Christ the King (A/RCL)
Matthew 25.31-46
Holy Trinity, Manasquan
Show
of hands: how many lefties do we have in the congregation today? Having a daughter who is a leftie has raised
my consciousness about the challenges left-handed people face. You have to be careful where you sit at the
table, so you’re not constantly knocking elbows with the rightie to your left
as you cut your meat J. You struggle with smearing the ink of what
you’ve just written as drag your left hand over the paper. You can’t write on the right half of a page
in a three ring binder. You get a bum
wrap. The nasty word “sinister” comes
from the Latin word sinistra, meaning “left.” It leaves us with
the impression that lefties are somehow shady.
In French, the word for “left” is gauche. It’s cool to visit the Rive Gauche,
the
So who are the “goats” in this story, the accursed ones? They are the ones who “will go away into eternal punishment” (Matt. 25.46). We would say, they are those who will be damned, “thrown into the outer darkness where they will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” as we heard last week in the parable of the talents. Most of us like to believe we will end up as a sheep at the right hand of the King, when judgment time comes. Let me tell you about someone, though, who was convinced he would end up as a goat at the king’s left hand.
I
don’t know the man’s name, but he shows up in a scene in the movie Gandhi,
starring Ben Kingsley. It’s toward the
end of the film, when Gandhi is almost dead from fasting, trying to compel
warring Hindus and Muslims in
He reaches into his breast pocket and draws out a piece of bread, which he flings onto Gandhi’s stomach. He announces, “I’m going to hell anyway, but I don’t want your death to be on my soul.” In other words, we’ve stopped fighting, so you start eating.
Gandhi, weak as a lamb, asks him softly, “Why are you going to hell?” He answers, “Because I killed a child. A Muslim child. They killed my child. My son. About this high.” [He tearfully gestures to the height of a 5 or 6 year old.]
Gandhi says, “I know a way out of hell.” The man asks, “How?” Gandhi tells him, “Go find a child, a child without a father or mother. A child about this high…. A Muslim child. Take him into your home. Raise him as your own. Raise him as a Muslim.” The man is stunned, looks at Gandhi as if he’s crazy. Then his harsh countenance melts, the tears come, and he collapses over Gandhi’s cot, crying.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” When the man killed, it was as if he did that to Jesus. When Gandhi offered that man the way out of hell, it was as if he did that to Jesus. When we usher the hungry out of a living hell by giving them food, it is as if we do that to Jesus. When we keep prisoners in a hell of isolation and echoed condemnation, it is as if we do that to Jesus. It is a paradox, but it is true. By putting others in hell or being content to leave them there, we condemn ourselves to the same fate. By escorting others out, we find our own freedom.
Driving along on Thursday, I saw a sign outside a Nazarene church that read,
“Don’t make me come down there!” God
Like a parent threatening children bickering in the basement, the sign suggests that God is threatening to come down if we don’t shape up. I don’t buy it.
This Christ the King gospel gives us a beautiful segue into Advent because it reminds us that the Christ who told the parable came once as Jesus of Nazareth and will come again as Judge. Equally importantly it reminds us that He is here now, in what Mother Teresa would call his most distressing disguise of the poor. How can we imagine God threatening to come down when a) He is already here, although “in disguise,” and b) we are taught to pray for Him to return in the Advent mantra, Maranatha, “Come, Lord Jesus.” That is the cry in the second half of the second-to-last verse in the entire Bible, the Book of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 20: “Come, Lord Jesus!”
We
Lutheran Christians believe that He came once in humility as the Babe of
Bethlehem, He will come again in glory as Judge of all, and He comes now in
Word and Sacrament as well as in the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the
naked, the sick and the imprisoned. He
comes in the Holy Supper we celebrate today, and also in the baptismal waters
that both literally bathed and symbolically drowned Baby Thomas Edward Anderson
Bubnowski in a neonatal intensive care unit on his second day of life,
Jesus is here. He’s here for all of us lefties and righties, when we’re right and when we’re wrong, whether we’re the prisoner behind bars or the visitor peering through them, the victim of the crime or its perpetrator, the one dropping off peanut butter for the food pantry or the one who picks it up and takes it back home to fill an empty cupboard, the patient or the physician or the pink lady who brings by magazines, whether we’re the clamdigger or the benny, the one anticipating a sentence to hell or the one who shows us the way out…. He is here with us. He is God-with-us, Emmanuel. He is here for us. He is Christ the King. Will we recognize Him today? Amen
Pastor Mary Virginia Olson