Matthew 25 and Judgment by Love

At the Last Judgment Christ judges all humanity according to their deeds — and the criterion he names is mercy: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). This file sets out the universal and definitive character of the final judgment, its criterion of love, the Orthodox holding-together of judgment by works and salvation by grace, and the revelatory rather than arbitrary nature of the verdict.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Universal and Final Judgment

The Last Judgment is the definitive verdict of Christ upon all humanity, rendered at his Second Coming after the general resurrection. It is distinguished from the particular judgment (see The Particular Judgment and the Intermediate State) as the final from the preliminary: where the particular judgment issues in a provisional foretaste, the Last Judgment establishes the definitive and irrevocable condition of each person — now the whole person, soul and body reunited — and of creation as a whole. The Creed confesses it: Christ “shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.” “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due for the things done in the body” (2 Corinthians 5:10); “God will render to each one according to his works” (Romans 2:6).

Two features mark its universality. It falls on all — “before him will be gathered all the nations” (Matthew 25:32) — the righteous and the unrighteous, those already foretasting blessedness and those already in torment, all now raised and standing before the throne. And it is rendered by Christ precisely as the incarnate Son of Man: “the Father… has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man” (John 5:27). The Judge is the one who has shared human nature and knows it from within, the one who was himself judged and condemned by human courts — a fact that colors the whole Orthodox understanding of the judgment as anything but the sentence of a remote and offended power.

The Criterion: Mercy to the Least

The most striking feature of the Orthodox reading of the Last Judgment is the criterion Christ himself names. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46) — the single most important scriptural passage for the Orthodox theology of judgment — the King separates the nations not by their creeds recited or their ascetic feats or their religious observances, but by their mercy: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and in prison and you visited me.” And the astonishing hinge of the parable is Christ’s identification of himself with the needy: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40); and its converse, “as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (Matthew 25:45). Both the righteous and the condemned are surprised — neither knew they had been serving or refusing Christ — because Christ was hidden in the poor, the stranger, and the prisoner.

The Fathers seized on this. St. John Chrysostom returned again and again to the identification of Christ with the poor, insisting that the altar of the neighbor’s need is as real as the altar in the church, and that mercy is the queen of the virtues and the very thing by which we shall be judged (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 79 [on Matthew 25]; trans. NPNF I/10; and his homilies on almsgiving, e.g. On Almsgiving / On the Poor Man Lazarus). The Orthodox tradition therefore refuses to set doctrinal orthodoxy and active love against each other: right faith is necessary, but the judgment scene of Matthew 25 makes love-in-deed the manifest criterion, and the tradition takes this with full seriousness. As the Meatfare Sunday hymns put it, the Church is summoned to prepare for the judgment precisely by works of mercy toward the needy (Triodion, Sunday of the Last Judgment; see The Last Judgment Icon and Meatfare).

Judgment by Works and Salvation by Grace

If judgment is “according to works” (Romans 2:6; Revelation 20:12–13), does the Orthodox tradition then teach salvation earned by merit? It does not — and the resolution lies in the Orthodox understanding of works, grace, and the nature of the human person. Works are not the currency of a transaction by which salvation is purchased; they are the manifestation and fruit of the person’s real orientation, the outward expression of what the person has become. The tradition holds together, without the Western tension between them, that salvation is wholly the gift of God’s grace and that it is genuinely appropriated through a synergy of that grace with human freedom, so that the works by which one is judged are neither the cause of salvation nor irrelevant to it, but the visible shape of a life turned toward or away from the God who saves (see Soteriology and Theosis).

Thus the “works” of Matthew 25 are not achievements tallied against a standard but the concrete evidence of love — and love is precisely the participation in God who is love (1 John 4:8, 16). To have shown mercy is to have become, however imperfectly, like the merciful God, and so to be capable of receiving his love as joy rather than as fire (see The Same Love Experienced Differently). The judgment by works and the salvation by grace are one movement seen from two sides: grace makes the loving deed possible, the deed reveals the grace received, and the judgment discloses what the person, by grace and freedom together, has become.

The Judgment as Revelation, Not Arbitration

This leads to the deepest note in the Orthodox understanding: the Last Judgment is not an arbitrary sentence imposed from without but the revelation of what each person truly is. The judgment does not so much decide the person’s condition as manifest it. “This is the judgment: that the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light” (John 3:19) — the light judges simply by shining, exposing what each has loved. At the Last Judgment the truth of every life is laid bare in the presence of Christ, who is himself the Truth and the Light; the “books” that are opened (Revelation 20:12) are the disclosure of the real state of each soul, its orientation toward or away from the God of love.

This revelatory understanding does two things. It preserves the full seriousness of the judgment — nothing is hidden, and the consequences are real and eternal (see Heaven, Hell, and the River of Fire) — while removing every trace of caprice from it: no one is condemned by a hostile decree, but each stands revealed in the light of the love he has embraced or refused. And it keeps the Judge and the Savior one: the Christ who judges is the Christ who died for the judged, “not willing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 2:4), so that even the severity of the judgment is the severity of a love that will not pretend a person is other than he has made himself. The Orthodox tradition therefore takes the possibility of condemnation with entire seriousness while refusing to pronounce on who, if any, is finally lost, entrusting that to the mercy of God and refusing the presumption of either despair or a facile universalism (the boundaries of that question are treated in The Apokatastasis Question).

See Also

References

  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on Matthew 79 (on Matthew 25). Trans. NPNF I/10. Late 4th century.
  • Triodion (Lenten), Sunday of the Last Judgment (Meatfare Sunday).
  • Scripture: Matthew 25:31–46; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 2:6; John 3:19, 5:27; Revelation 20:12–13; 1 John 4:8, 16; 2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 2:4.