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Passing Under the Staff
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 12, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Ezekiel 20:33-38 Matthew 25:31-46
As the season of Lent is traditionally a season of self-examination and repentance, so the parables before us in the weeks ahead are parables that do business with the judgment of God. Indeed for the next few Sundays, the good news necessarily will be preceded by the bad. And like the light of the Christ candle on Maundy Thursday--which when extinguished leaves us in the dark with no benediction--so will these stories cause us to peer into the heart of our own darkness and acknowledge the days we have spent forsaking the God who will never forsake us. This morning we turn to Jesus’ story of the last judgment. Like the parable of the foolish virgins and the parable of the talents at the beginning of Matthew’s 25th chapter, Jesus’ story of the judging of the nations is told not to the crowds but privately to the disciples on the Mount of Olives. And though the characters in his two previous parables bring to mind the varying degrees of faithfulness found among Christ’s followers, the story now before us cuts a wider swath. Writing to the early church, Matthew could be certain that the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger and the prisoner in question would immediately be identified as followers of Jesus, members of Christ’s family. The witness the early church began bearing to Christ after his crucifixion and resurrection found Christians as vulnerable as their Lord, with no place to lay their heads save the city streets, the dusty and dangerous highways, the cells reserved for those who threatened the reigning social order, and too soon the mouths of lions. Therefore the judgment rendered by the Son of Man here is not a judgment upon would-be followers of Jesus, but upon “the nations”, which is to say the Gentiles, the pagans, those who— reckoned from a human point of view—knew not the Lord Jesus. In other words, the Son of Man comes to judge the folks who are home right now watching Meet the Press or taking a walk in the rain along the Wissahickon, the people who may never have uttered a prayer in their lives or who in prayer may call God by another name. “Oh man,” even the earliest Christians may have thought. “Are they in for it!” But to the eternal amazement of God’s chosen religious communities in every age, we listen as these who neither professed faith in Christ nor had any conscious relationship with the Lord God in their mortal lives nevertheless are ushered by the Son of Man into everlasting life: into God’s life. Seems they knew Him but did not know they knew Him; seems that seeing only the other in all vulnerability and need, they loved Him without realizing this…which is to say they gave themselves away without counting the cost or the benefit…for love’s sake! Moreover the clue that it was the hidden Christ whom they loved and succored in the other was simply their obliviousness to the ethical import of their self-giving: not their own goodness but the other’s need was all in all because “Jesus,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “voids our knowledge of our own goodness.” Our meeting of Him, if it is Jesus we meet, “is entirely transformed into action, without any reflection on [our] selves. [Our] own goodness is now concealed from [our consciousness].” When did we see thee hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger? On the other hand, the left hand, one does not get the impression that these goats are the persecutors of the early church but merely that they are the indifferent and the invulnerable. ““To love at all” wrote C.S. Lewis “is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping [your heart] intact,” he said, “you must give your heart to no one. [“When did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger?”] It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. [You that are accursed depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.] The alternative to tragedy,” says Lewis “is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.” [And these will go away to eternal punishment.] Invulnerable and irredeemable, these will be those who are astonished that anything ultimate might have been at stake in the living of their days. Now God knows, reading this parable two millennia hence, we know ourselves neither as the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, nor have we been thrown into prison because of our witness to the gospel. Quite the contrary! Comfortably wed to the powers and privileges of the reigning social order, we have made Christ’s parable into a moral tale, numbering ourselves among those whom the shepherd will judge on the basis of our treatment of least of these. Go figure, we say, figuring that in addition to personal morality, our ticket into the kingdom must now bear the mark of our charitable good deeds toward those in need. “How could I have missed this for so long in the Bible?” wondered Rick Warren to Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker article on his purpose-driven church, “this mandate to care for the poor?” So in 21st century America, the part of the sheep and the goats is played by the Christians and the least of these played by those dependent upon our charity or made invisible by our indifference. We therefore make Sloppy Joe’s at Our Brother’s Place, clean our closets annually for the poor who pour in to the Christmas Bazaar, pick up a hammer and head for the next Habitat House, contribute modestly to a budget that supports a ministry to the poorest of the poor in Haiti, and generally make the effort to do what we believe to be good to do by our own reckoning and reading of this parable. Yet all of this misses what appears to be the critical turn in the parable. For you see those who are recognized and singled out as sheep seem genuinely surprised when our Lord mentions their good deeds from his throne of glory. Surprised? Truthfully most good Christians would only be surprised if they were to find themselves turned away. So perhaps the lesson here would be, in spite of the careful lives we have lived and the charitable deeds we have done, we further need be astonished when he summons us. I cared for thee…fed thee…visited thee? Moi? Unfortunately we cannot…be unconscious of our goodness, that is…and therein lurks the judgment visited upon us by way of this parable. It is as though we were neither sheep nor goats but…well…put politely…donkeys braying for recognition from the Son of Man who acts as though he has never seen us. Our lines go something like, “But we fed the hungry, clothed the naked, gave water to the thirsty, visited the prisoner and have come on our own steam to your throne of grace as your obedient flock!” And the Son of Man will say, “Funny, but for all these good deeds you have done, I do not recall ever meeting you.” From the beginning—from each of our own beginnings, says Bonhoeffer—we have chosen to know good and evil rather than to know God. I think he means, in reality, that we act upon one another [as a means to an end] rather than give ourselves to one another: we do good deeds but without really letting our hearts be vulnerable to the other. In a word, we do not love the other. Bonhoeffer here first recalls the Pharisee who “rendered thanks to God for his own good deed. The Pharisee,” Bonhoeffer notes, “knows the good he has done.” Standing in contrast is the tax collector who knows not his own goodness but God and so cries, “Be merciful to me a sinner!” I repeat: “Jesus voids [our] knowledge of our own goodness. The knowledge of Jesus is entirely transformed into action, without any reflection on [our] selves. [Our] own goodness is now concealed from [our consciousness]. It is not merely that [we are] no longer obliged to be the judge of [our] own goodness; [we] must no longer desire to know of it at all; or rather [we] no longer are permitted to know of it at all…. [Our] deed is no longer one possibility among many, but the one thing, the important thing, the will of God.” So then whether or not we recognize him or call him by name, when we truly meet the other in all vulnerability…and respond in love to the other’s need with no hope of reward or fear of punishment…we live in relationship to the God who is hidden to our sight but never far from our breaking hearts. Addressing himself directly to our parable, Bonhoeffer concludes, “When Jesus sits in judgment, His own will not know that they have given Him food and drink and clothing and comfort. They will not know their own goodness; Jesus will disclose it to them.” “What struck me most about Christ that winter,” wrote author Heather King, “was his smallness, his hiddenness…the way, after the resurrection, nobody had recognized him. Here in this church, at least, he remained hidden. The little unassuming chapel, with its chintzy tabernacle, was dwarfed by the towering banks and investment firms and lawyers’ offices that surrounded it. We fallen, lonely strangers, converging on South Flower, were hardly the kind of people any public-relations-savvy Messiah would have chosen to glorify his cause. And yet things happened in that little chapel. People with briefcases and business suits got down on their knees and buried their faces in their hands. The elderly priest talked about his own struggles and failures….At the sign of peace, we took each other’s hands and sometimes even smiled. This is where we found him, among these wax flowers and stifled sighs…we came with our burdens, our fragile flesh…our ridiculous stubborn belief that the body of Christ was not a symbol but food, real food. Each tiny, broken piece of bread might enable us broken people to go out—anonymous, small, hidden—and transform the world.” “Come” he says to them, “you that are blessed by my Father, and inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Thanks be to God. |