Fr. Troy Beecham
Sermon, Proper 29 A, 2023
The Last Sunday after Pentecost, often called the Feast of Christ the King
Matthew 25:31-46
“Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my brothers, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into everlasting life.”
The Gospel reading for this last Sunday after Pentecost, also known as the Feast of Christ the King, is often called the ‘parable of the sheep and the goats’. But there’s a problem with calling it that because it isn’t actually a parable. Jesus always introduces His parables by saying something like ‘the kingdom of heaven is like this’, which this Gospel reading does not have. Moreover, this Gospel reading is not even primarily about the sheep and goats. It is primarily about Jesus declaring His authority as the Judge of all peoples at the end of the ages. I have heard sermon after sermon focusing on the sheep and goats, which almost always end up saying that salvation, being a sheep, is to be had by being occasionally nice to strangers. Put another way, how can we feel good about ourselves by doing sporadic good works. In do so, what we are really doing is trying to figure out how to get away from the wonderful, yet awful, majesty of the One who will be our Judge because we feel unclear whether or not we are a sheep or a goat. By focusing on the sheep and goats, on ourselves, we are entirely missing the point of what Jesus is saying. So, if it is not any of these things, what is Jesus saying to us in this narrative?
To begin with, we must look at the larger context of the readings from the Gospel according to St. Matthew that we have been reading for the last several weeks. Beginning in chapter 24, we find Jesus and his disciples at the Temple in Jerusalem, just days from His arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. Jesus tells his disciples to look at the splendor of the Temple, and it was splendorous…one of the ancient 7 wonders of the world. He shocks them when He tells them that the Temple will soon be destroyed (which it was, in AD 70, when the Roman empire destroyed Jerusalem, killing an estimated one million Jews, and sold many tens of thousands into slavery, and renaming the region Syria Palaestina to try and erase Israel and the Jews from history, something we are still dealing with today), and after that, at a time that only the Father knows, the end of time and the dawning of the Kingdom of God will come. The disciples are astonished, dumbfounded, and ask Jesus what will the coming of the Kingdom of God look like, and what will be the signs of it nearing. As you will recall, for the last several weeks Jesus has been teaching us that very thing. He has told us that the coming of that great day will be sudden and unexpected, and so we must remain vigilant and faithful. He has given us the parables about the faithful and wicked servants, the wise and foolish virgins, and the bags of gold to illustrate the urgency of remaining awake and vigilant. And it is urgent because there will be a Day of Judgment, and all the peoples of the earth will be judged. In the face of the coming of that day, how will He judge the world?
Here we see Jesus as King, judging the peoples of the world. We read of sheep and goats, people being divided to the left and right, some going to everlasting life and others to everlasting punishment. We are unused to such stark words from Jesus, at least in the last century or so here in the West. Earlier generations were habituated to the concept of judgment, reward, and damnation, but we have largely moved away from such ideas in Western religious culture. Over the last few decades, we have become more habituated to the gentle shepherd Jesus, buddy Jesus, anti-capitalist Jesus, socialist Jesus…all kinds of new ways of thinking about Jesus, all of them very human, and none of them recognizing him as the incarnate Son of God to whom the Father has given all authority and judgment, and who will one day judge all the peoples of the world. This Sunday is a sobering reminder that Jesus is the Son of God, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and He will Judge of all humankind, some going to everlasting life and others to everlasting punishment.
So, we have to look at this narrative with fresh eyes. We have become used to hearing the focus being on the sheep and the goats, on us, and how our behavior determines which of the two we will be when we stand before the Lord, hearing sermons say something like this: the ‘least of these’ are the poor, the rejected, the persecuted, in sick, and the prisoners of the world, and the sheep are those who care for the them. Salvation is understood in this way as being someone who does a bit of good works for the suffering people of the world. There is no need here of being baptized, of partaking of His Body and Blood, of obeying the commands of Jesus, of loving each other as He loves us, of taking up our cross to follow Him, of worshipping God with all that we are, and of living under the righteous rule of our king, Jesus. The goats, then, are those who neglect caring for the suffering people of the world, rather than those who reject the call of Jesus to become His disciples, forsaking all, taking up their cross and following him. Do not misunderstand me; caring for the suffering people of the world is theologically important and entirely commendable, but this Gospel narrative is not about that. There is an important phrase that often gets either left out or is misunderstood in this reading that is central to understanding what Jesus us saying, and that phrase is “the least of these my brothers”.
Jesus will one day invite those on his right to ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world…’. This judgment will come as a complete surprise to those standing before Him, and He has to explain that ‘Whenever you did this for the least of my brothers…you did it for me’. In the same way, those on his left are also surprised that they have encountered the Jesus in His moment of need and are horrified at being judged to suffer everlasting punishment. If this narrative was Jesus’ way of teaching us about helping the suffering people of the world as the way to gain a favorable judgment, then those who helped or failed to help the suffering, especially we who have been doing it for two millennia, would hardly be surprised to find that they had been doing as the king asked.
But there is nothing in the narrative itself that speaks about entrance into the kingdom of God as a reward based on a life of good works. This is difficult for us to hear. Western Christianity has largely wandered back to the ancient error of thinking that salvation can be earned by anything that we can do or that we fail to do. Salvation is the free gift of God, something that God gives to his children. Rather than proposing a system by which we can merit eternal paradise and escape eternal punishment, this narrative uses the language of family, of inheritance. Language about inheritance echoes God’s promise to the Jewish, to whom God has given the land of Israel as an ‘inheritance’, but not because of they were particularly good or faithful; quite the contrary. They were made inheritors of the promise because God chose them as His people, and they inherit as a son inherits from a father in the ancient world. You don’t need to be ‘good’, you need to be a child of God, chosen by God and adopted by God. The New Testament is replete with this language of adoption by God, and of receiving the inheritance because of God’s gracious generosity now made possible to all peoples through his Son, Jesus, the Son of Man, the Resurrected Savior.
How, then, may we be adopted, how do we become children of God in Jesus? We have culturally fallen prey to the common misunderstanding that we are all brothers and sisters. In His Great Commission to His disciples, Jesus said that all must be baptized to become His disciples. He also said that any who be His disciples must partake of his Body and Blood. Here we find His two Sacraments by which we become one with Him. Many found this teaching too difficult to accept and departed from Him. In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Jesus also only ever refers to his brothers or sisters as those who do the will of God by becoming his followers, those who will take up the cross and follow him. This is particularly clear in Matthew 12:49, when Jesus astonishes everyone by saying that His family are those disciples who obey his commands and who take up their cross and follow Him, and not simply those related by blood or human community, or even call Him “Lord”. Many had trouble with this and left Jesus, because Jesus is clear that to follow him often means to be rejected by family and society, to become homeless, to experience persecution, and even death. We in the West have come far from having to experience these things as disciples of Jesus, but our Christian sisters and brothers around the world face this on a daily basis. Christians are the single most persecuted religious group in the world. In the last decade Christianity has nearly been eradicated in the lands of its birth in the Middle East and North Africa by Muslim violence. On average so far this year, 15 Christians are martyred for the Faith every day according to credible estimates by international observers.
In very real terms for many, to follow Jesus means they will be like Him, becoming a refugee, expelled from family, jailed, reliant on the charity and provision of others, and face death. With this in mind, the narrative then identifies the ‘least of these’ as not being the poor of the world in general, but is rather a direct reference to being a disciple of Jesus and the consequences of that choice in a world hostile to His Gospel. When read like this, those on the king’s right are people who have aided His persecuted disciples, and in doing so have welcomed Jesus Himself because His disciples have become one body with Him through Holy Baptism, in partaking in His body and blood in the Holy Eucharist, and through faithfulness to His commands. This echoes what St. Paul comes to understand when he hears Jesus say to him as he is on his way to persecute the disciples of Jesus in Damascus: ‘Why do you persecute me?’ To persecute the disciples of Jesus because they are his disciples is to persecute him, and to persecute him is to persecute the one who will sit on the Throne of Judgment at the last day.
The division of the people of the world, then, is not between those who do or do not care for the suffering of the world, but between those who care for the suffering followers of Jesus or don’t, and in so doing show their attitude to the king himself. There is no doubt that this reading of this narrative is challenging, but it does have the virtue of being faithful to the words of Jesus. It may seem odd that those who are already part of His body are not part of this judgment, but this is because their judgment has already been given by their participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus through their Holy Baptism, in partaking of His most Holy Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist, and their faithful submission to Jesus as their King, obeying His commands.
In the end, this narrative is entirely about Jesus, who He is and who He will be: He is the exalted Son of Man, who brings the needs of people of God into the presence of the Father; He is the exalted king who even now sits on the right hand of the throne of God as rightful king; and He is the true Shepherd, through whom the Father exercises His reign and his entrusts His final, just judgement. It is also about who He is in his disciples.
For many of us, to be united with Jesus in the Sacraments and through faithfulness to his commands carries little risk; but for many hundreds of millions of his disciples around the world it entails truly risking being hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, sick, in prison, or murdered. This has been true for Christians in many parts of the world in many ears in history. It is perhaps only we who have been free from persecution who have drifted away from understanding Jesus’ intent in this narrative.
We must be careful here to not make the misguided step of setting up our own seats of judgment about who we think will be rewarded or punished. We are not judges! We cannot possibly know who will be judged as blessed or as condemned. We do not know the secrets of people’s hearts, nor do we know all the deeds of a person, and so we judge no one, not even ourselves. Instead, we trust in Jesus, the Son of God who took on our humanity, who suffered at our hands, accepted being an outcast, and was cruelly murdered by us, the very ones He came to save. We trust in Jesus, who destroyed death by accepting his own death, and rose triumphant from the grave. We trust in Jesus because He will judge us all in love. We trust Him because His own prayer is that all people may become one in Him, and therefore become one with the Father just as He and the Father are one. And in that trust, sisters and brothers, we who are His body through Holy Baptism and in partaking in His most holy Body and Blood, His Church, must faithfully engage the world as His disciples, proclaiming the good news of salvation both with the testimony of our lives and with the words of our mouths, making disciples of all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to be faithful to all of His commandments. We must accept the risk, taking up the cross and following Him. We must not fail to offer the good news of His salvation to any person. And He will be with us, through persecution, suffering, and all manner of things, unto the end of the ages.
Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under His most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.
