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This
morning our Gospel lesson concludes the theme of Judgment, which
we have been looking at in the Gospels for these last three Sundays. The
Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, as it is often called, even though
this text is not technically a parable, depicts Jesus as the
Great King: the King who is manifested in his glory at the end of the
world; the King who takes his throne with all the peoples of the world,
all the living and the dead, gathered before him; the King who judges
between the people, who separates the people the way a shepherd
separates the sheep from the goats. This Gospel image of Jesus as the
Great King who brings judgment and fulfillment to the world is the
reason we call today “Christ the King Sunday.”
Most
of the parables of Judgment emphasize the theme of surprise: they
tell us that the Judgment will come at a time we do not expect, so we
should be prepared for it at any moment. This story today also has its
element of surprise; but in some ways what is even more important in the
story is the element of recognition. This Gospel story tells us
that when the Judgment comes, the surprise will be that it reveals what
has really been there all along.
The
King of Glory takes his place on his throne, and he says to the people
on his right hand: “You are blessed, because when I was hungry you fed
me, when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink, when I was lost
and hurting and outcast you took care of me.” And the people who
receive this blessing are surprised by it: “When did we ever see you
hungry or thirsty or lost or outcast?” they say—”You’re the King
of Glory! How could you ever be in need of us?” they
say. And then comes the moment of recognition: “Whatever you did for
even the least of my sisters or brothers,” says the King, “you did
for me.” The recognition is that the King has been with them all
along. The recognition is that the King is not a stranger, the King is
not a new figure that has suddenly irrupted on the scene—the King is
someone they’ve known all along, someone who has been with them always
in sister, brother, parent, child, friend, neighbor, stranger, outcast,
enemy. The King is someone they look at and say at last, “Oh! It’s you!”
And
if they recognize the King as someone who’s been with them all along,
then they also recognize their Judgment as something that’s been with
them all along. “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for
me,” says the King: and that means the substance of the Judgment each
person receives is something they themselves have been building up,
something they themselves have been acting out, all through their lives.
The Judgment does not come to them as some sort of mysterious verdict,
pronounced by implacable divine authority, according to impossibly
superhuman laws or rules of conduct. The Judgment comes as the
recognition of what their lives have been all about, the recognition of
what kind of people they themselves have decided to be, and how
they’ve lived out their decisions in day-to-day terms.
I
remember when I was in seminary, studying New Testament Greek, and I got
very excited one day to learn that the Greek word for judgment is
the same word from which we get our English word criticism; and,
having been an English major, I knew that literary criticism did not
mean carping and complaining (as we often use the word criticism
in casual speech), but literary criticism means an informed appreciation
of a literary work; it means getting past the surface appearance to
understand what a poem really is; it means understanding a literary
artwork well enough to appreciate, to feel, to savor its real value. And
I thought, what if Christ’s Judgment of us is like the criticism of a
poem?—what if Judgment is not Christ saying “You live, you die;
you’re in, you’re out,” so much as it is Christ helping us to look
past the surface of our own appearances and to understand for ourselves
what kind of stories we have lived, to appreciate for ourselves the real
value we have brought forth from the lives we have been given. What if
God’s Judgment isn’t the verdict of punishment so much as it is the
recognition of who we truly are?
I
think that is precisely the sort of Judgment that comes in this Gospel
story. When the King says, “You fed me, you clothed me, you cared for
me”—or, equally, when he says, “You didn’t feed me, you didn’t
clothe me, you didn’t care for me”—he isn’t saying something new:
he’s naming what has been there all along, he’s appreciating the
choices the people have made in telling out the stories of their lives,
he is recognizing the real values that have guided the decisions of
their hearts. I think we could even say the King in the story does not
judge the people; the King reveals to the people the judgments they
themselves have made.
And
of course the message of the whole story is that that is how the
Judgment is for us, too. Judgment is not just some apocalyptic courtroom
drama in some impossibly distant future: Judgment is the recognition of
what kind of people we are and what kind of lives we’re living here
and now. Judgment comes with the recognition that the King is here with
us now; Judgment comes with the recognition that we belong to the
King’s reign—or not—depending on whether we live Christ’s way of
compassionate love, or turn instead to a way of self-centeredness and
greed. The Judgment of Christ the King is nothing more or less than the
revelation of the love that guides our lives.
And
if that’s how we think of Judgment, if Judgment is the recognition of
love, then the way for us to be part of the Judgment is to learn to
recognize the presence of the King who is already here and has been here
all along. The way for us to enter the Kingdom is to help create the
Kingdom in our own acts of service and compassion and love.
Some
time ago I had a conversation with a young man who was growing very
frustrated and disappointed with the church he was attending—which
also happened to be the church were I was ministering. He had recently
had a sort of conversion experience: on a weekend retreat, not unlike a
Cursillo, he had suddenly become aware of the real presence and the
powerful love of Jesus, his Christianity, he said, was no longer just
words, but was something he really wanted to live. And he was especially
drawn to this very chapter in Matthew’s Gospel, this very story of the
sheep and the goats. He wanted to know, he wanted me to tell him, why it
was that Jesus said we should feed the hungry and house the homeless and
clothe the naked—and yet here we were in our congregation, caring more
about raising money for our building program than about giving money to
the homeless shelter; here we were, putting on fancy parish dinners
while people in our own city were starving; here we were, buying new
vestments to play church dress-up while people were sleeping on heating
grates downtown because their own clothes weren’t warm enough to make
it through the winter nights. He wanted to know, he wanted me to tell
him, why we Christians were such hypocrites, why we know what Jesus
wants us to do and yet we don’t do it, why it’s clear that we are
supposed to reach out beyond ourselves to people who are hurting and yet
we spend more time and energy on our own spiritual comfort than on doing
Jesus’ will. He wanted me to answer—and I told him I really didn’t
have much of an answer for him. I told him that we always struggle
between hypocrisy and faithfulness. I told him that the Kingdom won’t
come all at once, but we must keep building toward it one step of faith
at a time. I told him that Jesus also said, “If you give even a cup of
cold water to one of these little ones, you will not lose your
reward.” I told him that our congregation was in fact involved in many
service ministries and he could be part of them if he wanted to. I told
him to keep working with us and not give up on us.
I’m
not sure he was satisfied with my answer. I’m not sure that he should
have been. I’m not sure that I was entirely satisfied with my
answer. Part of me wanted to say that he was too idealistic, that he was
still full of his conversion experience and he wanted all of us to be
like the apostles, and that just wasn’t realistic for today’s
church. But part of me recognized the truth in what he was saying, part
of me recognized the voice of Christ the King in his words, part of me
recognized in him that “divine discontent” that keeps us striving to
be more in Christ than we are now. His words had for me the ring
of Judgment, not just in his verdict on what he considered
“hypocrisy,” but even more in the way he made me hear again the call
of the Gospel that has always been with us all along. He reminded me
again that this is all about the Love; and if we forget that, then we
might as well pack it up and go home.
And
that is the word of Judgment that the Gospel sets before us today.
That is the good news of the reign of Christ the King: the
good news that the King is already here, the good news that the King is
already in our midst, the good news that we can serve Christ in love now
so that we may live in Christ’s love forever. The good news is that we
may listen now and hear Jesus say: “I was hungry, and you brought bags
of groceries for the food pantry drive; I was homeless, and you banded
together to advocate for affordable housing; I was depressed and
mentally ill, and you took me in without stigmatizing me or being afraid
of me and helped me have enough courage to seek treatment.” The good
news is that we may listen now and hear Jesus say, “Whatever you do
for the least of these, you do for me”—and we may look forward to
hearing Jesus say, “Enter the kingdom prepared for you, and know
God’s love in eternal life.”
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