The Least of These: SALT's Commentary for Reign of Christ the King Sunday
Reign of Christ the King Sunday (Year A): Matthew 25:31-46
Big Picture:
1) This week is Christ the King (or Reign of Christ) Sunday, which concludes “Year A” of the Revised Common Lectionary. Next week, “Year B” begins with the Advent season and the first step of a year-long pilgrimage through the Gospel of Mark.
2) This is one of the rare times in the year when Christianity’s two Advents — Jesus’ “First Coming” of Advent and Christmas, and his “Second Coming” at the end of the age — come into close connection. The one who presides on the “throne of glory” in this week’s passage is the same one who, in just a few weeks, will be born helpless in an unremarkable, backwater town. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” has both of these Advents in view, as does “Joy to the World” (check out the lyrics!): on the one hand, the almighty King of Kings; and on the other hand, an ordinary, vulnerable child in an ordinary, vulnerable family.
3) And this juxtaposition, this creative tension, is precisely the point. To paraphrase the great womanist theologian Delores Williams, the “kingship” of Christ can only be understood through this dissonance and harmony: “King of Kings!” on the one hand, as if sung by a resplendent choir; and “poor little Mary’s boy” on the other, as if whispered by an elderly woman in a simple black robe, standing alone in front of that choir. These two songs, Williams contends, sung back and forth in call and response, is “the Black church doing theology.” Each song needs the other for the truth to shine through.
4) As we saw a couple of weeks ago, Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot and theologian, wrote eloquently of “three Advents”: the Advent at Christmas; the Advent at the end of the age; and a “middle” Advent, the everyday arrival of Jesus. This week’s passage combines the latter two: it’s about the last Advent, but the “king” reveals his daily, mysterious presence in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the impoverished, the sick, and the prisoner. Jesus is everywhere! As Martha puts it in the Gospel of John, Jesus is “the one who is coming into the world” (John 11:27).
5) As we saw last week and the week before, Jesus is wrapping up his public teaching ministry with three parables about the end of the age — each one an exhortation about how to live here and now. What kind of life does God want you to live? A mindful, joyful life (the parable two weeks ago); a daring, fruitful life (last week’s); and finally, a generous, compassionate life (this week’s grand finale). As Matthew tells it, this is Jesus’ final teaching before the passion. These are the words he wants ringing in our ears as he takes his leave.
6) As we saw at the outset of Matthew’s Gospel nearly a year ago, Matthew presents Jesus as a “New Moses,” and Moses is traditionally considered the original prophet. Thus Matthew understands Jesus in terms of the prophetic lineage — and the Hebrew prophets repeatedly emphasize that concrete acts of love and justice are what matters most in the end. The prophet Micah, for example, declares that God has no interest in “burnt offerings” or “rivers of oil,” but rather requires that we “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:6-8). In this week’s passage, Jesus ends his formal teaching ministry with a similar prophetic emphasis on action and humility.
Scripture:
1) Jesus has retreated to the Mount of Olives. His disciples “came to him privately” with questions about the end of the age: what will happen, when Jesus will return, what signs to look for — and of course the unspoken question underneath these spoken ones: What should we do in the meantime? After you leave, how shall we live? (Matt 24:1–3).
2) Jesus answers with a series of teachings and parables — culminating with this week’s story. When the “Child of Humanity comes in glory” and sits on his throne as “a king,” everyone will be gathered before him, and, “as a shepherd,” he will separate the sheep from the goats. The sheep, he says, have performed works of love and mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the prisoner — all iconic expressions of the Hebrew prophets’ longstanding insistence on serving the most vulnerable. And in contrast, the goats have done no such thing. The king reveals that when the sheep served those in need, in fact they were also directly serving him, feeding him, welcoming him, and so on; and when the goats didn’t, they weren’t. Accordingly, the sheep are welcomed into “eternal life”; the goats, to “eternal fire” (Matt 25:31-46).
3) On first glance, the story seems to construe salvation as a matter of righteous action and reward. And yet, on second look, the story actually does the opposite: when the shepherd-king summons the sheep, he calls them to “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt 25:34). God’s blessing isn’t a reward for their actions; rather, the blessing precedes their actions. Indeed, the blessing makes their actions possible.
4) In this regard, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a story about separating well-behaved sheep from poorly-behaved sheep. It’s about separating “sheep” and “goats” — and what makes a sheep a sheep, and a goat a goat, is God’s creative action in the first place, not the animals’ choices in life. In other words, the story paints a picture of a world in which “sheep” — by their given, created nature, which is to say, by God’s graceful gift — perform works of love and mercy. Such actions, then, are themselves blessings of God, flowing from God’s creative, saving love, not the basis on which salvation is decided. Thus Jesus explicitly rejects the idea that salvation is a reward for righteous action. On the contrary, every truly righteous action, this story declares, is itself an indication of blessedness and salvation in the first place. Works of love and mercy are the fruit, not the root, of God’s saving grace.
5) And for this very reason, they are no cause for pride or boasting. Since works of love and mercy are framed as gifts enabled by God in the first place, they are occasions for humility and thanksgiving, not puffed up arrogance. The more good works we do, the more humble we should become.
6) What’s more, the story humbles us in at least two other ways. First is the stunning surprise — stunning, that is, especially for religious people — that the distinguishing mark of “sheep” is their love and mercy, not church attendance, or doctrinal orthodoxy, or confession of faith in Christ, or anything else we’d typically categorize today as “religious.” This is not to say, of course, that such things are unimportant; rather, it’s to say that they are not ultimately important, such that if we perform them all impeccably but neglect works of love and mercy, we stand not with Jesus but against him. Religion, this parable proclaims, is for the sake of love and mercy, not the other way around.
7) And second, the sheep, it turns out, are not aware that when they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and so on, they actually fed and welcomed the king himself, who is continually present in the world in ways at once profound and mysterious. On one hand, this underscores the loveliness of the virtue God gives to the sheep: they aren’t serving in order to acquire the king’s favor; they perform their works of love and mercy for the sake of love and mercy, or better, for the sake of those they are serving — not some ulterior motive.
8) But on the other hand, by the same token, the story seems to put us in a bind. For after reading or hearing it, we now know that when we feed the hungry and welcome the stranger, we feed and welcome Jesus, the “Child of Humanity” — and this knowledge, it would seem, excludes us from the ranks of “the sheep.” Why? Because the sheep are defined, in part, by their ignorance of something we now know all too well. Thus if we are tempted to read ourselves into the “sheep” role in the narrative, the story itself stands in the way. The gate is closed. We can only admire the sheep from a distance, and humbly pray that God grant us the genuine love and mercy the story celebrates.
9) All of which brings us, at last, to the goats. Does the story of the Last Judgment declare definitively that God will send great numbers of people, or indeed anyone, to “eternal fire”? No, it does not. The story plainly establishes salvation as God’s business, not ours, so we can only be agnostic about salvation’s ultimate scope. We cannot rule out the possibility that, in the end, no one will categorically fail to perform works of love and mercy, or that God ultimately will forgive those of us who fall short in this regard. After all, salvation is always — in every single case — the forgiving, loving rescue of creatures who have fallen short; redemption is not a reward for generosity, but rather a graceful gift that makes such generosity possible.
10) Moreover, this famous story — with its striking, adamant emphasis on love and mercy (and not on more explicitly “religious” factors) — is a clear warning against looking down on another person or group for doctrinal, liturgical, or other religious reasons. For Matthew, Jesus’ final teaching declares that salvation does not and will not fall along sectarian lines, a head-spinning declaration in his day, and in ours.
11) The upshot of this story, then, is to humble us in multiple ways — and perhaps the most egregious form of rejecting God’s call to humility is to draw from the story of the Last Judgment the preposterous idea that we stand in the position of the Judge, that we somehow can discern who will be damned, or indeed if anyone will be.
Takeaways:
1) According to Matthew, Jesus begins his public teaching ministry with the Sermon on the Mount — and that sermon ends with a fierce admonition that merely saying to him, “Lord, Lord” isn’t enough, and that we should take care to both “hear these words of mine and act on them” (Matt 7:21,24). This accent on “walking the walk” is how Jesus ends his opening sermon — and sure enough, it’s also how he ends his public teaching ministry, here in Matthew 25.
2) What is following Jesus for? It’s for entering the kingdom of God. What does such “entering” look like? It looks like action: feeding, giving, welcoming, clothing, caring, and visiting. Are more explicitly “religious” actions important? Yes — but they are not ends in themselves. They are ultimately for the sake of tangibly generous, compassionate acts of love and mercy, both individually and communally.
3) On the eve of Advent and Christmas, the season of waiting and anticipating the coming Child of God who arrives in the most humble, vulnerable circumstances (“poor little Mary’s boy”), this week we draw the creative tension tight: the humble baby in the manger, the one with a soft spot on his head and Mary’s milk on his breath — is none other than Almighty God on a throne of glory (“King of Kings!”).
4) And yet this kingship is something new. Here is a “king” whose final word is a call to serve the most vulnerable in our communities, “the least of these.” Here is a regime in which the clear mark of “the greatest” is to humbly, genuinely serve “the least.” Here is a reign that turns conventional kingship, with its pretensions to domination and superiority, upside down: a reign of servanthood and neighborhood, and a community of justice, kindness, and humility, open to all.
5) Virtually all stories about “The End” are meant to clarify the stakes of our lives and decisions here and now — and “eternal life” and “eternal fire” are about as high as stakes can get. But remember: Jesus is talking to his disciples here, sitting on the side of the Mount of Olives, offering them one last lesson before the harrowing descent to the cross. The gist of his teaching isn’t to threaten them; it’s to help them focus on what’s most important, to exhort them to serve, to walk the walk, to focus again and again on “the least of these” — and thus to become a glimpse, a sacrament, an experience, and above all a proclamation of God’s dawning reign of love and mercy. A “kingdom” not of domination, but of servanthood; not of mockery, but kindness; not of cruelty, but compassion. For the fullness of that New Exodus, that Promised Land in all its beauty, the church waits, and prays, and hopes, and prepares — as the season of Advent begins.