Hell sure ain’t cool these days. The idea of a post-death judgment of our actions here on earth is repugnant to the western 21st century citizen. Suggesting that after we die that we may be held accountable to our actions during this life, will not bring cyber-hugs from your list of facebook friends. The concept that God has set up a system of justice in our universe, and that some people may chose the path of evil and thus renege their place in the coming kingdom, simply does not wash with modern post-modern post-post-modern sensibilities.
Partly this is because we who live our lives within the Western comfort bubble have become distanced from evil. Sure we see it on TV, we read about it in the newspaper, but on the whole it does not touch our real lives in any palpable way. As clever Western people we have even come to neat solutions for the problem of evil. The pedophile simply needs medication, the rapist needs group therapy, angry people in the third world just need the chance to buy flat screen TV’s, and America just needs to soften her foreign policy and all war, terrorism and evil will disappear from the face of the world.
As I peer at the world affairs section of the Sunday newspaper over the vista of my immaculately crafted latte, the problem of evil seems pretty solvable. As I savour the crema of my single source, organic, fair trade coffee, I wonder to myself why doesn’t God just take a bit of a chill pill, get with the program, and drop the ‘medieval’ judgment policies? He should listen to audience feedback, employ a public relations guru, and form some focus groups to help him do a publicity makeover? Anything that will get the message through to him that the whole post-death judgement thing does not cut it with the creative, highly educated, urban sophisticate demographic. Doesn’t he realize that no-one chooses to be evil, didn’t Freud or Jung or one of those guys work out it is just how people are raised, or the roll of the dice that the world has given them, or because they have some strand of mutant DNA or…or…or…something?
But then I am taken away from my cafe table overlooking the world, and I find myself standing and perceiving humanity from a different viewing platform. My mind’s eye is now far from home in a different place where the wind blows with a cosmic coldness. Here no one can afford to be clever or have the luxury to pontificate at a distance. This place goes by many names, Darfur, Treblinka, The Killing Fields of Cambodia, The Democratic Republic of The Congo, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Ra’s al-Ain, Kolyma. Some of these names are familiar to us, some foreign; but we know all too well the images, burned into our minds from high school texts books - mounds of bones, cavernous faces and jutting cheekbones, sallow rotting flesh, zombie-guards, lonely barb wire fences, 12 years olds with AK-47 assault rifles, old women sobbing into shallow graves, dead eyes, and that black smoke that you can almost smell from the pictures.
Here I find I have nothing to say, I have not seen my daughter, stolen and bloodily brainwashed to fight as a child soldier, nor have I seen the women in my village raped, I do not know what it feels like to have my people group processed for extermination, and I will probably never see my wife killed in front of me for not being able to work whilst suffering dystentry. Here my cosmpolitan, clever solutions and arm chair opinions simply get stuck in my throat.
In this place the players may change, the uniforms and methods of killing may alter. But the stories are the same. The choice to turn backs on God is the same, the choice to pursue violence, control, power and evil is the same. Standing here with those who are lucky to be alive, there is no question that some make a clear choice towards evil. Standing here, evil cannot be ignored, held at a safe distance or wished away. Standing here a God of Justice, who does not let the victim’s cries be ignored, but who holds those who chose the path of evil to account, strangley seems not just a God of judgement but simultaneously a God of love. As I stand here to suggest that there is no judgement after death seems a callous and horribly politically incorrect position to hold.
