Judgment Day
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 family, 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, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
This passage contains one of the very first Bible verses I ever committed to memory as a young 5-year-old, for it was the verse that I heard over and over and over again for every alter call – “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.’” – I’m not sure that I could read yet, but I did understand that it was better to be a sheep than a goat. I knew Jesus was good and the devil was bad. I knew eternal life was better than eternal punishment, and I knew Heaven was the home of the saints while Hell was the prison of sinners.
All these decisions loomed large in my young imagination. It seemed as if my soul rested on the dualism of a ‘Yes or No’ question. My ‘No’ to God would mean an eternal ‘No’ to my innate desires for love and acceptance. On the other hand, my ‘Yes’ to God represented such a small investment in exchange for the promise of not being eternally tortured at the hands of an angry God. When life, as well as eternity, was portrayed as one large dichotomy between the Good and the Evil, it didn’t take long for me to decide that I’d prefer to live in the certainty of self-righteousness rather than live with the risk of being surprised at the day of judgment.
As you know, I did, indeed, learn to read, and as a teenager trying to prove myself as one of the ‘good ones’ by reading my Bible religiously, I came across this passage for the first time on my own terms. I immediately recognized the verse that had framed so much of the world for me, but the verses surrounding it were completely foreign. The verse that had justified my belief in a God who left behind the ‘bad ones’ of our world seemed to actually be about the judgment of those who had left behind their hurting neighbors.
I don’t know if you remember the first time the foundations of your faith were shaken, but mine came when I read a passage of red letters on eternal punishment and they didn’t affirm what I already knew to be true about who was good and who was bad. I found myself in an identity crisis as a self-proclaimed Christ follower because all the spaces I had been looking for Jesus, like church, revivals, and youth retreats, were not listed as the places Jesus spent most of his time. Even worse, Jesus didn’t seem to be spending much time in places anyways…because he was with people who were without a place. And there I sat, a decade after I first came across these words, holding the broken pieces of a worldview built by the security and comfort of dualistic judgments.
The element of surprise has a way of shattering dichotomies that statistics and rational arguments never can. God seems content with letting us assume as much as we want about the world and ourselves just to remind us that Her love and power lie just beyond our certainty. Of course, we should expect nothing different on the Day of Judgment. Matthew 25, I would argue by conservatives and progressives alike, has a way of revealing our tendency to resort to our need for personal validation that we are good, and “they” are bad. What seems like a polarizing passage of sheep and goats, left and right’s, and good and bad’s, turns out to be a story dripping in complexity and surprise. A story about God’s future judgment turns out to actually be about our present judgments. A story about a King coming in his glory turns out to actually be about those with no power at all. A story about recognizing Christ as Lord turns out to actually be about not being able to recognize him at all.
A story as apocalyptic as this one, with its images of separation, fire, and judgment, is not meant to scare us, in my opinion, but rather surprise us. It is difficult not to read this passage and leave it reflecting on what truly matters in this life. What is morality? What counts as righteousness? While we aren’t given answers here, we are given hints that righteousness is perhaps more about solidarity than respectability. Saying the right things, scratching the right backs, and voting the right way may be a good way of securing a reputation as good, or even “Christian,” amongst our peers, but it doesn’t seem to be the way to cultivate a relationship Christ. In actuality, it seems as if the more intimate we become with a world that exalts the few and oppresses the many, the more we distance ourselves from Christ.
However, this isn’t some mandate for volunteering at Thanksgiving Day soup kitchens or dropping off used clothes to the Salvation Army. In other words, this story isn’t Christ providing us yet another check list with which to measure our own self-righteousness, even for us who are particularly generous with our yearly surplus. No, this story is about the denial of relationship. It is an indictment of the lives and institutions ordered in such a way as to maintain the suffering of human beings in exchange for the hoarding of wealth, property, and power. It is a warning to those who choose highways of backed-up cars waiting on food and water for their families over an end to hunger and scarcity. It is a warning to those who label the strangers and immigrants among us as “illegal aliens” yet subject them to cheap labor as a means of protecting their profits. It is a warning to those who are unbothered by 400,000 preventable deaths because catastrophic death is preferable to paying workers to stay home during a pandemic. It is a warning to those who depend on the naked and destitute to work long days with little rest just to afford survival to the next paycheck. And it is a warning to those who threaten to make anyone a prisoner if they refuse to comply and conform in the systems of oppression. This story is a condemnation of those who refuse to see us as human beings and treat us as nothing more than mere tools for their advancement. These people and these systems deny that we belong to each other, and in so doing, they’ve obstructed the very paths toward their own healing.
Although the powers that be seem content with structures that divide and destroy, Jesus offers the hope that the seeds of social healing can be found at the very margins these systems have created. For those who have been left out know exactly what will be required of us to create a world where no one is left out. It is the hungry and thirsty who will show us a new table of abundance where all may eat their fill. It is the stranger who will teach us about community and friendship. It is the sick who have much to tell us about how to get well. It is the naked who are ready to clothe us with love. It is the prisoner in chains who can lead us towards freedom.
It is the ‘least of these’ who are true royalty, for they live in the presence of the King. According to Jesus himself, there is no easy distinction between the Lord of Lords and the Least. Jesus and the poor are entangled so intimately that any attempt to separate them would be futile. Consequently, our affiliation with Christianity must be more than intellectual belief, a profession of faith, or a vote for our Christian values. Our membership in the kingdom of God is directly related to the relationship that we forge with Christ in the margins of our community. Simply, we are who we accompany.
Theologian Daniel Bell Jr. writes, “The works of mercy remind us that the struggle for justice is of a piece with the expansion of community, with the ever-widening proliferation of the bonds of friendship, which is the wisdom behind the liberationists’ insistence that the Church that struggles for justice cannot be a Church for the poor, but must be a Church of the poor.”
May we keep fighting the evils of corporate greed and the ways in which it feeds on the poor to survive. May we keep preaching about the injustice of the world’s richest empire which refuses to care for its citizens with health care, education, and food. May we keep struggling and organizing to change it all….but I remind you, in our attempts to secure more rights and liberties for our neighbors, may we never forget to make them our friends along the way.