Whatever you did...

Feast of Christ the King (Last Sunday after Pentecost)
Matthew 25:31-46
 
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew is the only place in the entire Bible where the Jesus talks about the Last Judgment. It may seem strange that Jesus never mentioned such a momentous event anywhere else, but that is the fact – only Matthew’s Gospel talks about it, and only in these 16 verses.

And what happens at the Last Judgment, as Jesus portrays it? Are people punished for every kind of sin? Is there a distinction between red states and blue states, between rich and poor, between those who believe in gay marriage and those who oppose it? No!

 

The only basis on which Jesus says we are to be judged is in this simple statement that Jesus gives us: whatever you did or did not do to “one of the least of these who are members of my family” you did or did not do to Jesus. [Matthew 25:40 & 45]

 

Let’s say that again: we will be judged on what we did or did not do to the least among us. Nothing else. There is no reward for holding the right set of religious beliefs, the proper morality, the correct theology, for being on the traditional, conservative, radical, or liberal sides of any question.

 

Now, I would never attempt to “boil down” the entire Gospel of Jesus to this one statement, and I don’t think that this is the only thing that Christians should do. But I do recognize that it was important enough for Jesus and Matthew to specifically describe what is expected of Christians. I also think that we are wasting a lot of time and squandering our salvation by fussing and fighting over things that do not matter in the end. The only thing that really counts is what we who call ourselves followers of Jesus do to one another, and for one another – especially for those who are “least” among us.

 
Two weeks ago, we heard the Beatitudes, also from the Gospel of Matthew. In them, Jesus said a lot of folks were blessed, but he didn’t list any of the people who are mired in conflicts of one kind or another today. Instead, he only talked about the poor, the meek, the hungry, the thirsty, and so on. Jesus was telling us what to do – in order to do for him – by doing for the least.
 

I don’t know about you, but this is both reassuring and frightening for me. I don’t go through life worrying about what will happen to me in the Last Judgment, but perhaps I should – and so should we all.

 

Christianity has become extremely complicated over the centuries. What started out as a few simple principles – Jesus is the Son of God, he came to save us, he died and rose from the dead, we are saved by believing in him – has gotten very complex. Almost from the very beginning, Christians got deeply involved in fighting with one another about the “details.” The first big division was over the question of whether a person had to be a Jew first, before they could become a Christian, meaning that those who weren’t Jews had to be circumcised and only eat kosher food, and so forth.

 
Not long after that, other divisions arose. By the time that Christianity became the majority religion in the Roman Empire, bishops were excommunicating each other over the mechanics of how Jesus could be both God and man, which books belonged in the Bible and which ones didn’t, the proper title for Mary, and how the Holy Spirit fit into the Trinity – among many other things.
 
It seems that people lost touch with Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel: whatever you do – or don’t do – to these, you do – or don’t do – to me.
 
So when someone rejects another because that other person doesn’t hold the same beliefs about the Trinity, or because that person’s theology doesn’t match the majority, or because that person has a different take on marriage or ordination, that person is actually rejecting Jesus. It’s that simple.
 
Jesus brings this right down to the most basic level: I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a stranger, I was naked, I was sick, I was in prison. These situations describe the most helpless among us, those whom we might be tempted to blame for their own fate, or to avoid because they don’t come from “proper society.” And to do that would be to fall right into the trap that our own foolishness sets for us.
 
Now, don’t get me wrong. A lot of the controversies we face today can be drilled down to our relationships with one another. When we take a stand on gay marriage, we could be putting one interpretation of scripture above the needs and feelings of some of the least among us – those rejected by a powerful majority that finds their orientation unsettling. When we decide what we believe about abortion, we could be forgetting to think about those among us who are directly affected: the woman and child involved. These are not moral or theological issues, so much as they are issues of how we treat others – and through them, Jesus.
 
One of the things that I notice in Jesus’ list of people who were helped and rejected is that there is no value judgment applied to any of them. Those who were hungry, thirsty, naked, and so on could all be saints or sinners – and they were probably both at the same time.
 
Imagine, if you will, that we could see the face of Jesus on every gay person who wants to get married, every woman who wants to have an abortion, every unborn baby that dies in an abortion. What, then, would we say? I don’t know if our response would be different or not, but I think it would say a lot about us if we could stop and picture Jesus in others more often.
 
We might come to the same conclusions that we hold today. We might not behave any differently in the long run, but we would be doing so for the “right” reasons, instead of for emotional, intellectual, or political ones. I can’t imagine that we would feel it was pleasing to Jesus for us to say to a hungry person, “go get a job, so you can buy something to eat,” or to a naked person, “you should be ashamed of yourself, go put on some clothes.”
 
This is a brief picture that Matthew gives us of the Last Judgment. I am not surprised that no other Gospel tackled describing it. But I am also amazed at how simple the decision is: either we did to others what Jesus expected, or we didn’t. There is no defense, no extenuating circumstance, no excuse for failing. Thank God, there is mercy and forgiveness, but knowing that our sins will be forgiven is never an excuse for committing them without regard for the consequences.
 
I don’t know about you, but the next time I see a person who is hungry, thirsty, homeless, rejected, I will look at that person differently. I will try my best to do what we all promised in our Baptismal Covenant: to seek and serve Christ in all people. “Seeking” means “looking for and seeing” Christ in everyone, and serving Christ our King means serving our brothers and sisters as best we are able. May God give us the grace to do this. Amen!