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The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King
Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in thy well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 29)
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 25:31-46
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Matthew 25:31-46
✛
Inherit the Kingdom...or Go Away
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On this, the last Sunday of the church year, we turn to what Saint Matthew gives us as the last teaching of Jesus prior to Holy Week, the culmination or apex of all Jesus’ teaching, a passage that shows forth what theologians call an exceedingly high christology. Last week we had the parable of the talents, a story that could be taken to be about people in the church who have been given a great gift, the gospel of Jesus, and who are then responsible for sharing that gift with others; and at the end Jesus will come and judge the members of the church (the holders of the talents) according to what they have made of the gospel. This today is much bigger than that: here it is not Christians entrusted with the gospel that at the end Jesus will come to judge, but everybody, all the nations; and it is not God the Father who will judge, but Jesus himself, the Son of man; and it is not the Father but Jesus who is called King. Here at the end it is revealed that the kingdom that Jesus talks about is not a private interior reality but rather the cosmic landscape on which is shown the meaning of all history, of everything ever done. And here at the end it is revealed that the king of this kingdom is not someone distant, unknown, invisible, but rather Jesus Christ himself. This final event of our human, earthly history is high christology, as Matthew signals from the first line: he (Christ) does not come with the angels, but he comes, and all the angels come with him.
Everyone is there: those who were dead and those who were alive at that time. All the nations, all the peoples of the earth, everyone. It is Jesus, according to this gospel, who will judge every member of the human race, every one of the billions of people we know to be alive today, and every person who has ever lived before us, and every person who is yet to be conceived prior to this final moment. The whole human race is gathered before Jesus.
And what happens, as you heard, is that the people are divided into the sheep and the goats, sheep to Jesus’ right, the side that symbolizes approval, and goats to Jesus’ left, the other side.
At the end of this scene, the created universe no longer exists as we have known it. The part of the human race to Jesus’ right hears the words Come, inherit the kingdom. What does it mean when the speaker, who says the words inherit the kingdom, is himself the king? It means something breathtaking. It’s not just “come into my kingdom” or “come into the kingdom.” And it is certainly not “leave earth and come into heaven.” To inherit means the kingdom is now yours. And if the kingdom is yours, you are the ruler. I say this is breathtaking: for it means that for this portion of the human race, the so-called “sheep,” every person becomes a king, a monarch, a ruler. We then seem to have a kingdom of kings. Inherit the kingdom. Every one of these people (and we have no indication of the relative size of these two groups, the sheep and the goats, but this is surely a vast number—we can recall that Saint John the Divine was given a revelation of a throng so vast it could not be numbered)—every one of these people has title to the kingdom. Jesus does not invite these people to enter the kingdom by, say, leaving the state of New York and entering another state, or leaving the earth and going to some other place (God’s kingdom is not another place!). Jesus invites these people to come, inherit his kingdom, which becomes their kingdom. The world is transformed, and every one of these people is revealed to be awesomely exalted.
And everyone on the other side also has a surprise. They hear the words Depart from me. Jesus tells them to go away. It is an awful surprise, for to go away from Jesus is not like going from New York to New Jersey or Oklahoma; to go away from Jesus is also not to go to another place. It is to go to everlasting fire, everlasting punishment: images of the vanity, the utter meaninglessness of a human life without Jesus.
One might wonder about the justice behind all this. Why should the ultimate destination of a human life—life eternal, or everlasting punishment—why should that hang on one’s relationship to Jesus, on whether one draws close to him or moves away? Matthew senses this question. He brilliantly shows us that there is no faith in Jesus that is disconnected from works of love, and that there are no works of love that are separated from Jesus. Works of love and closeness to Jesus are the same thing. Blessed Teresa of Calcutta called it the gospel on five fingers: “You did it to me.” Unlike our life today, when faith and works are often not well-connected, and we know that what we do and what we believe don’t fit right together, and we see that people with more faith can do worse things and people with less faith sometimes do better things—unlike our life today, in the end, nothing in the middle remains. The final truth of human history is this clarification: to love Jesus is to show that love to other people, and to love other people is to love Jesus.
The final thing I want to say is existential, and it has to do with presumption, our presumption upon God, our presumption about ourselves. Three years ago, as it happens, I spoke about this parable from this pulpit; my sermon is on the website if you want to read it. Three years ago, my wife still had a year of life in front of her, and she was sitting somewhere over there I think. Father Andrew was sitting in the sanctuary. And each of you can fill in where you were three years ago, and who at that time was in your life who now no longer is alive. When we come at last to the final gathering of all people, and we stand before Jesus, we should not presume to know where any of us is standing: not Susan, not Father Andrew, not yourself, not anyone. We may surely hope, but we do not know if we will be on Jesus’ right side. In the parable as Saint Matthew recounts it, everyone is surprised. Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee (or fed thee not)? This possibility, that our life might turn out to be meaningless, and this other possibility, that our life might turn out to be worth the inheritance of Jesus’ kingdom—these two possibilities, and the awareness that there is no other possibility, and the awareness that there is surprise at the end, and the awareness that in three years’ time, when this gospel comes around to be read again in this place, some of us will not be here: may all this shape our life daily, and may we do works of love, and may we pray earnestly for each other, the living and the dead.
