What Rough Beast?

 

It seems clear to me that our contemporary fear of “judgementalism” comes from the secular culture, and owes nothing to Church teaching, or the Bible, or traditional Judeo-Christian morality. It traces back to the “do your own thing” popular culture of the 1960s; before that to such figures as Marcuse, Freud, and before them Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx. 

Jesus himself had no problems with judging the moneychangers, 

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

or the scribes and Pharisees, 

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

or those who mislead or miseducate children. 

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

He judges the living and the dead, and divides humanity into sheep and goats.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”

Is this peculiar to him? Is it only he who is competent to judge, being God incarnate? No; John the Baptist, “the greatest born of women,” also has no trouble condemning the Sadducees and Pharisees, 

“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’”

or judging the acts of Herod Antipas. 

“For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’”

And in this, he is doing the same divine work as all the prophets of the Old Testament: issuing a warning to those who are on the wrong path.

“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.’”

If we lose this, we lose the ethical essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I see our contemporary refusal to make moral judgments leading to the destruction of a growing number of souls; and in the end the destruction of society at large. As W.B. Yeats put it, we are living in a time in which, increasingly,

"The best lack all conviction,

While the worst are full of passionate intensity."

This is what happens when we refuse the call to "put on the full armour of God." This is what comes whne we refuse Jonah's commission.