For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind. (John 9.39)

Al masih qam! Christos anesti! Christ is risen!

‘Everyone pretends everything is OK. But nothing is OK’. This is the voice of judgment, out of the mouths of babes. A spiritual daughter of mine said this once in a crisis: and it is absolutely true. Nothing is ‘OK’ in a world that crucifies the innocent. It usually takes a crisis, the Greek word for judgment, to judge what is wrong and what needs to be done. It takes a child to say out loud what we, the adults, pretend is not there; a child, who has not yet learned to be hypocritical, to say aloud: the feet of the idol are clay, ‘the emperor has no clothes’. A child exposes our lies. No doubt, that is why we torment children. See a child, sobbing in the night, whipped for crying out too loudly. A child, sent home to the parents who beat her, by the priest who tells her to obey. A little hand forcibly thrust into the fire to ‘discipline’ it. Soft bones, cracked. A little body, fondled and violated; a young soul, shamed, humiliated, bullied and degraded – by the very people it trusted to protect it. Mommy. Daddy. A teacher. A priest. To seize the innocent trust of a child who has no way of defending itself, to warp it and ruin it – is there any judgment too harsh? What is hell but the inability to love? And who loves less than someone who knowingly abuses the love of a child? ‘The babe that weeps the rod beneath writes revenge in realms of death’. For the poet Blake, for the novelist Dostoevsky, of all atrocities committed on earth, no crime is worse than to abuse a child.

Now imagine doing it in the name of Jesus Christ.

Where does it come from, this inability to love? This drive to punish someone, anyone, for anything at all: even for the crime of being born? Is it Calvinist, Puritan? The Puritans believed that you must beat a child, regularly, to break its self-will. Or is it Victorian? The Victorians left a baby to cry its eyes out in the dark, to teach it to be ‘self-reliant’? Maybe it is Irish Catholic? The old-time Magdalene Sisters, those upstanding Irish nuns, forced young girls into hours of drudgery in steaming laundries. Beat them, publicly humiliated them. Girls who committed the sin of being too pretty. Girls whose fathers, whose parish priests, forced them to do what no child should do, and tried to lock away the secret. All this abuse was permissible – even Christian, they said – because of Original Sin. Every child, they said, is born ‘in utter sin’: born with the guilt of Adam, the first sinner. A guilt transmitted by – what else? – sex. Babies, born so hateful to God that if they died, they should burn in hell. Think of it. A newborn infant, not yet able to make a single decision, locked away in eternal darkness for the unspeakable crime … of being born. If this is so,why should we not lock them away in an attic? Whip them, shame them, until they, too, learn to pass on the legacy of abuse from generation to generation?

Where does it come from, this inability to love? This drive to punish? Wherever it comes from, it does not come from God. Any abuser who thinks he does the will of God is condemned to be forever blind.

Today, Jesus passes by a man blind from birth. ‘Who sinned?’ the disciples ask Jesus. ‘His parents? The man himself? Did God predestine him to be blind, for the sins that he might yet commit?’ ‘No one sinned’, Jesus replies. ‘He was born blind, so that everyone might see the limitless mercy of God’. Bending down, Jesus wets the dust with his spit: the dust from which he created man. He dabs it on the blind man’s eyes and says: ‘Go, wash in the healing waters’. As soon as he wets his eyes, he can see.

Now the abusers cannot stand this. When the Pharisees interrogate him, what do they do? Rejoice? They turn the doctor’s surgery into a courtroom. They turn the hospital into a magistrate’s bench. ‘You had what you deserved. Who is this Jesus anyway? A sinner who breaks the law of the Sabbath? How could a sinner heal you?’ The man once blind now sees. He sees the truth as simply as a child. He turns the logic on its head. ‘I don’t know who he is. But, if he healed me, how can he be a sinner?’ ‘You were born in utter sin, in total depravity!’ those puritans shout and they excommunicate him. Even his own parents will not defend him. When Jesus hears that he is an outcast, he finds him and asks: ‘Do you believe in the true faith? Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ ‘Who is he?’ the young man asks. ‘The one speaking to you’. He falls down at the feet of Jesus and worships. Then, Jesus turns to the Pharisees – to every Pharisee, to the end of time: to the cold-eyed Magdalene Sisters, the Puritan who beats his little child, to the priest who sends a young girl away, bleeding, to her tormenters; and the priest who is himself the abuser. ‘For judgment’, he warns, ‘I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and those who think they see may become blind’.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. The only darkness is in us. When Adam turned away from God, God never turned from him. God is Life, so Adam died. He brought into this world, not hereditary guilt but death: death in all its forms – above all, the inability to love. That is the only real measure of death; and, if the word of the Gospel condemns those who abuse, instead of loving, it is only out of love for you. The judgment of God is his mercy. For the sake of mercy, God became the little frightened child, bundled in the night. For the sake of his mercy, he healed the sick and cast out devils by the word of power. For the sake of his mercy, he died on a cross not to ‘satisfy justice’ but to trample down death by death. For the sake of his mercy, he takes every frightened child, baptised or un-baptised, into his bosom: because he is the Truth that every child sees. But those who see in him some bloodthirsty, accusing tyrant go blind at the sight of the mercy that the merciless refuse to see. On this last Sunday of Great and Holy Pascha, we finally glimpse the full truth of the Resurrection: in Adam, all die; in Christ, all come to life. Do you doubt it? So I ask: how often do you hear the word ‘judge’ in this Divine Liturgy? But how often do you hear the words ‘Lord, have mercy’? When we sing,‘Lord, have mercy’, we are not pleading with an abusive tyrant. We are defying every abuser from the dawn of time, by proclaiming loud and clear the great and rich mercy of our God.