Sunday, November 23, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

To Feed with Justice

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 100
Ezekiel 34:11–16
Matthew 25:31–46

You may call God love,
You may call God goodness,
But the best name for God is compassion.

Meister Eckhart

According to Matthew, the passage we just read is Jesus’ last instruction to his disciples before he prepares himself to be handed over to be crucified. It is important to note that this last instruction depicts the last judgment. All the nations are gathered before Jesus, and Jesus, seated on a king’s throne and surrounded by angels, judges individuals, separating the sheep from the goats, the saved from the damned.

This passage from scripture is one of the most well-known and most frequently quoted. The part most familiar to many of us and which we have often heard cited, nearly verbatim, by many Christians consists of the verses beginning with “for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” and ending with Jesus’ lesson, “Truly I tell you, just as you did—or did not—do it to one of the least of these, you did—or did not—do it to me.” These are the verses that have a certain cadence and parallelism that make it easier for us to commit the words to memory. They also convey an element of surprise that makes a story good and memorable: when the disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger, or naked, sick or in prison?” Jesus surprises them with his symbolic answer that in each of these caring deeds for others they were unknowingly caring also for him. For these reasons, we remember these biblical verses.

We also remember these verses because they concretize and synthesize the two parts of the love commandment that Jesus taught in his sermon on the mount. To love God is to love your neighbor as yourself.

While it is so easy to recall these verses, it is also quite easy to forget or neglect the verses in which Jesus speaks about the last judgment, verses that provide the framework for Jesus’ teaching about caring for those who suffer most.

In the history of New Testament studies, biblical scholars have acknowledged that for a time scholars tended either to overlook the sayings of Jesus that presented an apocalyptic worldview stressing the end times and the final judgment that accompanied the end or to attribute such statements to some source other than the more loving and morally edifying sayings of Jesus. Embarrassed by the apocalyptic statements that Jesus made, they either neglected them or sought to explain them away.

Today biblical scholars tell us that if we want truly to understand Jesus’ teachings, we cannot discard his statements about divine judgment at the end of time. The last judgment is not simply a framework that can be discarded while the rest of Jesus’ message is retained. In the Gospel of Matthew, the last judgment plays an important role, notable by the fact that every single discourse in Matthew ends with an announcement of judgment for the church, including the passage we read this morning in which Jesus speaks a final warning to the church that it must now prepare for judgment.

So if the apocalyptic statements framing our scripture lesson this morning are not discardable, what difference does the idea that the end is near and judgment is at hand make? Do Jesus’ announcements of final judgment substantively affect the meaning of his moral teachings? You and I both know that in some cases the way we frame something can make all the difference. The frame can provide the interpretive lens through which we look at and experience things.

In a meditation entitled Time’s Up, Mary W. Anderson reflects on the difference a person’s sense of time makes for that person’s outlook on life. She writes, “The very idea that there will be an end is threatening to those of us who have pretty good lives and good plans for the future. For those of us who experience life as a roller coaster of ups and downs, the idea of ‘an end to it all’ may be comforting” (Living by the Word, p. 155). She goes on to write that those among us who are very elderly or very ill may think occasionally about the end of life and as a result prepare and put things in order more intentionally than those of us who are young and busy living in the middle of things. As powerful as the immediate sense of mortality is in shaping how we live our individual lives, imagine how powerfully our actions could be shaped by the idea that the whole world will come to an end and that in the final days we will each be judged according to a universal standard.

This is the apocalyptic framework within which we are to understand Jesus’ moral instructions. Within this apocalyptic framework, there is a greater sense of urgency to be decisive not just about putting our own affairs in order, but about making things right for the universe. As long as someone in the world is suffering, as long as someone is in need of care and compassion, things are out of order for everyone.

This has been the message of many of the Old Testament prophets. In today’s First Lesson, the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel spoke the words of Yahweh, who, because the shepherds—or leaders—of Israel had cared only for themselves and not the Israelites, who then ended up scattered in exile, took it upon himself to be a true shepherd rescuing, preserving, and caring for the lost and scattered sheep of Israel. Through Ezekiel, the Lord God says, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.” No doubt the language of caring and judging has been carried over into the teaching of Jesus, as we find in the Gospel of Matthew.

For Matthew, the coming judgment was the horizon that should have informed the behavior of members of the church. The coming judgment made clear the true significance of their behavior: what might have seemed like a mundane act of giving someone a drink of water or of sharing one’s food with another person or of showing hospitality to a foreigner or what might have seemed like an unimportant neglect of any of these things took on weightier significance in light of the coming judgment. In the face of divine judgment, there is no time for ethical neutrality, for sitting on the fence, or for waiting to see what might develop first. Decisive action is what counts.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote to white clergymen, urging them to wait no longer to act decisively for the cause of racial equality. In doing so, King argued against what he called “the white moderate’s myth of time.” He wrote, “I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said: ‘All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.’” Responding to this viewpoint, King wrote,

All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or contructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. . . . We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. (I Have a Dream, p. 92)

Whether or not Martin Luther King’s worldview could technically be called apocalyptic, I don’t know. His writings reverberate, however, with the apocalyptic character that we find in the Gospel of Matthew—both the urgent exhortation for us to care responsibly for those in the world who suffer most and the view that individual salvation is tied up inextricably with the well-being of the whole world.

It is hard to know all the ways in which an apocalyptic worldview might shape one’s ethics. According to Matthew’s apocalyptic worldview, the final judgment has less to do with getting one’s own affairs in order and more to do with the right ordering of the universe, an order in which Christ’s example of compassion and care for the humblest in society is the standard by which justice is measured. More than a reason for us to fear, then, such a view of Christ’s judgment of the world is our ultimate source of hope.

Amen.