Loves Acts
Let me begin by saying that this was one of the hardest sermons I have given in a very long time because it does not support my theology.
When I think about God and who God is, I believe in a God of compassion and grace. While there is compassion in our verse today (Matthew 25:31-46), there is no grace—none. And so it challenges us to consider that possibility.
But I want to start with compassion. When I look at the life of Jesus, I see one who was compassionate. Compassion is used four times to describe Jesus, how Jesus felt, and it’s when he’s looking at a crowd of people and he has great compassion for their needs. The word in Greek actually means a lot of feelings inside stirred internally because that’s where they thought that feelings resided, they were internal things. Our definition of compassion is a feeling of sorrow or deep tenderness for one who is suffering or experiencing misfortune. It comes from the Latin calm being with or together pate to suffer. So it’s a suffering with.
When I look at Jesus life, that’s what I saw. I saw one who went with the people, who suffered with the people.
He wasn’t looking for privilege. He wasn’t looking to be in a place that had luxuries or he wasn’t even looking for power. When people started to come in mass, he left. He traveled with the people and went to the people that were hurting, he sat and ate with them. That’s how I see Jesus. That’s the part of God that I think Jesus was showing us.
So what do I do with Matthew 25:31-46? Well, I’ve got to look at the Gospel of Matthew first.
I wanted to talk about compassion, so where’s the compassion in this text? I think that’s the part that makes us love this text We love to hear, you should feed the hungry and you should give drink to those who are thirsty. You should welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned. We want to do that. Yes, that’s our rallying cry.
I associate this with the Outreach Commission. That’s what we want to be.
But the larger context of this is that it’s an apocalyptic scene about the end time and how things are going to end. So let’s look at Matthew’s gospel. To look at Matthew’s total gospel, we have to pay attention to who is the intended audience. Matthew is writing to people who are Jewish but believe in Jesus. They’re trying to figure out how they live that out. There aren’t Christian churches at this time for them to just go over to the Christian church. That didn’t exist. They had been in synagogues. And they were probably either asked to leave or told to leave. They were no longer welcome because they believed, because this is Matthew’s gospel, that Jesus was the Messiah.
So the Messiah had come. Think of the very beginning of Matthew’s gospel. The Messiah in the Jewish faith needs to come, be a human being, and come from the lineage of David. Do you remember how Matthew starts his gospel with that gray lineage and how he is connected to David? He goes back to Adam and Eve. But, he’s connected to, so he’s of the lineage of David. He’s mortal and divine. But he is a human being. In that first scene with Joseph, the angel tells Joseph, this is Emmanuel God with us, this is the one, this is the Messiah.
The whole gospel of Matthew is about Jesus as the Messiah. So Jesus knows the Jewish scriptures well. These people know the Jewish scriptures. They know the traditions and they’re trying to figure out how we continue to observe our Jewish traditions when we’re not allowed in the synagogue.
One of the things that comes with the Messiah is the end times.
When the Messiah comes, so there will be a third temple built in Jerusalem. This is hard because Matthew reads as if the second temple is still there. But it was written after the second temple was destroyed. So, there’s going to be a new temple in Jerusalem. And all the Jews from all over the world are going to be called together. And all people are going to be judged. And those who are evil and sinful will be sent, and Matthew loves the phrase, “to wailing and gnashing of teeth” or you’re going to be with God and you’re in eternity with God. You’re in heaven and everything’s wonderful.
This comes from a church and in the center, it shows Christ the king. So first of all, and our worship commission talked about this. What’s the difference between the son of man and the king?
On Jesus’ right, all are happy and everything’s good. They’ve got crosses and halos around their heads and life is good. Then on his left, which is where the goats go, there’s this beast that’s going to eat them and they look like they’re just in misery. So that’s the wailing and the gnashing of teeth for Matthew.
Matthew puts this as Jesus’s last teaching before his passion. Before Jesus leaves the teaching, he’s got to talk about the end. And because Matthew is probably Jewish and, and he’s talking to a Jewish audience, he lives out this messianic vision of what is going to happen. He’s not going to give up on that.
So, we have three parables that start at the end of the 24th chapter.
The first one is about the bridesmaids. Do you remember the parable of the ten bridesmaids? Where five remember to get oil and five do not. And the five who remember their oil when the bridegroom shows up. They’ve got oil and they go off into eternity. They go off to the wedding feast with the bridegroom. But for the five who do not, the doors are shut and you are not welcome.
Then it’s the parable of the slave owner, the master, and the slaves with talents. A talent is a weight that is worth money. They are given, we talk about talents as gifts, but they are money. It is about money. And the slaves are given different amounts of money. The ones who took the money and did things with the money are congratulated and the one slave who’s afraid takes the talent. He only gets one. He gets his talent and he buries it in the ground and he gets punished because he has done nothing with the money he was given. He hoarded it and did nothing with it.
Again, this idea of the good receives a reward. Those who do wrong receive a punishment. And now, we have this scene where all the people come and Jesus divides them. Christ the King divides them into the sheep and the goats. The sheep are rewarded and the goats receive eternal punishment.
The compassion in this story, because I like compassion and I’m using compassion more than love because I think love has so much we don’t understand what it means to love another person.
We think about romantic love or we say we love this cereal. No, that’s not it either. You know, we say that we love things that we might just like or might be our favorites, but it’s more than that.
So that’s why I prefer the word compassion. Compassion calls us to act. Just like the bridesmaids who were making sure they had enough oil, just like the slaves who didn’t just take the money and in fear, hide it, but used it. It’s about acting. It’s not about living in fear and cutting ourselves off and only worrying about us. I think that’s the bigger picture, right? It’s about seeing the needs of the other rather than focusing on ourselves.
But what do we need? We need to be looking out because if we don’t, if we don’t look out, we never see the need of the other. I think we need to take the justice element seriously.
So anytime we have a parable, there is always a surprise. And you might think that the surprise is the fact that the goats are punished. But I’m going to argue that’s not where the surprise is.
When I went looking to do this. When I first started looking at what can I say in this sermon? I went looking for a story because I know stories make good sermons. That’s when I realized that by trying to look for a story, I was qualifying who is the least of these. That brought me back to the Samaritan story because that made me just like the lawyer. That said, “who is my neighbor?” Qualify that for me, please. Qualify for me who I need to love. Qualify for me whose needs I need to pay attention to.
And I had a list of them. I mean, I started with children at the border. I went to the border patrol website, the official government border patrol website, cause I don’t trust anybody else’s numbers. I wanted to know how many children came to the border because, to me, those are who we need to be concerned about.
But I also started thinking about the LGBTQ community. Especially how transgender and non-binary people are being picked on. Particularly transgender. And how about women and reproductive health? I could have gone there.
But the reality is, it’s not for me to pick. The surprise in this parable is that neither the ones who did it right or the ones who did it wrong knew that they were right or wrong. That my friends should give us a reason to pause on all of the things that we think we know and all of the people that we are being told need to be controlled.
We need to remember that Christ calls us to compassion. So if there is someone who is suffering, we need to suffer with them. I do think we still look for those who are being picked on, for those who are being denied rights, for those rights that are being taken away, or we’re being told they need to be taken away. We need to be careful.