Matthew 25.31-46

We arrive at the end of the season of Pentecost with a pivotal scene in Matthew’s Gospel. Probably, the passage does not record Jesus’ actual words, but instead is of Matthew’s own devising, part of his attempt to craft a portrait true to the meaning and purpose of Jesus. That he places them here, at this key juncture, as Jesus’ last words to the leaders of Israel before they make the final decision to kill him, suggests he intends them to sum up and clarify everything Jesus has been saying all along.

But what is it he’s having Jesus say here? The most obvious interpretation, the one that thanks to our natural assumptions about God as well as much of our experience with religion is ready to leap to mind, is a conventional picture of divine judgment, salvation and punishment. It might be that after all the odd and disturbing parables that have led up to this, Jesus’ story of the sheep and the goats comes as a relief. Here at least he’s making sense: God wants people to do the right thing; if they do it, they go to heaven for their just reward, if they don’t, they go to hell to be deservedly punished. God as condemning judge is deeply, dangerously engrained in us. Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird (30) reminds us of our constant need to escape that pervasive image of “God as the high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.”

Fortunately, this ever popular, superficially plausible reading won’t work. There is, of course, the fundamental problem it poses for any thoughtful Christian faith, which categorically rejects the whole idea of salvation as a reward for being good and damnation as a punishment for being bad. How could we square that with St. Paul’s glorious affirmation of salvation for everyone by God’s grace alone that Mike read a few minutes ago: “For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ!” (1 Corinthians 15.22).  Isn’t Paul saying that my standing with God is no more a matter of my doing good than my death in Adam – my alienation from God – is a matter of my doing wrong?  Salvation – being accepted by God – is by grace, through faith in Jesus; it’s not a reward for goodness, not even for being kind to strangers or generous to the needy.

Even on its own terms, it’s hard to find in this text a sensible version of the conventionally religious meaning.  What is it, after all, that qualifies you as a righteous sheep, rather than an unrighteous goat? It looks like it doesn’t take much: just a bit of casual help to someone. Has anyone ever lived a life of such unmitigated selfishness as never to have done some small, helpful thing? I bet that the worst people we can think of could count as sheep if that’s all it takes. Glass of water for the thirsty? I’ve known some pretty lousy characters who, in a magnanimous moment, would gladly buy a whole round of drinks!  On the other hand, who is so consistently kind as never to have turned away from a chance to help someone in trouble, never crossed the street to avoid yet another panhandler, never been too busy to listen to someone’s hurt, never put one’s need to get work done, or to get some rest, or privacy, ahead of a broken world clamoring for attention? So it looks like we all end up being goats too. If Jesus is setting out the standard on which we’ll be evaluated for being in with, or on the outs with, God, then it’s a crazy kind of test, one everyone fails, and everyone passes.

Before we try to apply Jesus’ story of goats and sheep to ourselves, we need to remember what it would have meant in Jesus’ actual situation. Jesus is not a theological teacher, spelling out general principles about salvation. He’s the messiah of Israel, on the verge of being decisively rejected. He’s the dispossessed king, facing the fact that his people are, by forsaking him, choosing their own destruction. At the same time Jesus speaks here in the line of the great prophets of the Hebrew scriptures: calling the people to God, warning them of impending doom that cannot be averted except by repentance that gives up all attempts to find righteousness, strength and life outside the grace of their ever merciful God.  That doom is not some by-and-by cosmic apocalypse, the ‘end of the world’, the last judgment, but something concrete and historical, something clearly foreseen by anyone capable of reading the signs of the times, signs written in the plain and very worldly language of power politics. Over and over Jesus says, “turn to the God whose messiah I am and be saved, or soon enough the evil empire will crush you. Your only identity, your only future, lie in being God’s elect people, people of the God revealed to you, fully and at last, in me.”  Jesus confronted powers and authorities who rested secure in their scrupulous ritual purity, their close adherence to the law, their strict moral integrity, expressed all too often in their readiness to condemn and exclude the foreigner, the unclean, the leper, the harlot, and the beggar, to subjugate women and marginalize the powerless. Jesus confronted a religious establishment that counted on its righteousness to guarantee divine vindication when, at last, it rose in triumphant rebellion again Rome. To them, Jesus is nothing but a traitor, foolishly preaching peace, madly demanding that they love their enemies, outrageously enacting the kingdom he claimed to be ushering in, a kingdom where the gates are thrown open to all comers, the sinners, the unclean, the undeserving, the lawless peasants, the vile Samaritans, even – God forbid! – the filthy Roman swine.

At the risk of doing what the Baptists call “leaving off preaching and getting to meddling” I want to draw an analogy that might be more than an analogy. Consider the ongoing crisis in Israel today. Let me first be clear that I do not want to say that the Israelis are in the wrong and the Palestinians are in the right. I don’t believe that. In fact, I think it’s morally reprehensible to pretend that people who encourage adolescents to wire themselves with explosives and go blow up themselves and unarmed, unsuspecting civilians, diners in restaurants, worshippers at seders, children on buses, are in the same moral universe as the Israelis, whatever wrongs they have perpetrated against the Palestinians. Surely, the state of Israel has done some rotten things, well worthy of criticism, but overall it seems to me their response to the suicide bombings is remarkably restrained.  Imagine the way the United States would respond if such attacks were scaled up in proportion to our much larger population: I think it likely that there would be a decisive, and devastating, military response far beyond anything the Israelis would dare. We just wouldn’t put up with what Israel puts up with. So far as this world’s ways go, I don’t see them as doing so badly in a tragic and messy situation in which no one has a prayer of being completely in the right.

And yet: we can imagine, and even hope for, a radically different reality interjecting itself into this wretched situation, a prophetic voice that contends against an Israel that seeks its security in its economic and military prowess, in its alliances with great powers, or in the moral or legal justification of its actions, a voice that warns that the course it is on is not the way of Yahweh, but a way that leads inevitably to ruin.  Its national salvation lies not on the path that dispossesses the weak and destroys the enemy, no matter what the justification, but on the path of reconciling forgiveness, the risky path that puts its hope against all odds in the merciful love of God.

This, I think, is the background against which we should hear what Jesus says about the sheep and the goats.  His final word to the religious leaders contrasts the kingdom they embrace with the one they reject. The kingdom they so earnestly defend as God’s very own is in fact where the poor are despised, the stranger shut out, the kingdom in which the rules matter more than people, people are kept where they belong and get what they deserve. We always have to remind ourselves how much in that world the poor, the lawbreakers, foreigners, the sick were one way or another seen as cast out by God and cursed, as rightly avoided and despised.  Jesus pronounces that kingdom’s doom. It is on its way to death and destruction because, in its desperate need to make itself right and righteous, it cuts itself off from God.  The kingdom they reject in rejecting its king is the kingdom where one’s willingness to welcome the stranger, visit the prisoner, help out those in need, rather than putting one’s purity and one’s good standing with God at risk, instead connects us to the very life of God, the God who welcomes us though we were strangers, who frees us from our prisons, heals us, feeds us, clothes us and makes us whole.  This is the kingdom that has an everlasting and happy future, because it is the kingdom of the God whose love knows no limits.

The great line between the saved and the damned, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world, between the sheep and the goats, runs not between people but through them. I’ve seen self-help literature that advises me to get in touch with my inner child, and with my inner woman. But today’s text points us to our inner goats. The goat in me worries about being good enough for some sort of God cooked up out of my secret hopes and fears, he feels lost if he’s not satisfying expectations, justifying himself, and drawing lines between those who do, and those who don’t, get things right. But there’s a sheep there too. He’s often timid, lacking in initiative and, well, pretty sheep like. But he knows the whole goat approach to life is on its way out, and that the future holds the triumph of grace. He gets pushed around a lot by that old goat, but he knows the lamb of God who forgives, and takes away, the sin of the world.

Those lines run through the church too. In fact there might be nothing like the Christian religion for giving our inner goats room to maneuver. There’s the story of the rector who had an argument with a member of the vestry about whether a certain woman who had a bad reputation should be made welcome in the church. The minister finally said, “Well, didn’t Jesus forgive the woman taken in adultery?”  “Yes,” replied the vestryman, “but I don’t think any more of him for having done it.”  So much that bears the label ‘Christianity’ amounts to the attempt to coerce people into behaving themselves so as to make God approve of them. As if we need only tell people what they ought to do often enough, loudly enough, threateningly enough, and they’ll do it. When, to our frustration, they don’t, then we judge, condemn and exclude. In theological terms, the law becomes a weapon we use to try to manage other people, ourselves, and finally God. Faith in the crucified Jesus devolves into an apparatus of judgment, condemnation and control. But of course it’s hopeless: we’ll never make anyone, even ourselves, any better by hitting them with that stick. FitzSimons Allison (Fear, Love and Worship, 51) tells the story of a sergeant who during World War Two told a grim joke to his trainees: A man stopped on a dirt road to help get another man’s car out of the ditch. The man was starting to harness two small, furry cats to the bumper of his huge car when he asked, “Mister, you aren’t trying to get those cats to pull that car out of the ditch, are you?” His reply was, “Why not? I’ve got a whip!”

Human beings, all of us, wounded and wicked, are moved at last only by the power of God’s great mercy, his indiscriminately forgiving love. So let’s stop feeding that inner goat, stop whipping the cats, lose the stick and put our faith in our gracious God.

Amen
 

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