In the Apostle’s Creed we say a very awesome thing Sunday after Sunday. Quite nonchalantly apparently, or with the most unconscious unconcern we stand and say together: “He ascended into heaven, sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

Coming to judge? Who? Me? Do we know what we are saying? Does anyone really believe any longer in a Judgment Day?

I see no tears in your eyes, nor look of terror on your faces when I hear you say: “From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Surely you haven’t overheard someone in a pew near you moan: “Oh my sins, my sins,” as over the congregation there rumbles this muster roll of crucial, terminal words: “From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

Yes, the Creed says it. And we say it too. There is to be a judgment. The scriptures say it too. A judgment for everyone. Hear St Paul: “For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.” How many of Jesus parables sound the solemn note of judgment — not only the one about the wheat and the tares, but the ones about the talents, the drag net, the wise and foolish virgins, the parable of the last judgment itself.

But when, when will it come? No one knows. The Bible puts that plain. Idle and foolish are all speculations to set a time. The one thing sure the scriptures say is that it will come as a surprise to all men, when they are least expecting it.

And what will the judgment be like? Helmut Thielicke, in his incomparable prose, tells us that this too will be a surprise for us. “The last judgment is full of surprises. The separation of the sheep from the goats, of the wheat and the weeds, will be made in a way completely different from that which we permit ourselves to imagine. For God is more merciful than we, more strict than we, and more knowing than we. And in every case God is greater than our hearts.” (H. Thielicke — The Waiting Father — p. 82)

One thing there is for sure. One thing we know. Jesus will be Judge. Rather, Jesus is Judge. That is the supreme and solemn affirmation of the Creed. The crucified, resurrected, and living Lord is Judge: “From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The Creed says it, so does the scripture. In John’s gospel, Jesus puts it plainly: “The Father is no man’s judge; He has put judgement entirely into the Son’s hands, so that all men may honor the Son equally with the Father.”

What? The gentle Jesus, Judge of all mankind? Yes. But do we not associate austerity and sternness with the role of judge? And is not our picture of Jesus that of the self-sacrificing one, the suffering servant of men? Why, yes. And so far off-center are we from the central fact of the universe. For Jesus is Judge, now and forever. “Jesus, the Judge, will come with His sickle and crown. Then our sickles will fall and all the fake and illegal crowns will drop from men’s heads. Then all will be changed, and everything will be different, utterly different. But one thing will remain: love, the love in which we have believed and hoped and endured, the love which will never let us forget that God can find and bring home and set at His table even the blasphemous, the enemy, the deceiving and the deceived.” (H. Thielicke — The Waiting Father — p. 82.)

Yes, the scriptures and the Creed tell us that Jesus is Judge in order that we may know: First, that judgment for all is inescapable, inevitable; second, that we may not be ignorant of the ultimate standards of judgment — the mind and spirit and compassion of Christ; and third, and more important of all, that we may know that we are not the judges.

The most deadly sin of the righteous is self-righteousness. The biggest mistake the saved can make is to surmise that their big business is to judge the unsaved. One of Jesus’ first and firmest words to His disciples after they had come to Him was: “Judge not that ye be not judged.” He knows our human failing — of wishing to do to others what we fear most that God should do to us: mete out judgment.

Yes, we need to know that Jesus is Judge and believe it and accept it in order that we may know and believe and practice that we are not the judges of mankind.

Who are we then? What is the role of the Christian disciple in the interim — that time between Jesus ascension to glory and His coming in judgment? Why, we are to be His evangelists, apostles, witnesses, and missionaries. Listen to Him: “All power is given unto Me in heaven and earth. Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Oh, the temptation to be a judge rather than an apostle or a witness or a missionary in our kind of a world! Take a look at the Congo for instance. Stewart Alsop, who has just come back from Africa and written an article for the Saturday Post, says that one of the things we must guard ourselves from doing in this crisis is judge the Congolese from our Western standards. Alsop tells of meeting one important political official in Africa who spent a stretch in jail for selling his mother-in-law into slavery. Another high official of the Katanga government he tells about as elegantly dressed, speaking impeccable French, but who obviously hated all white men because his aged father once got into trouble with the Belgians for eating a small child in the vain attempt to regain his youth.

William Rule writes of the distressing case of Kesu, his former chauffeur in the Congo, who recently, when driving a heavily loaded truck, was run into at an intersection by a man on a motorcycle. The cyclist was killed instantly. Whereupon the cyclist’s friends who were lining the roadside, dragged Kesu from the truck, almost cut off his head, stuffed his lifeless body back into the truck and tried to burn it. Kesu, you see, belonged to a different tribe.

Norman Cousins, just back from Laos, reports in the Saturday Review that the soldiers there will don the uniform of first the loyalists and then the rebels. They seem to have no clear idea of the side they are on, or what the shooting is about.

Bill Moseley was telling us in Memphis this month that in the backward area of North Brazil where he works there are more communists per square mile than anywhere else in the world and that though he and other missionaries give the poor people their food when they are starving, medicine when they are sick, and teach them how to farm effectively, and though the communists do nothing for them but just promise a better day, “come the revolution,” the communists win more converts than the Christian missionaries.

How strong the temptation, especially in times like these, to judge the Congolese of barbarism, the Laotians of irresponsibility, the Brazilians of impossible ignorance and ingratitude, and leave it at that. But it is Jesus who is Judge and not we. Our role is not to put on the judge’s robe, but to don the apostle’s sandals and take the shepherd’s crook and go with the gospel of the love and forgiveness and salvation of God to the most debauched, degenerate, and despairing of mankind.

But the rather strange thing is that whether we acknowledge and accept our missionary role, our apostolic task, or not, we have it nevertheless. We can never make ourselves judges of mankind really and effectively, for our judgments will not stick. Neither can we escape the assignment of witness-evangelist, however we squirm to get out of it. We are witnesses either to Christ and His Kingdom of Light or to the devil and the forces of darkness. The mass media of today make us Americans live in a goldfish bowl. Our witness goes out to the ends of the earth. The whole world knows what we are doing every day and what we do proclaims loudly our real faith and allegiance.

Richy Hogg in his mission study book: One World — One Mission, writes that: “the treatment and status of people of color in the U. S. A. have produced throughout the non-western world a powerful, negative witness against the Christian gospel. So great is its impact that it undercuts the Christian world mission more effectively than could an overseas army of atheists equal in size to the entire Christian missionary force and dedicated to preaching atheism.”

It is a sociological fact of our time that three-quarters of our world population is non-white. Those non-white peoples are emerging from colonialism now and clamoring for their freedom. There have been born 34 new nations since World War II and 20 have been in Africa. “These non-white peoples are asking themselves: ‘Which shall we choose, communism or democracy? Does democracy actually work where it involves the relationships of white and non-white peoples? Or does it take the unrelenting pressures of a totalitarian system like communism to insure that non-white people be treated as equal even if not free?’” (James Cogswell in Presbyterian Survey — February 1961 — What Hurts the Missionary Most)

And the witness that we give in our daily lives here at home is persuading them as they make their decisions in Africa and Asia and South America. We cannot escape our assignment as witnesses, apostles, missionaries.

But will Jesus judge us for our failure to be faithful in our assignment as His witnesses, His missionaries and apostles? Is this not a more or less optional vocation? Some choose it and some don’t. He is already judging us each one for our failures.

There is a feeling in the air these days that history is racing to some new climax. Everybody feels it. Not just the students of history and political science and the foreign correspondents and the members of the state department and foreign missionaries and world travelers — everybody seems to feel it, in his bones.

World history comes to these great divides, these turning points. The gospel writers speak of “the fullness of time” which had come when Jesus was born. The whole world took a new turn. History reached another great water-shed when the Roman empire began to break up and Augustine wrote his City of God and the new order in Europe began to emerge in the feudal system, which for centuries gave order and some measure of security. Then in the fullness of time came the Reformation and the Renaissance as the feudal system cracked and went down the drain of time.

Now, in our time, humanity has reached another great divide. The colonial system is cracking up all round the world. New nations are clamoring to be born. Communism races like a red forest fire over the earth. History is fluid. New orders, new structures are coming into shape, dimly discernable through the fog of the future. What their detailed form will be, we do not know.

But one or two things a Christian should know. He says he knows that Jesus is Judge. And he should remember that it is souls and not systems that the Supreme Judge of the universe cares most about. No matter how sacred men in any age may call a system they have developed and loved and found a measure of security in, whether it is called: “the divine right of kings,” or “the holy Roman Empire,” or “the free enterprise system,” or even “Christian culture,” if it enslaves and imprisons and starves and cruelly treats any of Christ’s people, the helpless and ignorant and debauched and hopeless of the earth — then He judges that system as evil and done-for, and He lets the wrath of God demolish it.

What does all this mean for us today? St. Mark’s gospel opens with the picture of Jesus as a young man in a hurry, moving rapidly from place to place proclaiming: “The Kingdom of God is breaking in upon you.” He strides through crowded marketplaces and walks along the seashore by fishermen mending their nets. He hardly stops it seems, but almost over his shoulder calls now to this man and now to that one: “Come after me.” And they drop their nets and leave their plows and get up from their desks and follow Him. He goes to the synagogue in Capernaum and teaches in short, clipped sentences, sparking orders. People are astonished at the note of authority and urgency in His voice. When a demon possessed man begins to interrupt Jesus, Mark says: “Jesus cut him short and spoke sharply — ‘Hold your tongue, and get out of him.”

This is the pattern of action for those who would follow Jesus in this moment of history — the picture of a young man in a hurry. Time is running out. Our times are saying to us as Jesus said to Judas on that fateful night: “What you do, do quickly.”

Dr. William Rule, missionary of our church to the Congo appalled by the small, skeleton crew of doctors left in the Congo to care for the individual and public health needs of that distraught land, has launched a campaign that he calls “Operation Doctor.” It is an urgent appeal to American doctors to take out one year of their lives, a tithe of their professional talents, and go give emergency medical assistance to the stricken Congolese. He writes that the response has not been spectacular thus far, but proudly announces that the first volunteer to arrive is a Southern Presbyterian — a woman doctor — Dorothea Witt, from the St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church in New Orleans.

Have you been toying with the idea of volunteering for overseas service of the church in some needy area? Well, whatever you do, do it quickly.

Have you been studying about changing your ideas and habits of dealing with people of other races and colors of skin and cultures? Well, whatever you do, do quickly.

Have you been considering investing a chunk of your income or your capital in Christ’s Kingdom, at last to back up with your dollars the doctrine you profess? Well, whatever you do, do quickly.

Time is running out. The future is forming. Now is the time to stake out your claim for whatever kind of a future you really believe in. Again the Lord of Glory comes in judgment, for He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and He shall reign forever and forever.