We have just passed the point in the year when we can hope to disclaim responsibility for our actions. By the time you hit the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday before Advent starts, it’s too late. For this day has readings in its liturgies which blow away any mists of doubt and wishful thinking as to whose fault it usually is. They show the futility of finger pointing away from ourselves, the fond hope to shuck the burden of blame, to inch away from the buck when it stops on our desk. You heard some of the terrifying vision which Daniel had: “…the Ancient in years took his seat…the court sat, and the books were opened.” It is the scene of a trial, and judgement. “…and I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven…sovereignty and glory and kingly power were given to him…an everlasting sovereignty which was not to pass away, and his kingly power was never to be destroyed”. (Daniel 7: 9-14) Did you catch the frightening vision which John records in his opening verses of the Apocalypse which read as the Epistle:…”Behold, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye shall see him, and among them, those who pierced him, (that is us, when we crucify him afresh with the wounds we inflict upon him) and all the peoples of the world shall lament in remorse…” (Revelations 1:7)
Judgement. Listen to Matthew in his Gospel who paints a picture of Christ’s Kingly Judgment for us. His picture is as terrifying as Daniel’s. The work of Christ the King is to declare a sorting-out. Quite flatly he states that he will “separate people into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” (Matthew 25: 32) Some will be near his companionship, others will feel the lack. His term for it is on his right, and on his left. And the grounds of his judgement are what we, all of us, know at the deepest level within ourselves what we do with the opportunities given to us to love. It is a gut responsibility and our instinct is usually for self-protection, so that the words, charity begins at home spring to our lips. But charity doesn’t begin at home. Christ is the first and last to insist that charity doesn’t begin at home. It begins and ends in him; in his heart of love, in which all Creation has a place, a treasured place. Always when we mouth the phrase “enlightened self- interest” we have to watch out of the corner of our eyes for where Christ is pointing, to his right or to his left, whether the phrase is prudent politically or not.
Talking about enlightened self-interest – what do you happen to think of a nuisance that can frighten you: the hordes of homeless begging in the Grand Central or Penn stations or the Port Authority, or in the subway trains you have to take? Don’t be sentimental and suggest that because they have nothing they aren’t capable of sin. But there are deeper questions to consider. They are a threat to our ease, a nasty reminder thrust under our noses. Banish them? Where do you banish them to? Where are they to go? What are we to do with people who are reduced to subhumanity, either through drugs or through no fault of their own? You can’t lock them up. You can’t banish them to Montclair or Montauk or Morristown. They constitute for us a problem of frightening proportions, in all sorts of ways. No easy answer of enlightened self-interest. They are the least of God’s little ones.
But then: “Then he will say to those on his left hand, ‘The curse is upon you; go from my sight to the eternal fire that is ready for the devil and his angels. For when I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat, when thirsty nothing to drink; when I was a stranger you gave me no home, when naked you did not clothe me; when I was ill and in prison you did not come to my help.’ And they too will reply, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison and did nothing for you?’ And he will answer, ‘I tell you this: anything you did not do for one of these, however humble, you did not do for me.’ ”
And that is not all. Christ ends with something that is not a threat but a promise: “And they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous will enter eternal life…” (Matthew 25: 46b)
We might wish he had not said this, but we can’t pretend he hasn’t said this. We have to face a possibility of Christ disassociating himself with attitudes and enterprises of our own manufacture, of turning his back upon policies we maintain, and of refusing to countenance our rationalizing selfishness however sophisticated it may be in its disguise. It is easier to point to the appalling philosophy of Marxism, or to the cruel policies of genocide in Darfur, or to the callous side of capitalism or whatever it is meets with our own disapproval. We can attempt to write a Gospel which oversimplifies issues we can’t cope with or wish to see extinct. But this is not Christ’s way. The buck stops here. We cannot shelter behind stern words of judgement of somebody else. What is Christ saying to the whole family, his Church?
He may be saying something like this: the Church is under judgement, even though it is his body; the Church militant, composed that is, of living souls, can no more disregard this terrible warning than individuals can hope to disregard it. If for whatever reason of self-interest the Church fails to reach out with love and with compassion to those outside her bounds: the doubting, the alienated, the hurt, even those with self-inflicted hurts, people with lifestyles we neither like nor think the Church should countenance; then she is in danger of failing to notice Christ shining through the eyes of those unsuitable souls. Wherever goodness of the very least sort is, Christ is, in mixed-up, mistaken, errant, ignorant, bigoted, backward souls, wherever a spark of goodness is, the Spirit of Christ it is who makes that spirit glow. When the Church is tempted to categorize and to pigeonhole and brand with a mark, she runs the risk of exclusion from Christ’s companionship. Her job is to offer the stern challenge of reconciliation to irreconcilables, to bring in the unwilling with the offer of love and the recalcitrant with the promise of God’s forgiveness, and to all souls everywhere a clear proclamation of Christ’s sovereignty and kingship which conveys to an incredulous world of individuals the means of grace and the hope of glory.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
