Matthew 25:32-46
One of the biggest debates going on these days is about history. Some of our states are enacting laws restricting what teachers can say about history. The claim is that public schools and universities have revised history along ideological lines, particularly with regard to the history of racism in America.
The argument goes that teaching about the history of American chattel slavery and the Civil War makes white children feel guilty. I think a deeper issue is one that our own Earl Simpson wrestled with in one of his excellent poems: his grandfather who fought for the South in the war, and who was without doubt an outspoken and unapologetic racist, as many of our white ancestors were.
To write history as a wholesale condemnation of a whole nation feels to descendants like throwing them into the everlasting fire. Earl’s grandfather was likely quite loving and good to his family and friends. He likely attended church and gave substantially to its support. He obeyed laws and stayed out of trouble. He worked hard and paid his bills. And yet all that history seems to say about him and his contemporaries is that they were complicit in horrific evil.
Germans have had to deal with their Nazi history, and reports seem to be that they have had an easier time with the reckoning. That said, there are some rather draconian laws in Germany: you can be arrested for saying “Seig hell” or for doing the Nazi salute.
Nevertheless, the charge that history is ideological is true. History has always been revised along ideological lines. History is just a story humans tell each other about the past, and the old saw remains largely true: “history is written by the victors.” That is, history has always been written by those who come out on top.
The bible is a remarkable example of the opposite: history written by the losers. And for this reason it has always had a certain thorny edge for any great and powerful nation or empire that considered itself Christian.
Jesus is teaching us about history today, and he gives us a great measuring rod to evaluate it.
The most important fact about the parable of the sheep and the goats is that neither the sheep nor the goats know that their treatment of the least among them has anything to do with God.
The sheep and the goats described in this story represent neither Jews nor Christians. They don’t represent individuals. They represent nations, and the one fact they have in common is that they don’t know Jesus, and they don’t know the Son of Man, and they don’t know the God he represents.
Another important fact is that though this is often called a parable, it is really more of a cosmic image that includes some allegorical elements. The Son of Man is an image of the risen Christ come again to judge the living and the dead. The allegory is how Jesus compares the Son of Man to a shepherd separating sheep from goats.
Matthew’s gospel has for a central theme God’s reaching beyond Israel to the world of Gentiles, or what Jesus here calls “the nations.” This story is clearly told for us, citizens of the United States of America, along with every other nation and ethnicity that isn’t Jewish or Christian.
It is first very interesting to me that the Son of Man does not put any of these nations to a test of faith. None are asked what they believe or who they believe in. None are required to confess Jesus with their lips and so be saved. The Son of Man has come and they have never confessed his name because they never knew him. Now he is right in front of them, undeniably Lord.
Instead the test is simple: how did your nation treat the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned? If you prioritized their care, you will be saved. If you didn’t, you will be eternally cursed.
If that makes us feel scared, that’s good, because Matthew, Mark and Luke all intend to frighten their hearers. I don’t believe God intends that whole nations roast eternally in agony in some kind of metaphysical hell. I think that everlasting fire refers as always to Gehenna, a trash fire pit what was kept constantly burning outside the city walls. Jesus is saying that nations that lack compassion for the least among them are nothing more than garbage destined for eternity’s incinerator.
Indeed, this seems to be Jesus’ most bitter type of condemnation: that we were useless to God’s purposes, like a fig tree that bears no figs, or the inedible chaff that comes with wheat, or the weeds that grow among the wheat that no one could actually eat.
History is always strained through a moral system of thought. When Americans collectively bought into racist ideology, we told ourselves a story of white saviors coming to save the dark-skinned from their degraded state. But as the voices of dark-skinned people began to be heard, that story has changed, and the heroes have become the villains and the losers have become the victors, and statues start coming down.
Jesus here gives us a new measuring stick to evaluate history, and he gives it to us, as he always does, in hope that those nations who neglect the least among them might be shocked and terrified into repentance, that the coming of the judge might move our hearts to open to the stranger, the naked and hungry and thirsty, the sick and the incarcerated.
Now, let me be quick to say that the political or economic policies a nation uses to address these issues may vary. I’m not advocating for socialism or capitalism or any other ‘ism.’ As always, the kingdom of heaven is about what we desire. And in this case, it’s about whether or not we desire to be a nation that welcomes the stranger and cares for the needy. How we accomplish that desire is the easy part.
And this brings this huge question down to you and me.
The first is the question of Earl’s grandfather, and ours. Is Jesus saying they are all in hell because they were racists? My take on this is that the whole teaching is not to be taken literally, but is meant to speak to larger questions of a nation’s orientation to its lesser members. Earl’s grandfather’s kindness and goodness in his everyday life matters, from a gospel perspective, far more than the great sins of his nation of which he was inescapably a part. In other words, nations may be cast into the garbage fire of eternity, but individuals will still be judged on their own.
And so we can honestly look at the sins of our nation without at the same time condemning our ancestors or feeling guilty for their failings. Slavery and the racism that justified it was evil, and that evil infected many people, and still does in some cases. But humans have always been infected with evil, and we will be judged by future generations for ours. But we are also blessed with the grace of God in Jesus Christ, the risen lord who comes to us today to warn us.
The gospel calls us to repent, if we haven’t already, of our hard-hearted tendency to put those in need out of our minds. As we collectively embrace this desire of God to see to the least among us, we, and our nation, are healed.
Amen.
