St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of the Last Judgment, 7 February 2010

“As you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (Mt 25.45)

Look in a mirror. What do you see? Yourself? Only an image of yourself. A soiled mirror may show you only a bare outline of your face. A warped mirror, a distorting mirror – the kind you find in a carnival – shows you the distorted face of a monster: the bulging eyes, the wide mouth. Your face, stretched and compressed all out of proportion. Only a clean mirror shows you your real face. Now imagine you saw that grotesque, distorted shape, not in a carnival mirror but in an ordinary looking-glass. That image is you. You want to scream, to run away as fast as you can. But the mirror has done nothing to you: it only shows you as you really are. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall…’ Fairy tales are full of mirrors: a magic mirror that talks, a mirror that invites you ‘through the looking-glass’ into the place where everything is topsy-turvy. Everything unexpected, turned inside-out. A mirror has a strange power to hold us captive. If you like what you see, you stare into the mirror for hours. But if there’s something there you don’t want to see, you hate a mirror. You avoid it, you run away. You throw a sheet over it – in case you caught the slightest glimpse of yourself, out of the corner of your eye. If you’re frightened enough, you smash the mirror with a bottle. But, no matter how many pieces go flying, each piece tells the truth. The mirror has done nothing to you. It only shows you the truth.

The truth! That’s what most of us fear. We walk around in a fog, a dense fog of half-lies: not the lies we tell our neighbours, but the lies that we ourselves half-believe. In French, we call it la mauvaise foi, ‘bad faith’. Deep inside, you know it’s a lie – but you believe it, anyway. You all but convince yourself. So, living in a fog of half-lies, you live in constant fear. A liar only conceals the truth; the half-liar forgets where he put it. What if the truth comes out? What if I pass by the mirror and glimpse my own face – my real face? In our terrible fear of the mirror, we construct a way of life. We stuff our bodies with heavy food and drink; we stuff our heads with chatter: ‘avoid the negative, accentuate the positive’, anything to help you run, run, run, far away from the mirror that shows us the truth about who we are. It’s hard work living with bad faith. An alcoholic lives with it all the time. Bad memories burn up your body and your soul. You try to drown the fire with another shot – but, with every shot, the fire burns worse. Some fires, you can’t douse with a shot of gin. But liquor isn’t the only bottle used to smash the mirror. Women in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, where my wife used to work, sell their diseased bodies to pay for the next fix; they crawl on all fours in the alleys, scrounging for an infected hypodermic needle. In this very city parish, I’ve seen homeless men stinking of vomit. I’ve taken a man’s soiled hand in mine when he was hungry for more than food. If you’re like most of us, you want to look away, don’t you? Snap out at them, when they scream out? Imprison them in an institution, abandon them to the hands of some burnt-out, abusive nurse. When they cry ‘I’m hungry, thirsty’, you shout: ‘Pull yourself together! Don’t make a scene!’ But has it ever occurred to you: that soiled, drunken face is a mirror of your own. A mirror of what we all are, stripped of our gloss – a mirror of broken humanity. If you run away from it, throw a sheet over it and pretend it isn’t there, maybe it’s because you don’t want to see the truth about yourself reflected in that face. You don’t want the sun to come out and burn away the fog.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory on the last Day and sits on his glorious throne, he will shine a million times more brightly than the sun. But we won’t see him. We’ll see his face, sure enough, but it won’t look like the familiar face of Jesus Christ in the icons. We will see a mirror. According to Saint Basil the Great, all that Christ does on the Day of Judgment is appear. No thunder. No lightning from the sky, no ball of fire hurled from some wrathful God. That’s Jupiter, not Jesus. All Christ will do is appear. But, in his face, we will see ourselves – just ‘as in a mirror’. As a mirror does nothing but reflect what is there, Christ will do nothing. But ‘the sheep’ will see one face, and ‘the goats’ another. We will see, in our own image reflected in his face, the faces of all the hungry we’ve fed, the thirsty we’ve given drink; the lonely strangers who found a home in our lives; the naked, we clothed; the sick and imprisoned, whose tears we dried when we showed mercy to them. As in a mirror, Saint Basil tells us, we will see all those in need that we helped: all of them, fixed forever in the features of our own face. If, once in our life, we took pity on someone who hungered for more than food, we will recognise that face in our own.

But if, in our fear of the truth, we’ve thrown a sheet over the mirror and smashed it into a million pieces, there will be no place left to hide. The sun will burn away the fog, simply by rising in the morning; the mirror will do nothing to us, but reveal the truth – the whole truth. In the loving face of Christ, we will see the image we dread. In his loving voice, we will hear a voice crying: ‘I was the woman in the alley who sold her body, who crawled on all fours. I was the drunkard with the dirty hands. I cried out, and you shouted at me; I reached out to you, and you pulled back your hand. I asked for bread, you gave me a stone’. Now, you can no longer look away. The faces of all those who needed you – the faces that you rejected – are eternally etched on your face. No thunder, no lighting, and no ball of fire from the sky. At the Last Judgment, the fire will be in us: the fire of hatred, or the fire of love. Christ our True God, who cannot lie, will say to us: ‘I loved you then, I love you now – but if you turned your face away from the mirror, you can turn no longer; if you hid from my love, you can hide no more’. On the terrible Day of Truth, no one will be able to hide. In the face of Christ, we will see our own face as we have never seen it before. Will it be the face of love – or a face that can never love again?

Beloved in Christ: always remember the words of Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol – ‘I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it’. God judges no one. God damns no one, not a single human being from the dawn of time till now. A mirror doesn’t judge you: the mirror only shows you the truth. The sun doesn’t judge the fog; but, when the sun rises, it burns away the fog. Your eternal destiny is in your hands. This very day, the Sunday of the Last Judgment, someone will need your love. Someone will reach out a hand to you: perhaps a hand bruised and soiled. A hand seeking your love. Will you take that hand in yours or not? Don’t get me wrong: God will not love you less if you pull away. But this is the logic of love: every cruel act binds us; every kind act sets us free. Every cruel act warps and distorts our features; every loving act shapes in our face the features of Jesus Christ. On the great and terrible last day, the Day of Judgment, no one will ask: ‘Did you keep all the commandments, say the prayers, observe the fasts?’ No Judge will even ask us: ‘Did you love – or did you hate?’ Instead, we will read the answer in the face of Christ himself – in our real face – as in a mirror.