The Last Sunday after Pentecost

"Inheriting The Kingdom"

The Rev. Dr. Richard W. Pfaff

That’s pretty familiar language, isn’t it [Mt. 25:31-46]? The thrilling words addressed by the judge-king welcoming into his kingdom those for whom it has been prepared; the chilling words addressed to those on his left hand, condemned to perpetual gloom and outer darkness. The metaphor, too, is familiar: sheep and goats. Those classified as goats “will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

So familiar, in fact, is this passage that we may lapse into a kind of auto-hearing as it is read (“Oh yes, I know what’s coming next, it’s the bit about clothing the naked, I really like that part”), and thereby miss a – possibly the – fundamental point: that, in the account the evangelist Matthew gives of Jesus’ words here, “When the Son of Man comes … before him will be gathered all the nations.” Not just an enormous crowd of individuals, then, but an enormous collection of the nations, or peoples, or whatever the word ethnos (panta ta ethnē) can reasonably be thought to connote: that’s what we’re invited to ponder in today’s Gospel lesson. Of course, this fact in no way diminishes individual or personal responsibility, but taking Holy Scripture seriously requires that we faithfully confront what is put before our eyes and minds in any given reading – and what is put there in this case is that the primary units being called to account, so to speak, are vastly larger than individuals.

It doesn’t take long for some pennies to drop, I suspect; for us to realize how much this complicates matters for us. For it means that we have to pray and live and act not only as individual Christians but also as parts of the various big, corporate units to which, in one sense or another, we belong. One of these is the church, and that in itself on many levels, of course: the church on the level of this parish; and of the diocese of which this parish is part; and of the denomination – The Episcopal Church – that this and the other dioceses in the United States comprise; and of the larger grouping of dioceses and provinces in what we call (however shakily) the Anglican Communion; and of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, in which we profess belief every Sunday.

Equally, we are parts of big corporate bodies politic: of this town; of this state; of this nation; possibly of political collectives even larger than this nation. We expressed ourselves in the elections a couple of weeks ago, but the act of voting by no means exhausts our involvement in these larger bodies. And we tend to belong to other bodies as well, bodies ranging from alumni associations to fraternal groups to (as I’m always surprised to remember in my own case) the AARP.

The point here is a simple one: we are moral agents as parts of these bodies no less than as individuals. Put another way: each of these bodies stands under the Lord’s judgment. One such body was featured on the ABC television news last Wednesday: the Bennett Chapel Baptist Church, a small, largely black congregation in Possum Trot, Texas. A number of its members had the improbable idea that they could take into their homes children who had been badly abused and, by immersing them in love, allow them to become well adjusted and productive young people, several of whom are now in college. The adoptive parents interviewed seemed to believe that there was some kind of connection between being a Christian and that kind of sacrificial, persistent love. Can there be any doubt at which of the Lord’s hands they’re going to be placed?

That kind of moral heroism isn’t (or at least doesn’t appear to be) possible for most of us. But the criteria suggested for the divine judgment don’t seem to go away. It’s pretty clear now that we – our nation, even our entire world – are in for a rough time economically. Among those likely to suffer most are those at the bottom of the ladders of privilege and affluence, locally as well as nationally and internationally. I do not pretend to know how priorities need to be rebalanced to take account of the scale of the problem, from the Big Three automakers in Detroit to the rapidly emptying shelves of the food banks and soup kitchens in Raleigh and Durham. Nor how to weigh the urgency of present necessity against the prudence of providing for foreseen future needs. The often-cited maxim that it is better to teach someone to fish than to give that person a handout of food has a lot to be said for it, but doesn’t do much to assuage the immediacy of hunger.

It’s wonderfully appealing to think of ourselves, invigorated by this Gospel passage, as rushing out to try to fulfill all of its imperatives at once: feeding the hungry and watering the thirsty and clothing the naked and welcoming strangers and visiting the sick and those in prison. Some of those works of mercy must be, and are being, performed, not least by people in this parish – I think in particular of the “Operation 5,000” boxes of foodstuffs that have been filled and hauled about in such cheering quantities. Nonetheless, all of the needs, all of the activities that qualify for sheep-hood in this word-picture painted by Jesus, are not going to happen at once; many will not happen at all; and, no matter how furious our attempts to deal mercifully with identified human need may be, that need will always outstrip capacity to satisfy it.

So what? What do we most need? Wisdom, for one thing: the capacity to weigh and discern and prioritize. Patience, for another, and humility: the grace to acknowledge that, as was just said, all problems will not be solved at once, and many will not be solved in our lifetimes. And, perhaps most essential, an understanding that it’s not just “charitable activity” we’re talking about, not just the corporal acts of mercy; not solely the relief of human need; not (specially not) the refilling of our insatiable containers of self-righteousness.

No: what we must understand is the ultimate point becomes clear if we look again at today’s Gospel lesson, and notice not just the judgments handed down but also the way the judge arrives. Again, we are bound to take seriously Matthew’s account of what Jesus said (there is no comparable passage in any of the other Gospels). At the end of the lengthy discourse addressed to his disciples – it lasts through all of chapters 24 and 25 – the concluding paragraph begins “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.” So the judgment, the separation of sheep and goats, is set in a context of pure glory; the Son of Man is revealed to be the King (so verse 34 terms him). Rex tremendae majestatis, King of earth-shaking majesty, as the Dies irae puts it; we can almost hear the trumpet sounding, Handel and Mozart and Verdi all taking turns at it.

And the sheep, far from being sent off to a happy grazing ground, are invited to “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” This is, then, not a courtroom scene with a large number of sentences being pronounced, the gloom and doom of those at the left hand being probably more vivid than the promised joys of those at the judge’s right. Instead, it is a courtroom scene in a different sense of the word: one set at the brilliant court of a king whose dazzling body (in Charles Wesley’s unforgettable phrase) bears tokens of the suffering and of his Father’s consequent exalting him “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named” [Eph. 1:21].

Christ’s suffering, Christ’s exaltation; the suffering of the world, the exaltation of Christ’s sheep into his kingdom, where the Father’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven: it may require a deep breath and a little time for quiet reflection for us to take in, even in tiny measure, that these are connected. To take in also that we can have not only the audacity of hope but even the audacity of belief: belief that for us the judgment, terrifyingly stringent though the prospect doubtless is, is a judgment by the king of glory into his kingdom of glory. And to take in that when the sheep go marching in – a prominent contingent being the sheep of the Bennett Chapel Baptist Church of Possum Trot – that’s where the march will end: in the kingdom of his glory.

Even so, Lord Jesus, come: the ancient prayer of the Church as Advent approaches. Come in your loving mercy; come bearing the dear tokens of your Passion; come to save and to judge, to save by judging; come (as Aquinas has taught us to say) in the sacred and venerable mysteries of your body and blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of your redemption: who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.