Sunday, November 22, 2020

November 22, 2020 - Christ the King


Lectionary Readings

Almighty God, we give you thanks for making us inheritors of your Kingdom and ask that you would make us worthy of that gift in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            This is our third Sunday of considering the parables of judgment in Matthew 25. These three parables of the Ten Bridesmaids, the Talents, and today’s Parable which is either called the “Judgment of the Nations” or “the Sheep and the Goats” are told in the final days of Holy Week. Jesus’ arrest is just around the corner and so these parables speak to the waiting that his followers will experience: the wait between his death and Resurrection and between his Ascension and his coming again in glory. These parables of anticipation and judgment culminate in the well-known scene that heard this morning.

            As I did last Sunday, I’m going to go ahead and give you the conclusion upfront. In my reading of this parable, the keystone phrase is “Come… inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” An inheritance is not earned, it is something you receive because of a relationship that you did not produce yourself. If a relative leaves me an inheritance, it’s not because I chose to be a grandchild, I was born into that relationship and received blessings from it. This is what Jesus is describing here.

            Though this is obviously a parable of judgment, it is also, rather clearly, a parable of grace. The King notes that the Kingdom that will be inherited was prepared for the sheep from the foundation of the world. As God says to Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” The answer is that none of us were there when the foundations of Creation were laid, and yet, this Kingdom was prepared for us. That’s grace. And so what is happening in this parable about the final judgment is that we are inheriting what has always been intended for us.

            This word, inherit, might sound familiar when we consider the whole of Matthew. The key place we hear this word is in the Beatitudes, which we heard back on November 1 – “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The meek are the humble, the lowly, the gentle. Well, in this parable we see that the gentle and compassionate sheep are inheriting that which Jesus tells us has always belonged to them – the joy of the Kingdom.

            There are a few things that this parable tells us about the nature of the Kingdom. For one, it is catholic. To be clear, catholic has nothing to do with the Church of Rome. “Catholic” is simply a word that means “universal” or “wide-ranging.” It is in this sense that we affirm our allegiance to the catholic Church in the Creed each Sunday. And, as Jesus describes it, the Kingdom is also all-encompassing. Judgment is not based on what was done or said in worship, not on what was done when people were watching, but rather on what happened throughout the lives of the sheep and the goats. The Kingdom, in other words, is not parochial or confined to only certain aspects of our lives. It’s not as if we say that Sunday morning and 10% of our budgets are about religion and the rest is up for grabs. No, the Kingdom is catholic, it is present in every place and at every moment.

            The Kingdom is also mysterious. We see this in the shock of both the righteous and the unrighteous to learn that Christ was manifest in the naked, hungry, sick, and imprisoned. We know from the prophet Isaiah that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not ours; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s thoughts higher than ours. Where we get into trouble is when we think we’ve got it figured out. In a previous church, I remember one person, when asked why he wasn’t interested in attending things like Sunday School or the Lenten program said “I learned everything I need to know in Confirmation classes when I was a kid.” It would have been one thing if he had said, “that stuff is boring.” But to claim that we’ve figured God out, that’s on a whole other level of problematic.

            And that is the problem that the goats ran into. They had no room in their imaginations that a person in prison could be anything other than someone guilty of a crime. The poor as nothing more than the lazy. The stranger as nothing more than those who don’t belong here. There was no sense of mystery for them. But the Kingdom is a place of wild and wonderful mysteries – where a piece of bread is the Body of our Lord; where a sick person is Christ; where death is followed by Resurrection life. This parable reminds us that, thankfully, things are not always as they seem.

            The Kingdom, as it is revealed in this parable, is also actual, not hypothetical. The Kingdom is not about developing an economic theory to serve the poor, it’s about serving the poor. And, as Jesus illustrates, judgment will likewise also be not based on hypotheticals. It has been noted that we like to judge our actions based on our intentions and others based on their outcomes. Well, the King in this parable judges based on not only what is done, but what is not done. The Kingdom is not an idea; no, it is the deepest reality of the world, and our actions will be the basis for whether or not we are told to go to the left or the right.

            And there are two responses to this catholic, mysterious, and very real Kingdom. Some are obedient to the King and others are not. The difference between these two is that of faith versus works, but not in the way that we might think. The sheep, that is those who are the inheritors of the Kingdom, show faithfulness and do something with that faith. Just like the two servants who received the five and the two talents in last week’s parable, these sheep put their faith to work. Now they don’t do the work because they were expecting a return, but because that’s just what you do with faith. We have intellectualized faith – but that understanding is anathema to this parable and faith as portrayed in Scripture. Instead of faith being about what we think, faith really would be better translated as “faithfulness,” or even “trust,” “loyalty,” “obedience,” or “allegiance.”

            The sheep are faithful. They don’t think anyone is watching them when they clothe the naked, they aren’t looking for rewards for giving the thirsty a drink. They’re simply doing what they believe is the grain of the universe – loving God with all their hearts, souls, and strength, and loving their neighbors as themselves.

            The goats though were focused more on a religion of works than one of grace. They thought salvation was something that had to be earned, whereas the sheep trusted that they already had been given all they need. The goats say “Well, if we had known, we would have done more.” See, for them, it was about doing, not trusting. And just as we saw in the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids, sometimes it’s too late for action. What the goats needed to have done should have been done long ago.

            The fascinating and shocking thing about this parable is that neither group has any idea what they are doing. Both are just as unsettled to hear “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” So we have to immediately jettison the idea that we know how to be sheep that end up on the right hand of God. We don’t. Jesus doesn’t give us this parable to tell us the things that are clearly outlined in the Torah – feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, liberate the oppressed, visit the sick. If that’s what Jesus wanted us to understand, he would have said it plainly. To be sure, those are good, holy, and faithful things to do. But this is a parable, not an ethics lecture.

            So instead of this being a parable about what we’re supposed to do, it’s actually a parable about where we’re supposed to do it. The thing that we so often misunderstand is when and where the Kingdom of God is. In a passage found in Luke, we read that “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’” We pray this all the time – “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” We misread this parable if we think it is about a Kingdom that is out there and not yet. Indeed, Christ is our King and that means he has a Kingdom.

            Jesus has told us that the Kingdom will be inherited by the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers. And that is just as true today as it will be at the end of the age. As Jesus tells us, this Kingdom was prepared since the foundation of the world. It is ready to inherit right now. This is a parable that reveals to us what can be grasped right now – nothing less than the Kingdom itself. Yes, at the end there will be judgment based on how we lived in the Kingdom faithfully, or not. But the Kingdom is present right now.

            To train us to see the Kingdom, Jesus suggests very tangible things. Writing in the 4th century, St. John Chrysostom said that we will never be able to recognize Jesus in the chalice if we cannot recognize him in the beggar. We do works of mercy not to earn anything, but rather to enter into something and what we are entering into is the Kingdom that has been prepared for us. We know from Scripture that God is love, and so God’s Kingdom is a Kingdom of love. When we love others, we are inheriting the Kingdom.

            Now, what makes this so scandalous, especially to our modern and “enlightened” ears is that you’ll notice that is no reference to addressing the underlying problems at hand. There is nothing here that makes us think that capitalism, liberalism, or socialism is going to be rewarded. This isn’t to say that we ignore larger and systemic issues, but we don’t start there. The King does not say to the sheep – “Well done, you voted for the right candidates, you attended the correct rallies, you had the right slogans, you shared the correct articles on social media, you attended the appropriate trainings.” No, what is commended is how close we get to those who are suffering under the weights of addiction, loneliness, injustice, poverty, hunger, and illness. The Kingdom is inherited by conversation, by service, by love. 

            The attorney who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson, speaks about the need to “get proximate.” In a 2018 commencement address at Johns Hopkins University, Stevenson said “You have to find ways, no matter your field, to get proximate to people who are suffering, to get closer to people who are excluded, to go into the parts of the community that other people say you shouldn’t go to.” This is what he has done in his life – he doesn’t just advocate for justice, he did what Jesus suggests we do – he started visiting people in prison. His story is chronicled in the book and movie called Just Mercy, and I commend it to you. In that book, he writes, “We cannot create justice without getting close to places where injustices prevail, we have to get proximate.” It’s a sad truth that we all know, great injustice can be done in the name of doing justice when we treat people as problems to solve instead of as images of Christ to serve.

And that’s the twist of grace in this parable – when we get proximate to those who suffer, we get proximate to Jesus. And when we get close to Jesus, we receive the Kingdom that has been prepared for us since the foundation of the world. Suffering is something that we’ve been taught is bad, something to be avoided. But as we know from one of the great prayers in our Prayer Book, “the way of the cross is the way of life and peace.” Jesus himself suffered as a condemned and accursed criminal, as he hung naked, thirsty, and beaten on a cross. And on Christ the King Sunday, we proclaim: that man on the Cross was actually God; that is depth of love; that shows us the grain of the universe. Come, you that are blessed by our God and Father, inherit and get proximate to the Kingdom that was prepared for you from the foundation of the world.