Scripture text: Matthew 25:31-46
Patee posted a cartoon on Facebook back in September on my page. It showed an exasperated preacher slumped over his pulpit, proclaiming “The title of my sermon is I spent all week on a sermon and I got nothing.” It’s a bit how I and pretty much every other pastor I’ve talked with over the past week has felt about this Gospel text. “What are you going to do with it?” “How are you going to preach it?” “Where’s the good news in this text?”
Questions. Lots of questions. Troubling questions. Questions with difficult answers. In my opinion, texts that do this to us are, in many ways, the best passages on which to preach. The old cliche about a good sermon “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” applies best to these passages of Scripture. If come away from a story like the Sheep and the Goats without being unsettled, you probably read it wrong.
This teaching of Jesus is the very last one in Matthew’s Gospel. What follows in Chapter 26 and beyond is the Passion narrative, Christ’s journey to the cross and the empty tomb. That’s not likely coincidental. Matthew and the other authors of Scripture write their stories of Jesus with a very deliberate intent and agenda; They want us to understand what was important to Jesus. If this is the last one in Matthew’s Gospel, if this is the final lesson, then what does it have to say to us about what matters to Jesus?
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced this is part two of a teaching Jesus gave earlier in his Gospel narrative. Jesus boldly proclaims after the confession of Peter that any who wish to become his disciples must (we all know this phrase) “take up their cross and follow him.” Well, Jesus is now about to take up his cross, but it is not our fate to actually literally join him on Golgotha. So how then do we take up our cross and follow? That’s the question this story was told to answer.
You want to serve God? Here’s how. You go into the midst of the least, the lost, the broken, the abandoned, the rejected, and the hated. You serve them. You want to serve me? You’ll find me there with them. Among them. I am them.
Jesus says “I’m going to the cross to take care of you. To erase your sins and give you back the life you were meant to have. Now it’s your turn. I’ve taken care of you. Go! Take care of them.”
It is not erroneous to say that this is a fundamental piece to being a disciple, to being a Christian. In fact, I’d argue that this is more important than just about everything else. The Christian life is Christ comes, lives, dies, and then rises again for us. We believe and trust in that and then we serve others in Christ’s name. Notice what’s missing in that formulation? Church membership? Nice, but not that important. Coming to worship every Sunday? Nice, but not that important. Having the right theology or understanding of Scripture? Nice, but not that important. Having a solid moral and ethical character? Nice,but not that important. All these things are trumped by service.
And that’s a lot more troubling to us than we care to admit. Going to church is easy. Hammering out your doctrine and dogma is easy. Marking off your checklist of “thou shalt nots” is easy. Getting down in the muck and the mire with people, that’s hard. And we are full of excuses as to why we won’t do it.
They don’t deserve it. They’re horrible people. The poor are lazy. People on food stamps are thieves who take more than their fair share. Gays are deviants and perverts. Blacks are criminals. Latinos are illegal immigrants. Young people are spoiled. Women are dumb. Turn on the news or read a political website and you’ll see and hear excuse after excuse of why “those people” are the scum of the Earth and deserve nothing but scorn, disdain, and hatred. And we listen to this vile rhetoric because it tells us we don’t have to do what Jesus told us to do.
This isn’t anything new. The naked were unclean. The prisoners deserved it. If you had leprosy, you were forsaken by God. Today’s poor and different were yesterday’s tax collectors and Samaritans. Which is why Jesus makes his argument in such stark and harsh terms. Ignore “those people” at your peril, because if you turn your back on them, it’s like you’re turning your back on me.
I cannot overstate how important this is. I mentioned last week that the Gospel of Matthew was written largely to give a wayward church its identity back. To tell early Christians who they were and this passage drives that home. Who are you? Who am I?
We are the people who take care of the world because Christ has taken care of us.
That’s who we are. That’s why Christ has called us to be his own. That’s what we do.
This is Christ the King Sunday, the day of the church calendar that marks the end of the church year cycle. It is here to remind us that we are not the king, we are his servants. We serve the king by serving his people. We do what we’ve been told to do, as good servants should. The king has taken care of us. The king has saved us. The king has died for us and risen again on the third day. Now he calls us to live our lives in that same pattern. To take up our cross and serve others. Amen.
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