A Strange Equality

Matthew 13:41-43

The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.

1 John 2:17

And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 1)

This [shining like the sun in the kingdom of their father] won’t have anything to do with privilege or pride. All trace of that kind of thing will have gone forever. It will have to do with reflecting and embodying the love and glory of God himself; that’s what, after all, human beings were meant to do. Each human being was designed to a God-reflector.

Most human languages are inadequate at this point, and have to use pictures. . . . But it’s clear that what Jesus is talking about is a redeemed, renewed human race that is, at last, what God meant it to be: the mirror in which the rest of creation can see who its creator really is, and can worship and serve him truly (171-2)

C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

A. Orendorff

There is a strange equality at the end of all things that is at once both unthinkably chilling and profoundly staggering. What is startling about Jesus’ words is the striking uniformity that awaits, as he says, both “all causes of sin and all law-breakers” and “the righteous.” The agony of the one, it seems, is in direct proportion to the glory of the other. That this is a hard truth is evidence by Jesus’ closing phrase, “He who has ears, let him hear.” This, in other words, is something most would rather not acknowledge. This is not an easy idea to swallow; nor is it an easy truth to believe. The righteous will shine with the reflected glory of God himself; while the law-breakers, with gnashed and broken teeth, will weep. “He who has ears, let him hear.”