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.
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.”
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.
