Jude: a gospel of fire insurance?

The following is a slightly modified section from a sermon I gave on Sunday, June 3 on the book of Jude. The text of Jude can be read here. I have adapted it for this blog, but the content remains the same.

Is the good news according to Jude simply a gospel of “fire insurance”? Certainly, the letter of Jude easily leads to this conclusion. We see in Jude what sounds like an exclusionist form of the gospel—us vs. them, insiders vs. outsiders—which bears a lot of similarities with James 4 and 2 Peter. He speaks about “the salvation we share” and near the end of the letter he says to “build yourselves up on your most holy faith” and to “keep yourselves in the love of God.” Certainly, all of this is right and good, but it is very one-sided. It focuses entirely on the community of believers to whom Jude is writing and does not seem concerned with the extent of the gospel outside the walls of the church. If we take these verses at face value, one might get the impression that within the church you are safe, but outside of it you are totally doomed.

On the basis of these verses, we might conclude that the gospel in Jude is one of exclusion and “fire insurance”: those who are not in our circle are utterly lost without any hope, while we have “insurance” to keep us out of the “eternal fire” and the “eternal chains in deepest darkness.” Jude even says to the church: “save others by snatching them out of the fire” (v. 23). Is the gospel then really one of insurance? Is salvation really about avoiding the eternal fire of hell?

Two mistakes might lead us to this conclusion: first, reading Jude apart from the rest of the New Testament, and second, reading Jude as a proclamation of the gospel. The two problems go hand-in-hand. We often tend to want every book in the NT to proclaim the gospel, so we look for the basic message of salvation in each letter and try to harmonize them to get the overall biblical message. This is problematic on one level because Jude never sets forth the gospel message in itself, and it’s problematic on another level because it assumes that Jude’s message is entirely harmonizable with the rest of the NT. But this cannot be assumed uncritically.

The most important argument in the early church was whether or not the gospel extended to Gentiles. Paul felt that he had a mission from Christ himself to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. Because Christianity began as part of Judaism, the notion that the good news extends to Gentiles was something unheard of at the time. The whole debate was decided at the council of Jerusalem which is recorded in Acts 15 and more briefly in Galatians. The debate as Paul records it in Galatians is between Paul, Barnabas, and Titus on one side, and the Jerusalem church leaders on the other side. One of the primary leaders in the Jerusalem church is James, the brother of Jesus, and while we have no direct evidence, it is most likely that Jude was part of this same group in Jerusalem. His association with James (which Jude makes clear in the first verse of his letter) likely indicates that he was initially either against or neutral regarding the Gentile mission. He probably did not come out in support of it the way Peter did (at least as Luke records it). We do not know anything for certain, but the connection between Jude and James makes this conjecture the most likely option. And the exclusionist language in Jude, common to others in the same camp, helps to support the point.

We cannot assume that Paul and Jude are in agreement, simply because they agree on the basic confession of Jesus Christ as the Son of God who died to rescue humanity from sin and death. We have to read Jude in light of Paul, and we have to read them both together. Paul is a preacher: he proclaims the essence of the gospel in just about every letter, and most especially in Romans, Galatians, and 1 Corinthians. Jude, by comparison, is a pastor: he is the shepherd of a small Jewish-Christian community, and he is concerned about their spiritual health. He is a concerned parent, whereas Paul is a traveling missionary. Jude presents a message for a select group of people; Paul presents a message for all people. In this light, I think we have to say that, from a canonical perspective, Jude presupposes Paul. Paul preaches the core of the gospel, while Jude ministers to a community that is facing a threat to this gospel. They may already know that salvation is for all, but now they are facing deceivers and intruders who are disturbing the peace and causing divisions in the church. Jude’s goal is to fix these problems, not to (re-)proclaim the message of salvation.

When we look at the text of Jude, not once do we read about the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Apparently, what Christ accomplished for us on the cross is assumed. What is important now is that the church remain firm in its foundation, never wavering in its adherence to the truth that God has indeed rescued us in Jesus Christ. We are no longer what we once were; we are now “those who are called, who are beloved in God the Father and kept safe for Jesus Christ” (v. 1). According to 1 Peter 2:9, we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people; once we had not received mercy, but now we have received mercy (1 Pet. 2:10). Certainly these statements give glimpses into the heart of the gospel, but they do not proclaim the gospel itself. These “Catholic epistles” are focused on the church that has received the gospel already. We have to read them together with Paul’s letters and the Gospels in order to get a more accurate picture.

I will give just one example of how reading Jude by itself can be very misleading. Jude speaks repeatedly of these intruders into the church as the “ungodly.” In v. 4, he writes: “For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for this condemnation as ungodly” (NRSV). Or as the NIV puts it: “For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people . . .” Then later in v. 15, Jude quotes a passage from 1 Enoch which he appropriates in order to say that the Lord Jesus Christ came “to judge everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” In case you missed it, these intruders are ungodly! Apparently, Christians are, by implication, the “godly ones.”

But now to complicate matters. In Rom. 5, Paul writes the famous words: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. . . . God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (v. 6, 8). In other words, for Jude, Jesus came to judge the ungodly, whereas for Paul, Jesus came to die for the ungodly. So which is it? Judgment or death? Condemnation or salvation?

Most translations of Jude 14 say, “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone.” Some translations include a footnote saying that the Greek actually says, “See, the Lord came,” and this is in fact the correct translation. The Greek speaks of Christ’s coming in the past tense. It makes sense, though, why translators would prefer the text to say, “The Lord is coming,” because this gives the impression that Jude is speaking about the second coming of Christ. But in fact the text most likely speaks about Christ’s coming as Jesus of Nazareth. The problem, of course, is that Jude seems to contradict what Paul himself declares to be the heart of the gospel, that Christ came to die for the ungodly rather than judge and convict them.

The question as I just put it—did Jesus come to judge the ungodly or die for them?—makes it either one or the other, but this need not be the case. While neither Paul nor Jude say this directly, we can and must say that Jesus Christ came to judge the ungodly and die for them. Or rather, Jesus Christ came to judge the ungodly by dying for them! We cannot lessen the notion that the ungodly are truly ungodly. They are against God, deserving of eternal fire. But there is an important insight which Paul argues for in Romans that we do not find in Jude, namely, that all of us are the ungodly. We are all ungodly apart from Jesus Christ. As Paul states, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10). We are all destined for condemnation. We are all guilty of committing deeds of ungodliness. We are all potential—and at times even actual—enemies of the gospel. We might even be guilty of causing divisions in the church and hindering the truth of Jesus Christ. Not a single one of us is free from this on our own strength and power. Apart from Jesus Christ, everyone is ungodly.

Jesus Christ thus came to the world to judge us. He came as the eternal and holy Judge in order to judge our sins, and he did this by being judged in our place. Jesus Christ is the Judge who was judged in our place and on our behalf. On the cross, our ungodliness was crucified; our old ungodly selves were killed and laid to rest in the tomb once and for all. The resurrection of Christ is thus the resurrection of our new selves, the new human person who is no longer “the ungodly” but rather a saint, no longer a deceiver and intruder but rather a witness to the truth. We are no longer “clouds without rain, blown along by the wind” (Jd. 12), but we are thunderstorms full of God’s living water. We are no longer “autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted, twice dead,” but we are instead, according to Psalm 1, “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither” (v. 3). We are no longer “wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame” (Jd. 13), but we are rather like the Sea of Galilee calmed by the voice of Jesus. We are no longer “wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever,” but we are instead, as Daniel 12:3 declares, “the wise who shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” Or as Psalm 148 says, we are like the “shining stars” and “highest heavens” which praise the name of the Lord. We no longer wander, lost like the Prodigal Son, but instead we have been found by God and brought home to eat of Christ’s glorious banquet. We are no longer confined to the blackest darkness of hell, because Jesus went to the depths of death and broke open the black gates of hell with his radiant light. All of this is only because Jesus Christ came as our judge and was himself judged in our place so that we might worship him forever.

So in a sense, both Jude and Paul are right: Jesus came to judge the ungodly, but he did so by dying for them, by going to the grave for them, and most importantly, by rising from the dead for them. With Jude, we must surely be concerned about those who might deceive us and lead the church astray into immorality and division, but we must never forget the truth of the gospel: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Or as Paul writes a little later: “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:10). Apart from Christ, we are the enemies of God. But because of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us as the Judge judged in our place, we are now sons and daughters of God, coheirs with Christ, friends of the Almighty. We have been judged in Jesus Christ, and therefore we can live as the children of God freed from sin and death, freed now to carry out the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18), freed to live new lives that bear witness to the love and mercy of God.