In both the Apostles’ Creed (the belief in God which we confess in the Rite of Baptism) and the Nicene Creed (which sets forth the Church’s understanding of God’s Nature); . . . in both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed we declare that the Risen and Ascended Jesus Who is seated at the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty; . . . we declare that we believe that Jesus will come again to judge the quick and the dead . . . to judge those who are alive at His Second Advent . . . and to judge those who were dead but are raised to life on that Day by God the Holy Spirit.  . . . In both the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed we confess that we believe in a final, divine judgement upon our lives.  And so, in the Epistle appointed for today Saint Paul tells us that

we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.

. . . But is this true, do you think?  Do you think that the Risen and Ascended Incarnate Word of God, Who is the Second Person of the Trinity (and, therefore, God), can distribute either good or evil?  If God is, by definition, Perfect, and if Christ Jesus has revealed God to be perfectly Good, then how can One Who is perfectly Good be capable of distributing evil?  . . . Well, the truth is that God cannot.  He Who is perfectly Good can only distribute perfect goodness.  Jesus Himself has said that a house divided against itself cannot stand.  So, when Saint Paul declares that Christ will distribute either good or evil on the Last Day, he is speaking in a figurative and subjective sense.  Saint Paul is saying that the consequence of God’s perfect Justice is perfectly Good, . . . but it will feel either very good . . . or it will feel very evil.  On the Day of Judgement, whatever you have trained your eyes and your heart and your mind to see and love and think and do . . . then God will give you what you love and long to have; . . . and He will give it perfectly.  If it is God’s good that you love and long to have, . . . then you shall have it.  But if you desire a defective and a proud good; . . . if you train your eye to see the sins of others and your mind to always think of your needs, and if you train your body to do the self-serving cynicism of your thinking, . . . then you shall have nothing from your God Who loves you perfectly and will honor your choices, . . . but Who has no defective good to give you.  If you are always cultivating weeds, how can you expect the Master to give you wheat on the Day of Harvest?

    And so, Jesus has told us that the kingdom of God -- the reign of God; the wonderful thing that was bestowed upon you at your Baptism when you promised your heavenly Father to obey Jesus as your Lord and Saviour in Whom you put your entire trust and love; the reign of God which you received at your Baptism and which was confirmed in you when you became an adult, and the love of which you renewed this past April at the Great Vigil of Easter . . . and on Pentecost; . . . the reign of God which is immediately present to you now . . . and forever -- “the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground,” Jesus says.  God has applied and does apply a divine “seed” to your soul, Jesus tells us.  All you have to do is admit that it is useful and permit it to remain in you.  God’s “seed” does its own work while you pursue your life’s ordinary business.  Even the constraints of our weakness (such as the need for sleep, for example); . . . even the constraints of our weakness do not prevent the miracle.  Of its own, by a power of life we do not understand, the soul produces of itself:  first the blade -- which signifies a dim awareness of God’s holiness and goodness -- and then the husk -- which signifies our tendency to hope in God’s goodness -- and then the sweet and succulent grain which is the soul’s joyful experience of God’s sanctifying love.  And that is the moment when everything else is abandoned in order to harvest the good of God and to be nourished by it and to store it up for days when the chill of sorrow and death touches your soul.  In other words, you don’t have to die to go to Heaven, Jesus says; . . . Heaven will grow right up in you . . . if you will not resist it.

    I was talking with a fellow the other day, who was dismayed and offended that the Church should consider mere infants to be sinful souls who would not go to Heaven unless they were baptized (he had been raised Roman Catholic).  . . . I said to him that the word “sin” is a medieval English archery term which means to “miss the mark.”  . . . I went on to say that infant souls are not born evil, . . . but they are born with bad eyesight!  They will miss the mark; . . . they will sin without the grace of God to heal their vision.  . . . And so, the Church infuses Her infant children, by Baptism; . . . the Church infuses Her infant children with God’s heavenly Kingdom . . . so that it might grow up in them and they learn to see reality as it truly is.  Because, you see, we are spiritual creatures.  We are created in God’s holy Image, but uniquely privileged to be clothed in the stuff of His material order.  Therefore, we do not truly live . . . unless our living in this world is informed by the reality of God.  Just as carrots contain a substance that allows your physical eyes to see in the dark, . . . so the seed of God’s reign provides each of you with the grace to discern, with spiritual eyes, the holiness of God that is the substance of your physical life.  The seed of God’s reign gives you sight to descry the mercies of each season and to do them.  The seed of God’s reign empowers you to apprehend and love the provision God makes for your needs, and it enjoins you to manifest God’s glory by making provision for the needs of someone else.  The seed of God’s reign enables you to know the intricacy and power of creation and enjoins you to dance in harmony with your God by living a simple and chaste life.  Oh, certainly the Psalm is correct where it declares that “the wicked grow like weeds and the workers of iniquity flourish” . . . and the consequence of their sin is suffering and sorrow.  And certainly the transient nature of this material order into which we are born can inspire in us terror and grief.  . . . But your life is like a rose, . . . it has both flowers and thorns.  If life’s thorns consume your mind, . . . then God will allow you to have what you choose:  thorns.  But if the thorns of life teach you to be careful, and you cherish God’s roses, . . . then the Lord God Almighty will give you the fullness of life; . . . you shall have its blossoms; . . . you shall have color and joy and wholeness . . . as well as the thorns over which His grace shall give you full mastery.

    The whole of it is as Jesus has put it:  the kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed.  God is in the small things -- God is in the things overlooked and slighted by proud and worldly spirits; . . . God is in the things overlooked by bad spiritual eyesight.  . . . God is in Faith; God is in Hope; God is in Caritas -- Holy Love; . . . God is in Holy Scripture and daily and faithful prayer; . . . God is in the Sacrament of the Altar, joyfully celebrated and received, at every opportunity . . . week by week.  God is in the small things, . . . and out of this “seed” of God which your cherishing allows to grow in you . . . emerges a tremendous good that is a mercy not only to yourself but to everyone around you, and to all of God’s creatures; even the birds of the air.

    In Psalm 123 we read

As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters, and the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, So our eyes look to the Lord our God.

Go and do likewise.