TRIAL BY JURY

We’ve all been told that someday, that being upon our death, we will have to stand before the judgment seat of God and face our Maker. We have been told that all the sins we committed in this life will be laid out before us and we will have to make some kind of defense for them. None will be forthcoming, of course, as sin has no defense. It is always a deliberate act that we know at the time of its commission is wrong but we still go ahead and do it anyway knowing all the while we have no excuse.

At the same time we will want to lay out before God all the good we have done hoping that those good works will somehow make up for all our bad deeds. They won’t. They never do. But that, too, is no excuse for not doing the very best we can whenever we can, which is all the time.

Whether or not this scene really plays out upon our death only time and death will tell. It does not matter anyway because eternity is out of our hands. What God has in store for us when that time comes is left to our imaginations. If we want to believe it will be a time for judgment or a time for forgiveness or whatever crosses our mind, it will be, as Paul says in one of his letters, beyond our wildest imaginations. This does bode well.

What is important and what I think really concerns God and what should be our own main concern is not what will happen in the hereafter but we are doing and what is happening in the here-and-now. We know that to be true and, for the most part, we are quite aware of such and act on such awareness, but not always and perhaps not often enough, or not often enough to make a difference in the way we live.

George Bernard Shaw, who enjoyed the fruits of a successful life and who understood that to whom much is given, much is demanded in return and who did not observe this to be happening opined: “Every person who owes his life to civilized society, and who has since childhood enjoyed its very costly protections and advantages, should appear at reasonable intervals before a properly constituted jury to justify his existence.”

It might be less intimidating to appear before a jury of our peers than before our God, but not by much, if at all. Public confessions, which such would be, are humbling and frightening. They are humbling because we have to stand naked, as it were, before our peers and admit that we have failed to live up to our responsibilities as citizens and, even more importantly, as Christians, and deliberately so in the process.

On the other hand, such confessions are frightening not because we are afraid of the punishment that would be meted out because there would be none. Rather, what frightens us is that in facing our deliberate failures we would have to change the way we act so that we do not repeat them between now and the time we appear before that jury again.

The truth is that we are both the judge and the jury of our own actions. We know what is expected of us. We know that we have failed. We know what has to be done. All we have to do now is do it.