Matthew 25:31-46
It is easy to
think that we have been successful in any endeavor before we are tested. Students in college classes, for example,
often think that they are doing just fine until they take the first
examination. Athletes may think that
their team is the best until they lose the first game. Cooks do not know how good a recipe is until
someone actually eats the dish. And sometimes the challenges that reveal how
well we have done are not those that we would have expected.
In
today’s gospel reading, everyone was surprised that how they treated the sick,
the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the prisoner—“the least of
these” in society—was how they treated Jesus Christ. The ultimate standard of their relationship
to God, of their spiritual health, was shown in how they responded to the
everyday challenge of caring for those in need.
By serving Christ in their wretched and miserable neighbors, some
demonstrated that they were in union with the Lord, that His holy mercy had
permeated their souls. Others, by
disregarding those same neighbors, had shown that they had rejected Christ,
that they did not share in His life.
Some opened themselves to the life of the Kingdom in which they already
participated in this world, while others shut themselves out of an eternal
blessedness they had rejected bit by bit throughout their lives. The judgment of the Lord in this parable is
not some random decree, but a confirmation of who people had chosen to become
through their actions.
If
we have been paying attention at all, we will know that Great Lent begins very
soon. The Church calls us to weeks of intensified
spiritual struggle in which we devote ourselves to prayer, abstain from the
richest and most satisfying foods, give generously to the needy, turn away from
our sins, and extend and ask for forgiveness from those from whom we have
become estranged. We all need the
spiritual disciplines of Lent for the healing of our souls as we prepare to
follow our Lord to His great victory over death.
Today’s gospel
reading, however, reminds us that the practices of Lent are not ends in
themselves by any means. If, like a
prideful Pharisee, we believe that observing them fulfills what God requires
and automatically makes us closer to Him than others, we will do ourselves more
harm than good. For the standard of
judgment in today’s gospel lesson is not whose religious observance was the
most austere or otherwise impressive.
No, the key issue in this passage is who we become in relation to the Lord
as that is shown by how we treat others, especially those whom we are in no way
naturally inclined to help. Remember
that all human beings bear the image of God, which means that we are all icons
of the Lord. How we treat an image of
someone reflects what we think about that person. So if we become the kind of people who ignore
and disregard suffering neighbors and strangers, we turn away from Christ.
Conversely, if we love and serve them, then we love and serve Him.
The question is not
simply what we say we believe or where we spend a couple of hours on Sunday. It is whether we have truly become “partakers
of the divine nature” by grace (2 Peter 1:4), whether “it is no longer I who
live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20) The test is whether we actually
live as those who have died to sin and been born anew into a life of
holiness. As St. James wrote in his
epistle, “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit widows and orphans in their trouble
and to keep oneself unspotted from the word.” (Jas. 1:27) And as St. John
taught, we are liars if we say that we love God while we hate our brothers and
sisters. (1 Jn. 4:20)
In the world as
we know it, there is nothing naturally attractive about following Christ to His
Cross, burial, and descent into Hades. And there is nothing naturally appealing
about serving suffering human beings in their misery and need. But if we serve
only ourselves and abandon them, we abandon Him. If we are to become the kind of people who do
not deny our crucified Lord and run away in fear, we must learn to bear our own
crosses, including the challenge of caring for those whose crosses are much
heavier than ours. Our Lord’s
sacrificial love must become characteristic of us; otherwise, we will reject
Him because, regardless of what we say we believe, we will want no part of a
Lord Who reigns from a Cross and an empty tomb.
From Judas
Iscariot to today, there have always been those who betray Jesus Christ for
money, power, pride, or some other false god.
There are those who, even as they call themselves Christians, identify
our Lord’s Kingdom with the corrupt ways of worldly kingdoms, who associate the
way of Christ with ways that He clearly rejected, such as worshiping wealth and
earthly power, judging others self-righteously and hypocritically, or hating people
of different ethnic, religious, or national backgrounds. Of course, it is appealing in every
generation to think that all we find to be familiar, comfortable, and desirable
must be holy—and that whoever we think our enemies are must be God’s enemies.
It is tempting to hate and condemn people or groups whom we see as a threat to
whatever we may want in life. No matter how attractive that way of thinking is,
it amounts simply to idolatry, to identifying our ways with God’s ways and
rejecting Him without even recognizing it.
If we are to
prepare ourselves for a journey that leads to the Cross, to the sacrificial slaughter
of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, we must reject
conventional and easy ways of thinking about religion that so easily lead us
away from Christ. Remember that no one
expected a Messiah Who would associate with sinners, bless Gentiles and
Samaritans, die on the Cross, and then rise in glory. If we are to acquire the humility and faith
necessary to follow such a shocking Lord, we cannot rest content with what is
pleasing to us on our own terms. No, we
must open ourselves to His strength by humble repentance and obedience.
This Lent, let
us use our lack of enthusiasm for serving our neighbors as a reminder that we
must pray daily for God’s strength and healing for our own souls. Let us abstain from meat and other rich foods
as a tool for learning to control our self-centered desires so that we may put
the needs of others before our own. Let
us give money, time, and attention to bless those here and around the world who
lack what we take for granted. Let us
take advantage of the opportunities all around us to serve our Lord in our
neighbors. The more that we embrace
these disciplines with true humility, the more fully we will participate in the
healing and restoration that Christ has brought to the world through His Cross
and glorious resurrection.
The Lord said,
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (Jn. 14:15) If we call
ourselves Christians, then we must obey Him.
If we dare to ask for the Lord’s mercy on us, we must show His mercy to
others. If we claim to be His followers,
then we must learn to put others before ourselves, especially those we are not
particularly inclined to help. For as He
taught, “In that you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” If we use the disciplines of Lent to gain the
spiritual health necessary to serve Him more faithfully each day in relation to
neighbors and strangers, then we will be prepared to go with Him to the Cross
and to enter into the joy of Pascha, to “inherit the Kingdom prepared for you
from the foundation of the world.” For as
hard as it may be for us to accept, in our small efforts to help “the least of
these,” we serve the Lord Himself Who died and rose again for our
salvation.
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