krisis

This is the word's home territory: judging as a deliberate act, and the verdict that act produces. It begins in the courtroom picture, where someone hears a case and pronounces a decision, but in the New Testament it is mostly God or his appointed Son who does the judging, and the decision is binding and final.

The senses here move along a single line, from the activity to its outcome. First there is the work of judging itself, the authority to weigh a case and pronounce on it. From there the word reaches forward to the great judgment at the end of history, the appointed reckoning often called "the day of judgment." And because that reckoning so often falls against the guilty, the same word slides into the meaning of the adverse verdict itself: condemnation, the sentence of doom. The Gospel writers can even use it for the local council that tried capital cases, the concrete body that handed down decisions.

What ties these together is that a judgment is both a process and a result. To speak of someone coming "into judgment" can mean facing the trial or receiving the guilty verdict, and context decides which is uppermost. That is why translators move between "judgment," "condemnation," and "sentence" for the same Greek word, depending on whether the act or its grim outcome is in view.

Alongside the courtroom uses, the same word carries a richer Old Testament idea: not the verdict in a single case but justice itself, the right and fair dealing that God requires and that a faithful person practices. This sense comes straight out of the Hebrew Scriptures, where the matching Hebrew word names justice as a way of life, the active doing of what is right toward the weak and the wronged.

When Jesus rebukes the religious leaders for tithing herbs while neglecting "justice," he is not talking about a law court. He means the whole obligation to treat people rightly, the heart of what the law was always after. The same note sounds in the promise that God's chosen servant will bring "justice" to the nations and carry it through to victory: not a single ruling, but the establishment of right order in the world.