This is the seventh entry in our new series, TIKKUN OLAM. In it, we intend to explore what justice looks like in the eyes of God, and how we are called to partner with God in the healing of the world.
My favorite kinds of sermon series are those in which we discern a broad theme from the Lord, such as this one, but then take each week as it comes, seeing what truths are unearthed along the way. Initially I had anticipated this series would be broken into two parts - first a high-level theological theory of what justice is (which we have accomplished), followed by the parsing through of different contemporary issues that beg our attention. However, I have sensed that the better thing is for us to frame the work of justice we are called to as the hands and feet of Jesus, and allow the Spirit to lead us into the specifics that are pressing on our hearts. This past week as I was praying through possible themes for the message, I felt drawn to a rather contentious passage, in which Jesus speaks of “the least of these”:
“When the son of man comes in his glory,” Jesus went on, “and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be assembled in front of him, and he will separate them from one another, like a shepherd separating the sheep from the goats. He will stand the sheep at his right hand, and the goats at his left.
“Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come here, you people who my father has blessed. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world! Why? Because I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome. I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you looked after me; I was in prison and you came to me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Master, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and come to see you?’
“Then the king will answer them, ‘I’m telling you the truth: when you did it to one of the least significant of my brothers and sisters here, you did it to me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left hand, ‘Get away from me! You’re accursed! Go to the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels! Why? Because I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat! I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink! I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me; I was naked and you didn’t clothe me; I was sick and in prison and you didn’t look after me!’
“Then they too will answer, ‘Master, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t do anything for you?’
“Then he will answer them, ‘I’m telling you the truth: when you didn’t do it for one of the least significant of my brothers and sisters here, you didn’t do it for me.’
“And they will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous will go into everlasting life.” (Matthew 25:31-46 NTFE)
There are five major discourses in Matthew’s Gospel account. Many scholars think these five collections of Jesus’ words are meant to echo the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament that make up The Law. For Matthew’s audience the implication would be obvious: This is Jesus establishing a new order, a new way forward on the path to God. This final passage, called The Olivet Discourse, contains some of Jesus’ most apocalyptic sayings and parables before his entry into Jerusalem for his Passion.
This story of the sheep and goats is less a parable than a “heavenly picture” what we could see if we were to peel back the veil of our reality and see the workings of heaven. Yet like parables, this vision is not so much meant to give us clarity but to disorient us and disrupt our assumptions.
There are three key elements I would like to explore here that stand out to me. As you read there may be other words or images that the Lord is inviting you to meditate on in your own time. First, and most poignant to our series, who are “the least of these”? Secondly, what is this separating out of sheep and goats, and when does it happen? Finally, how do we understand the element of surprise that seems to run through the vision?
What we are engaging with is an ancient tradition that in scripture is referred to as "binding and loosing”. For the Jewish teachers and rabbis, there was a deep conviction that Torah was in fact divine, but the details of what each law or category might mean in practice was the fertile soil for healthy debate as they sought to attain faithfulness to YHWH’s intentions. For example, the command to “not kill” - what constitutes killing? Is it only murder? What if it is in self-defense? The widening and narrowing of interpretations was, and should continue to be, a fundamental element of our faith journey.
There seem to be two primary ways of defining “the least of these” that warrant consideration.
The narrow, or exclusive, interpretation of this phrase would indicate that Jesus is specifically referring to his followers. This is based on a previous scene in Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus’ mother and brothers come to a house where he is teaching, presumably to get him to quiet down on behalf of the family reputation. Jesus responds to them by saying, “here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:49,50). The exclusive definition, therefore, would imply that those who do not follow Jesus (the nations) will be judged by how they treat those who do. A more honest account should also specify those who follow Jesus who also embody the list of the disenfranchised in Matthew 25; we should not apply the term to ourselves unless we are hungry, thirsty, etc.
The alternative interpretation, in contrast, places the emphasis on the social order category of “least”. Showing preference to the categories of disenfranchisement would make sense within the broader cultural context - a Greco-Roman world that was obsessed with class status would consider these people cursed by the gods and therefore unworthy of attention. Within Matthew’s Gospel we do see Jesus pointing to those of low status as the ones blessed by God (Matthew 5) and the ones with the ability to enter the Kingdom ahead of the rich and powerful (Matthew 18). This alignment of Jesus with the “overlooked or ignored” as Eugene Peterson translates it would align well with a longer arc in scripture of God associating with the lowly.
I will readily admit I came into preparation for this sermon leaning towards the first position. It made sense to me (although it made me uneasy) that “least of these” when read through the lens of Matthew 12 does in fact narrow the definition to Jesus’ followers. However, after doing the work myself, I feel more confident now that the latter interpretation is the more faithful one. For me, there was a key prophecy from the prophet Ezekiel that also speaks of sheep and goats that points in this direction.
I shan’t post here the entire passage, but it might be worth pausing here and reading Ezekiel 34:1-24 before we move on.
This critical reading from Ezekiel begins with an indictment of the bad shepherds, who take resources from the sheep while neglecting their care, and then moves to judge the bad goats and fat sheep for much of the same behavior. In their place God declares “I myself” will intervene to become the good shepherd, rescuing and protecting the sheep. God continues by promising to establish David as his shepherd king to do the same work. As Christians we recognize the magnificent fulfillment in Christ as both the embodiment of YHWH and the Davidic shepherd king.
Because of this, I am willing to risk the possibility that Jesus is ever-expanding the category of “brothers and sisters”, and therefore the broader definition of “least of these”, because we see God aligning Godself in an ever-increasing way with the whole human family, not just those who are follow Jesus. As we previously explored in the last post, the lawyer that provokes from Jesus the parable of the Good Samaritan only considered YHWH the God of the Jews, but Jesus shows him that God is the God of all people, and that “neighborliness” is the embodiment of The Law.
So, now that we have opened up the definition of “least of these”, what do we do with this heavenly vision of judgement and the element of surprise in the sheep and goats?
The Shepherd King is ruling in glory now, welcoming in those who participate in the healing of the world and indicting those who do not. Even as I don’t really have the space to explore this fully here, the word for eternal (aionios) in Greek does not mean “sometime in the future” or even “forever”. The ancients did not have a concept of a never-changing future. Rather, the word means something more like “ongoing” or “for an age” - which is how we get the word eon in English. It stands to reason that this judgement may be for a very long but possibly limited time.
Secondly, we recognize that within this passage the categories of “blessed” and “cursed” are not about mere belief, but consequence of our actions. This is something we need to contend with, as many of us in the Protestant household have been told that it is our faith, not our works, that save us. Taken in solitude, Jesus is separating out the sheep from the goats, who do not seem to know him, by how they treat the least of these. This should catch our attention.
Finally, many Christians in the West have been conditioned to think of this vision as “the final judgement” at the end of time, but what if it is actually more the ongoing judgement of Christ on the throne throughout history? We find that earlier Jesus had already mentioned this: “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done. Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:27,28). Jesus did not raise from the dead and ascend to heaven only to twiddle his thumbs for millennia, waiting until he can sit on his appointed throne. If we are faithful to the text we realize Jesus is currently on the throne in glory, judging the world!
I believe in the final judgement, the Second Coming. I also hold space for the possibility that some may be surprised when they finally meet Jesus-face-to-face, because they have been serving him all along without realizing it. Do we have space in our theology to entertain such a notion?
This heavenly vision from Jesus sets us up to understand something profound about our spiritual growth, especially when it comes to see Jesus in the least of these.
When we mature, God moves from being merely an object of our affection to becoming present in the world around us. Every human becomes an icon for the hidden face of Christ in our midst. The first stage in our spiritual awakening is usually marked by focus on God and God’s love for us. We get to know Jesus as a person and we experience his spirit within us. The spiritual work is often found “in the church” - we enter a building to meet God, we sing songs to God, we read scripture to encounter God. Often, but not always, this first stage is marked with a zeal and an ease by which we feel the presence of God.
However, there comes a time for many of us when the obvious feelings of being with God seem to evaporate. We find it harder to enter into worship or the scriptures and have the same level of experience we once did. For some it might be what John of the Cross called a “dark night of the senses” - we start to think we’ve lost something and we have to try as hard as we can to recreate the feelings of the past. However, this stage is actually an invitation from God to go deeper. It is here we might begin to realize that our motivations are, at best, mixed. There is a part of us that chases after God because of the feelings it makes us feel or the benefits it has for our life or afterlife.
The final stage is that God moves from being an object we worship to being truly omnipresent in life. We must begin our spiritual journey from the posture of seeing God as an object in a particular space, but if we stay there it becomes idolatrous because it upholds the sacred/secular false divide. As our scope of love expands, God becomes the lens through which we see the world, especially other people as image-bearers. Our motivations for loving God and loving others are purified because we realize Jesus is not simply the way to get what we want out of life; knowing and being known by Jesus is its own reward. We still worship, read scripture, serve the community and the poor, but we do it from a different place. We start to see him in every aspect of life.
When Christ embodies himself in “the least of these” he is inviting us to seek out new revelation of himself in those who are overlooked and ignored. Perhaps those of us in the dark night of the senses don’t need another Christian podcast or the latest Christian self-help book. Perhaps we need to actively go out into the world to find him in the face of the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, imprisoned. First we show the least of these the love of God without ulterior motives, then we tell them God’s name. As Mother Teresa once remarked, “Jesus makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the sick one, the one in prison, the lonely one, the unwanted one, and he says: ‘You did it to me.’ He is hungry for our love.” In this story, Jesus is saying to each of us, “these sheep didn’t even know they were doing these things for me, but now you do. Will you go out, find me, and love me in them?”