Matthew 25:31-45
April 26, 2009: Second Sunday of Easter
Today is the second in a series I am doing during the Easter Season called “Christ as Verb”. Last week I talked about love being the basis for everything else we do as Christians. And we saw how “love” is more than a feeling, more than an interior state, it is a verb: action. This week we see how love leads to a whole list of verbs in this passage where Jesus is describing to his disciples what the realm of God looks like.
To help his friends understand what the realm of God is like, Jesus has them imagine a day of judgment; a day where the sheep will be separated from the goats. This has, of course, become an infamous passage used by many for separating the Christians from the rest of the heathen world. But that is tragically ironic because in fact this passage is about action being the measure of faith, not belief or religion. The surprise at the end is that we will learn that whenever we acted toward others with love, we were both acting as Christ and serving Christ. Christ is the object, the subject, and the verb all at once.
I have always thought Jesus was trying to be a little bit funny when he talked about separating the sheep and the goats and then exalting the sheep. I mean, the sheep? If I were to choose whether to be a sheep or a goat, I would, hands down, choose goat. Sheep are dumb – goats are smart. Just ask Susan and John McIntyre. Goats can outsmart even the most secure confinement systems, they can outwit other animals and by their intelligence they can cause those that raise them eternal consternation. Just ask Marlene and Ray Peak.
Sheep, on the other hand, use what little intelligence they have – the ability to recognize faces of humans and other sheep – to hone their skills as the best follow-the-leader contestants in the animal kingdom. That’s what they do…they follow. They follow the leader no matter where it will take them. Goats are curious and play and jump; sheep follow.
So, if we are assigning people animal roles, I would like to be a goat, thank you very much. Surely Jesus must have had it backwards…he meant to exalt the witty goat, not the dull, mindless sheep. Except when Jesus was separating the sheep and the goats, it wasn’t their intelligence he judging. It was their eating habits.
Sheep eat in such a way that there is still more to eat after they have had their fill. They graze off the top of the grass. Goats, on the other hand, eat all the way down to the ground and then some. They tear leaves, buds and fruit off trees. And anyone who has ever been to a petting zoo knows, they are happy to eat the contents of your purse or pockets. If a goat is let loose, it will eat what it can, without regard for what will be left for later.
This passage is about eating habits, among other things. Or more precisely, it is about how our habits affect our ability to feed others. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I am a goat – and I’m not talking about intelligence. There are many people in my life who, upon hearing the description of how and what a goat eats, would think of me. If it is there, I will eat it…and I really can’t stop once I start. Just ask Montie.
I take some comfort in the fact that I am not completely alone in this. I think Americans in general have a very neurotic relationship to food, and being goat-like is just one manifestation of that. But, I find this passage convicting because it draws a direct link between eating like a goat and not caring for people as if they were Christ themselves. And I think I come out as the goat on this one more often than I like to admit.
It’s a theme that runs through the whole of the scriptures: how we ought to eat and how that affects others.
• After the Exodus, when people were wandering in the wilderness, God provided them daily manna – until they began to hoard it out of fear that it wouldn’t be there the next day. When they began to hoard, there wasn’t enough the next day for everyone.
• Torah law insisted that farmers leave part of their field unharvested so that the poor could come and “glean” from its edges.
• There is restraint implied in the Lord’s prayer when we ask God to give us this day our daily bread; Jesus harkening back to the lesson of the manna.
• And of course we have today’s passage that asks us to eat more like sheep who do not consume resources so completely that there is nothing left over.
One of the verbs for this week is feed. Feed others. Jesus was chastising those who couldn’t feed others because they had hoarded all the food for themselves. I can see how this is true for my own life, and I’m sure none of us has difficulty drawing the connection with how food politics work in our world. Some have much, many have little.
And, it’s not hard to extrapolate from the issue of food to all of the other mandates Jesus gives in this passage. Give a drink to someone who is thirsty: When we hoard water, use it all up for our lawns and golf courses, we can’t give a drink to the thirsty. I have a friend who used to work as an environmental engineer in Phoenix, AZ, studying mostly water issues. When I was visiting one time, he took me up on a mountain and showed me exactly where and how the United States was effectively stealing water from Mexico; hoarding it and using it not just so we can drink the water we need, but so we can water our lawns and take our showers.
Welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit those in prison: Time is a precious recourse too. If we let our time and energy be eaten to the quick by life’s demands, as if a goat were let loose on our schedule, then when we will welcome the stranger or visit the imprisoned? How will we have the strength to care for the sick if we have spent all of our energy just getting through a typical day as we have come to know it; a day that “makes the most” of every minute, not letting one moment of down time infringe on our busy, scheduled lives.
This is not a passage just about charity. It is about that in part. But, it is also about our whole lives and whether they reflect more the habits of sheep or of goats. It is about how much is left over for others after we have had our fill.
And, it’s about the verbs – feeding, visiting, caring – not about the afterlife, as has often been presumed. It is true that Jesus frames this all in terms of what will happen when Christ comes again, but that is a paradox. What Jesus says is that when that day comes, we will be surprised to learn that what matters is what we are doing now, not what we think will happen in the future. It is about building the realm of God in our midst today, not about living in it after we die. And it is about what we are doing now – not believing. This passage is so verb-fillled it could be a Bruce Willis action movie. Feed, give drink, welcome, clothe, visit. There is no confession of faith. Those hearing this for the first time were probably surprised to hear that in the end, their religion is not what matters, and that the after life isn’t that important. When talking about the judgment day, Jesus points relentlessly back to the present and forces us to find meaning and purpose in the daily living, not in a far away heaven or hell.
Of course, it’s one thing to say all this. But this is not about words, it’s about action – and action tends to be the hard part. And it’s hard not just because we don’t always have enough to give, but because sometimes that giving can be less than gratifying.
As a pastor, I have had occasion to, on behalf of our church, give money to people in need of food. I have had the occasion over the last couple of years to visit a woman in prison. And of course, as pastor I have had occasion to visit the sick. And I would love to say I felt great in every situation…like I was doing the Lord’s work. I would love to say that I always experience Christ in the other. I can’t. There are times that this is true. But there are times when the best I can do is try and trust that Christ is present in and around each person even though I don’t feel it or even quite believe it. I would love to say that I always feel like Christ is acting through me when I feed others, and visit them in prison. But I know too well that instead I often get in the way of Christ – judgment takes hold. Confusion sets in. Despair and discouragement cloud my love.
Some people I help just keep coming back without a plan to change their lives. One person I have visited in prison is running from the law. Sick people who I visit and pray for often stay sick, no matter how earnest my prayer or how careful my care is. Given the outcome of many of these experiences, it is hard – VERY hard – to believe these verbs do any good at all.
But when I look again at this passage, I realize that efficacy doesn’t seem to be the point. At least not the results-based, outcome focused efficacy we are used to in our culture. It isn’t about success or failure – it is about the verbs: feed, give drink, care for, visit. The verbs are what define the relationship between human beings and Christ. To be fully human we must be the body of Christ. And to be fully human we have to treat every person as if they were Christ. When we don’t – regardless of whether what we do produces results – we begin to lose our humanity and the body of Christ begins to fall apart.
Remember Jesus was talking about building the realm of God, and in the realm of God, it is as much about how living as the body of Christ affects us as it is about how it affects others. In 1845, runaway slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass used today's Gospel to argue that injustice damages the perpetrator as well as the victim, a message he hoped would compel his mostly white northern audience to agitate for the end of slavery for the good of white slaveowners as well as black slaves, all of whom were brothers and sisters in Christ. In the process, Douglass shows that when we do justice for "the least of these," we do it for the sake of the whole Body of Christ, because injustice dehumanizes the oppressor and the passively complicit bystander as well as the oppressed.
In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he tells the story of his Baltimore slave mistress, Mrs. Sophia Auld, a woman who had earned her own living until she married and who had never had a slave until Frederick came to live in her household as a young man. When he first meets her, she is the Christian ideal. She prefers that he look her in the face, a bodily representation of equality that was a punishable offense in the slavery South. She begins to teach him the alphabet until her husband forbids her to, warning her that teaching a slave to read is against the law and will only give him ideas that will render him unfit for the life of unquestioning service before him. Following the nineteenth-century womanly ideal of submission, she obeys her husband, and Douglass portrays this move, this first step in treating him as less than fully human, as the beginning of her descent from Christianity into hell.
Acts of injustice do not occur in a vacuum, and even a single decision to treat others as less than human -- to stop teaching a slave how to read, for example -- leads slowly but inevitably to other acts of inhumanity. Before we know it, we have also neglected to clothe and feed the poor, and have ceased to comfort the mourning. It is the overall character of our life – whether we look more like sheep or goats – that affects our ability to do each action we are called to do. When we let our lives look more like the eating habits of goats, we not only have less resources to share, we become less human and less inclined to change our ways.
I don't know if everything I do is effective. But, then Jesus did not say anything about effectiveness. He only asked, "Did you feed the hungry?" "Did you clothe the naked?" "When I was in prison did you come to me?" It is good to know that, whether or not you can change the world, you can still be faithful. It’s easy to ask, "What difference does what I do make?" But Jesus does not ask this question. Jesus only asks us to be faithful. Amen.
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Bibliography
Bruer, Sarah Dylan Bruer: From commentary on Matthew 25: http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/11/christ_the_king.html
Keely, Karen A. Justice for "the Least of These," Salvation for All: from commentary on passage; Nov, 13 2006
Robinson, Tony: “At the Clothing Bank”, Christian Century Nov. 3, 1993
Hareuveni, Nogah: “The Goat As Armed Robber in the Ancient Land of Israel”; Jewish Heritage Online Monthly.
