“Look, he is coming with the clouds,and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and all peoples on earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be! Amen”. Revelation 1:7

We will have heard many times that ‘so and so’ is in heaven and is looking down on us. It is one of the great heresies of our time to suggest that not everyone gets to heaven, but if they did, what would it say about God as a judge?

The idea that God will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead sounds strange to 21st Century ears, even though we say this each week in the Creed. The idea of God coming into our world does not fit into our contemporary thinking. If you asked people if they believed that God would come in judgment, I have no doubt most would say “no”. Many clergy are uncomfortable with the idea of God as judge.

The idea we all get to heaven comes from saying that if God is a God of love, why can’t he accept everyone? Why can’t he admit everyone to the next life? If he forgives all sins, why does he need to pass judgment?

God is a God of love, but to be a God of love, he must be also a God of justice, a God who does what is right. I believe that for God to be a just God, for him to be a righteous God, he must be a God who passes judgment and if he passes judgment, then some people are going to be condemned.

One episode in history is sufficient to convince me that judgment is necessary.

Primo Levi was an Italian chemist who lived through the most horrible episode in human history. He was a Jew who fought against the Fascists who controlled Italy under Mussolini. In 1943, he was captured and put into a prison camp. The Jewish prisoners were taken from the camp and put onto a train, 650 of them were put into twelve railway wagons. The train went across Austria and Czechoslovakia to Poland, to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

This is how Primo Levi describes the arrival at the most awful place in human history:

“The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to a millennial anger. A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little beyond it, a row of lorries. Then everything was silent again. Someone translated: we had to climb down with our luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a moment the platform was swarming with shadows. But we were afraid to break that silence: everyone busied himself with his luggage, searched for someone else, called to somebody, but timidly, in a whisper.

A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an indifferent air. At a certain moment they moved among us, and in a subdued tone of voice, with faces of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly, one by one, in bad Italian. They did not interrogate everybody, only a few: ‘How old? Healthy or ill?’ And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.

. . . we had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple police agents. It was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask for his luggage: they replied, ‘luggage afterwards’. Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said, ‘together again afterwards’. Many mothers did not want to be separated from their children: they said ‘good, good, stay with child’. They behaved with the calm assurance of people doing their normal duty of every day. But Renzo stayed an instant too long to say goodbye to Francesca, his fiancee, and with a single blow they knocked him to the ground. It was their everyday duty.

In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we know that in that rapid and summary choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number. not one was living two days later. We also know that not even this tenuous principle of discrimination between fit and unfit was always followed, and that later the simpler method was often adopted of merely opening both the doors of the wagon without warning or instructions to the new arrivals. Those who by chance climbed down on one side of the convoy entered the camp; the others went to the gas chamber.

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died: the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews was self­demonstrative . . . Emilia, daughter of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful, intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in washing her during the journey in the packed car in a tub with tepid water which the degenerate German engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging us all to death.

Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared. We saw them for a short while as an obscure mass at the other end of the platform; then we saw nothing more”.

Primo Levi was extremely lucky. He was an industrial chemist by profession and he was used to work in the laboratories. He survived. Millions of Jewish people did not survive, They were exterminated—just for being Jewish.

Reading Primo Levi’s book conjures up pictures in the mind that are nothing short of hellish. The events he describes, the planned, systematic extermination of six million people are the most evil episode in human history.

Some of those responsible were brought to trial, many were not. They escaped into the chaos of post-war Europe to begin new lives; some disappeared into the depths of South America. Many of the worst criminals died untried and unrepentant.

Let us picture in our minds little Emilia Levi– three years old, a bright little Italian girl with long dark hair and a dazzling smile. A little girl with all the innocence of a young child.

Then let us picture those who killed her. It is hard to do, it is hard to imagine that any human being would be capable of carrying out such deeds.

On the day of judgment, what does God say? “Ah, well, it is all in the past, come in everybody?”

Would that be justice? Could we believe in a righteous God if he simply ignored evil deeds?

To say that everyone will be welcomed in heaven is to make a mockery of God. It is to say that God has no moral standards, that he is blind to suffering. It is to say that God is unjust.

If God said to little Emilia Levi and to those who killed her, “Your reward is the same”, he would not be God at all. A God who was unjust, who did not believe in right and wrong, would not be worthy of worship. Justice for Emilia Levi demands judgment.

If he is God, then he must be the God who comes as the judge of the living and the dead— a judgment that can only be avoided through his grace. We are not worthy of God’s love in our own right (another heretical thing to say in our current times); we haven’t earned it, it is given to us for nothing. God asks us whether we accept his grace and the response must be our own.

“Look, he is coming with the clouds,”
and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen.