early No-Kings movement where banners were waved declaring that “We have no King but God!” In like manner, the biblical image of God as Judge may well be best understood as developing out of the questionable experiences the Jewish people had in the secular courts of the land. If so, then both the biblical image of God as the Righteous King and God as the Just Judge are a way of instilling hope in something beyond the too many futile experiences of unrighteous kings and unjust judges. But, we might ask, what are the depictions of God as Judge in the Jewish scriptures expressing hope in? To get at the expectant Jewish hope of embracing God as Judge, I want to turn first to an experience much closer to our own time.

In the late 1960’s, three Afro-American comedians, Pigmeat Markham, Flip Wilson and Sammy Davis, Jr., in song, television skits and stand-up routines, popularized the phrase, “Here Comes Da Judge!” For the most part these appeared to be little more than innocently poking fun at the pomp and circumstance of the procedural decorum of the American courtroom. However, in light of the fact that these came at us from Afro-Americans in the midst of the then struggling but aspiring Civil Rights Movement, we must ask ourselves, how much of these comical routines might be better understood as a direct response to the general experiences of Black Americans before American judges. Let’s face it, many black Americans ended up before judges (particularly in, but not limited to, the South) simply because of the color of their skin. Very few blacks went before such judges with any glimmer of hope that their case would be heard much less justly addressed. “Here Comes the Judge!” was a phrase much more familiar to black Americans than white ones and it did not exactly resonate with expectations of acquittal or mercy much less fair treatment. Fair and equal treatment was what was, and still is, driving the hope expressed in the Civil Rights Movement.

Let’s fast-forward backwards a few thousand years to the reality of the Jewish experience which undergirds the great majority of scripture. First, despite the way we love to read into scripture God’s triumphs on behalf of the people of God, the Bible is largely a record of a people who repeatedly end up on the losing end of most of the worldly engagements and experiences they end up undergoing. The general experience of most Jews brought before a secular court in biblical days were not pleasant ones. The Jews were to many, beside themselves, a rather odd people. Their adamant opposition to the popular notion that there were many gods and not just One, actually made them atheists in the estimation of most other people. Their refusal to serve in the armies of the empires of which they were a part made them seem very unpatriotic. Arriving before a judge with all the other strange ceremonial, dietetic, and moral quibbles they had, did not go a long way in contributing to a judge deciding much of anything in their favor. When we consider how often they were treated as the doormat of the world, does it come as any surprise that they were hoping for a radically different system of justice? The biblical witness makes it rather plain that those who periodically occupied them, the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman Empires - to name a few - could rarely, if ever, be counted on to treat a Jew fairly and justly. Post-biblical history, from Christian pogroms to inquisitions and aberrational “Christian” organizations like the Nazis and the KKK, only further exasperates the experience of being a Jew in the court of so much public opinion.

Interestingly enough, the Jewish experience was the predominant reality for the early Christian Church - and, for the most part, for almost all the same odd reasons that the Jews suffered such acrimony. Early Christians refused to recognize the supposed divinity of other gods - including the Emperor; they refused to serve in the armies of the Empire; and they too exhibited some strange ceremonial and moralistic attitudes and behaviors that made them odd and strange and, at times, particularly for the dispossessed and the powerless, intriguing and attractive. Let’s just say that Christians did not end up as fodder for wild beasts and gladiators in the Coliseum as the result of fair and just treatment in the courts of the land. These experiences and their memory dragged on like a bad hangover into the Nicaean Age. Somehow early Christians drew hope out of the fact that Jesus himself died as the result of the questionable intrigue played out in the secular courts of his own day which saw him little more than a momentary and expendable nuisance. The fact remains that many are viewed no better in our courts to this very day. This is why the scriptures played such a powerful role in so much of the positive energy in the Civil Rights Movement. The scriptures are a powerful witness for the powerless caught in the maw of the powers of the status quo.

It is for these reasons that the biblical concept of God as Judge is entirely developed out of a hope and an expectation that God is a Judge who is different from the judges who, for better or for worse, are corrupted by a biased view of individual loyalties and agendas which cannot but help influence their decisions. Though we might claim that ideally justice acts with absolute impartiality, it is too often in short shrift. Just ask the Jews or the early Christians or Afro-Americans or those without sufficient means to recoup losses at the hands of corporate interests. The biblical image of God The Judge, knowing all, is one in which this Judge not only exercises mercy but will always operate with mercy set as the default means of the cosmos. What if reciting the creedal trust that God will judge the living and the dead (which doesn’t leave anybody out), instead of falling into the mire of condemnation (which is never stated there), we internalize (as the biblical witness has) a God who as Judge forgives (which does naturally follow in our creedal recitation) all the living and the dead. Now there is the biblical good news with which we have been entrusted.

There is no underestimating the amount of “court language” and “legalese” in the scripture (for instance: there are the “courts” of God out of which the satan’s - quite literally the prosecuting attorney - case against the people is cast out of the courts of God; there is the paraclete - literally the one who stands beside us as a counselor-at-law - in the Gospel of John who Jesus assures us will not leave us com-fort-less or un-fort-ified; etc. etc.) but all that is for another time. Suffice it to say that among the foundational elements of Jesus’ own declaration of the good news, entirely entrusted to us, is that God’s presence and activity among us is essentially found and experienced in a spirit of forgiveness and a refusal on our part to play the judge. And perhaps to view all earthly judges with a modicum of comedic irreverence and a large dose of what we can hope will be transforming forgiveness.