O Lord our Shepherd, help us to receive and live by
your grace. Amen.
Last Sunday, I preached about how we read Scripture, particularly when it’s a difficult text. A week ago, the text was the passage just before today’s – often called the Parable of the Talents. A master was going away and gave money to three of his slaves. Two doubled the money, but one buried it in the ground to make sure that his master’s money would not be at risk. When the master returned, he praised the two who gained money and called the other one a “worthless slave” and ordered him to be thrown into the outer darkness. That’s a tough parable.
And what makes it tough
is that it’s not clear how we’re supposed to interpret it. Is God the master,
or not? Is it a parable that encourages speculative risk-taking or shady economic
practices? Are returns on investments really the metric we should use? How does
throwing someone into the outer darkness square with the Gospel message of grace
and mercy? It’s a difficult parable to understand.
Today, we are presented
with a parable with the opposite problem. The Parable of the Sheep and the
Goats, as it is often called, is seemingly really easy to understand: take care
of the least of these, or else. Anytime we read a passage of Scripture and
think “Yea, yea, I got it. I even have it on a bumper sticker,” then we need to
be open to the possibility that we might be missing something. These are the
two traps we fall into when reading the Bible – difficulty in understanding hard
passages or misunderstanding seemingly easy or familiar passages.
The story about the King
on the throne who separates the sheep from the goats based on their attention to
those in need is a passage we’ve likely heard before. Even if can’t recall ever
hearing this passage of Scripture before, you’ve seen it in action. It’s the
foundational Biblical passage for what is often referred to as the “Social
Gospel.” It’s a go-to passage for activists, charity leaders, and justice
advocates. This parable is used by politicians who argue for expanding
Medicare, immigration reform, and social safety net programs.
To be very clear, caring for
those in need is not, at all, a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s a good and
holy thing. But that’s not what this is a parable about. God did not intrude
into Mary’s life, walk around Galilee calling disciples, die on a Roman cross,
and rise from the dead to tell us “Hey, could you try being nice to one another?”
When we reduce the meaning of this passage to “Take care of people in trouble”
we miss out on the radicality of the Gospel that this parable is all about.
Jesus is not, primarily, a great teacher. Yes, he was a great teacher, but Jesus’
mission was not to give us “10 steps to a better society.”
No, Jesus is the Christ,
the Messiah, the Savior who did for us what we could not do for ourselves,
namely, fulfilling the commandments. Our problem is not our ignorance; it is
our stubbornness, selfishness, and fearfulness. It’s not that we don’t know
that we are to help those in need, or forgive those who wrong us, or be generous
with our resources. No, we struggle with actually doing those things. It is as
St. Paul put it in one of his letters – “I can will what is right, but I cannot
do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I
do.” Jesus is our Savior who liberates us from the consequences of our sins, from
the burden of following laws that we cannot keep, and from the impossibility of
justifying ourselves before the throne of judgment.
When we read this as a
parable about Jesus who is Christ our King instead of Jesus, the wise storyteller,
we are put in a place where instead of claiming to understand it, we can stand
under the shelter of Jesus’ grace. We prefer that simpler misunderstanding of
the parable though as a short story with a simple moral at the end – be kind.
But, to state the obvious, Jesus did not get condemned by the religious leaders
and executed by the government because he was telling people to “be nice.” No,
he was challenging everything about what true power looks like, he was upending
the tyranny of merit and deserving, he was ushering in a kingdom that threatens
to undo the injustice that we benefit from.
We’d rather have the
Golden Rule than the Gospel because, with the commandments and rules to follow,
we can at least pretend that we’ve been good and deserve to be blessed, and
blame others for their misfortunes. Ours society is a meritocracy, where input
leads to output, where actions have consequences, where you get what you deserve
and you deserve what you get. “Do unto others” is written into our psyche and
we like that – it’s predictable and fair.
The Gospel, on the other
hand, is wildly promiscuous and prodigal. Instead of being a message for the
earners and the doers, which we all are, the Gospel is for the losers and the weak,
things we’d rather not be. The Gospel does not tell us what we need to do,
rather it tells us what has been done for us. When you preach grace, the
criticism that comes back is either “Yea, but what are we supposed to do” or “But
that’s just not fair.” Exactly. The Gospel is deeply unsettling because it cuts
against everything that society values. And so we killed the messenger with a cross
and domesticated his message to “Be nice” instead of “Come, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you.”
More than being about
what we do, this is a parable about who we trust. When it comes to our
salvation and what we deserve, do we trust in God or ourselves? To be very clear
and on the record – works of charity matter and are important. I am not saying
that what we do makes no difference or is unimportant. Love always matters.
However, it is as Martin Luther said, “God does not need your good works, but
your neighbor does.” Feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming
the stranger, clothing the naked, tending to the sick, and visiting the imprisoned
is holy work and I am not discouraging any of that in the slightest. We do
those things though because those in need are our brothers and sisters and we
have an obligation to one another. These
acts of charity though are not the basis for whether or not God loves us or
whether or not the cross is efficacious in our lives.
There’s an important detail
in this passage that points us in this direction of grace; that tells us that
this isn’t a parable about the rewards of doing good. Both groups, both the
sheep and the goats, both those who served those in need and those who did not,
have no idea that they were attending to or ignoring their King. The sheep did
not serve those in need because they knew that in serving them, they were
serving Jesus. Likewise, the goats did not think they were neglecting their King.
Both groups were simply living their lives according to their values. The sheep
were not anticipating a reward and goats were certainly not expecting
punishment. That ignorance is the hinge on which this passage rests.
When the sheep are
informed that they had been serving their King, they ask “When was that?” They
didn’t puff up their chests and say “That sounds about right.” They didn’t even
know that anyone saw those good deeds. They were not trying to meet some
standard, pass a test, or earn any credits. They were simply, as best as they
could, walking the way of love. They were told, “Come, inherit the kingdom prepared
for you from the foundation of the world.”
There’s a podcast that I
listen to and one of the questions they ask all of their guests is “When you
get to heaven, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the
pearly gates?” Most people, disappointingly, answer as if they were goats and
say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” The thing is, none of us are saved
or loved because we do a good job or have been particularly faithful. The thing
that I hope to hear when I meet God face to face is what Jesus tells us the Son
of Man will say to us, “Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation
of the world.” Do you hear the difference between “well done” and “come,
inherit”? “Well done” is the Golden Rule; it’s about what we’ve done and
deserved. And I’m so grateful that because of the grace and love of God I won’t
be getting what I deserve. Instead, I hope to hear the invitation to “come,
inherit.” Is an inheritance earned? Of course not. An inheritance is something that
is given as a pure gift because there is no way of showing reciprocity for an
inheritance.
Yes, today when we think
of an inheritance, we might misunderstand this point because we have attorneys,
courts, and last wills and testaments which complicate inheritances. In the
time of Jesus, an inheritance was different; it was not a decision anyone made
about who would receive their earthly goods after they died – it was simply a
given that it would go to their descendants in a predictable order. You no more
earned an inheritance than you earned your birth. Because we are children of
God, we are inheritors of the Kingdom by grace. We do not earn our salvation, which
means that we cannot lose it either. We don’t have to deserve God’s love, it is
given as a gift, a gift that we can never undeserve.
“Well done” is transactional,
this for that; it’s about deserving. Whereas, “come, inherit” is a gift, free
from all strings; it’s about grace. “Well done” is about us and “come, inherit”
is about God. Our sinful and selfish instinct though is to focus on us and what
we deserve, and, by extension, what they do not deserve. Deserving, very quickly,
devolves into comparing, competing, and judging. An inheritance though is something
to enjoy and share.
The goats, when told they
had ignored and neglected their King protest, “When was it that we didn’t do
what we should have? When was it that we didn’t earn our salvation?” For the goats,
it was all about them: what do I have to do? By contrast, the sheep had been
participating in the inheritance all along. For the sheep, it was about knowing
and trusting that they were a part of the family of God, and therefore, they treated
others accordingly.
One theologian has put it
this way – “Heaven and hell are both full of forgiven sinners. The difference
is that in hell, they don’t think they deserve to be there. In heaven, they
know they don’t deserve to be there.” This passage concludes chapter 25 of Matthew
and what begins with the very next verse is the Passion of Jesus, the holy
drama in which the inheritance of our salvation unfolds as Jesus does for us
what we could never do for ourselves – he fulfills the commandments, atones for
our sins, and conquers the grave.
Our salvation is such a tremendous,
beautiful, and lovely gift. But we’ll miss it if we’re worried about whether or
not we’ve done enough to deserve it. or if we’re keeping score to see if we’ve
done more than our neighbors. The love and grace of God are something to use, something
to enjoy, something to be lavish with because we don’t need to ever worry or
wonder if it’s going to run out. Wasting our lives trying to earn that which we’ve
already inherited is such a sad reality to be trapped by.
Imagine how you might be liberated
by knowing and trusting, as we heard in Ezekiel, that the Lord is our shepherd who takes care of
us and blesses us not because we’ve been good enough, or nice enough, or thin
enough, or industrious enough, or rich enough, or smart enough, or anything enough,
but rather because we are a part of the beloved community of God’s flock? You
are enough. That is our inheritance. So all of those other bad shepherds, those
who tell us that we need to be more and do more, they are liars. From that
sense of enoughness, we are freed to attend to the needs of others in the flock.
They are not projects, they are not checkboxes to earn our salvation through.
Rather they are fellow inheritors, they are those who have gifts and blessings
to give to us in our neediness. They are a part of our flock.
We misunderstand this
parable if we hear it as a lesson about getting what we deserve or giving us
marching orders. Instead, it is an invitation to trust in God’s goodness more
than our good deeds, to enjoy being in the flock instead of being the guard dog
of the sheepfold, to be nourished in the green pastures of God’s love instead
of foraging for our own food. “Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from
the foundation of the world. Therefore, let us keep the feast.”
