You did it unto Me: A Meditation on Matthew 25, for the Last Sunday in the Church Year

Our final Gospel reading for this church year, is the last third or so of Matthew’s 25^th chapter.  In this text, we read of Christ returning, raising the dead, separating the good from the evil, and passing judgment upon them all.  Every person that has ever existed will be present at that Great Judgment Day, and every person will give an account of what they have done in the flesh.  There will be no place to hide, as even death will give up the souls that were contained therein; and there will be no middle ground between those who enter heaven, and those who are consigned to hell.  It is a total culmination of all creation, leaving no loose threads or grey areas.  It will be total, complete, and eternal.

In light of that inescapable Day, Jesus sheds some light on the deeper realities of our lives in this world.  As fundamentally selfish and self centered people, we are tempted to live lives that reflect our own priorities, and quite frankly, to ignore any Day of impending judgment.  Enraptured with our own passions and pursuits, we are easily misled into thinking that our lives are all about some oblique sense of self actualization (whatever that really means…) or checking off the boxes on our personal bucket list.  We can far too easily think that our lives only find fulfillment in our chosen line of work, in family, in politics, in hobbies, or in a thousand variations of the same.  We are ridiculously inclined to a target fixation on the things we desire, so that when we achieve them we think we’ve won… and when we miss them, we think we’ve lost everything.  How many people have chased wealth, prosperity, power, or popularity, ultimately only to find a delusion of either self satisfaction or ultimate despair?  How many tombstones decay around the world, with the names of those who took their lives because they despaired of treasures or passions they could not achieve?  How many shattered lives lie in the wake of those who trampled everyone and everything in the satisfaction of their passions?  Far too many, indeed, are the souls lost to self delusion.

Jesus teaches us that our lives are much more than a shallow pursuit of passing fancies.  While we may deceive ourselves into believing that our thoughts, words, and deeds—the things we’ve done, and the things we’ve left undone—impact only ourselves, the deeper truth remains.  Our lives come forth from the source of all Life, and are sustained by Him forever.  We cannot separate ourselves from the Lord of Life even in our death, since our soul never dies.  We are fundamentally a creature of community, first with the God who calls us into eternal existence, and secondarily with all the others whom He has likewise called.  Ignore it all we like, with selfish desires and passions and pursuits, but we cannot escape our relationship to God and His people, anymore than we can escape that Great and Terrible Last Day.  As creatures, our very existence is contingent upon the will of our Creator, and to our Creator we will all one day be summoned.

For this reason, Jesus teaches us, that in so far as we have done or not done anything to the least of His brethren, we have done or not done it unto Him.  The poor man on the street in need of food and shelter; the fatherless child; the widow and the orphan; the sick and the disturbed; the naked and the homeless; the criminal and the prisoner; they are all created in His image, and we are all connected to the same God who gives us life.  When we deny water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, medicine and care to the sick, or compassion to the prisoner, we deny it to our God.  In so far as we serve ourselves and abandon our neighbor in need, we declared ourselves petty gods in the face of the True God, and take for ourselves the worship and service due to Him.  As such, those who live in unrepentant self worship, unfaithful to the Lord of Life, will be cast into the fires created for the devil and his evil angels—where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the smoke of their destruction will rise forever.

To sinners like you and I, this should be terrifying.  How many times have we taken for ourselves the time, money, and gifts that God gave to our care, rather than returning them to Him through service to our neighbors in need?  Truth be told, far more often than we realize.  Each and every person on the face of the earth, great and small, young and old, rich and poor, deserve to be separated with the self worshipping goats, and left to burn with the devil forever.  It is a condemnation we rightly have earned, and justly deserve.  It is a sentence written in the faces of our neighbors whom we have spurned and ignored and abused.

But for this selfish and twisted race of ours, the Lord Jesus Christ has come.  He has taken this wickedness of ours upon His own most holy flesh, that the righteous judgment of eternal condemnation might be poured out upon Him alone.  Our blessed Lord and Savior stood between us and the righteous wrath of our just Creator, so that He might be the righteousness we so obviously lack.  He took our place upon the hill of Calvary so that He might trade His goodness for our wickedness, and rising again to show His victory over sin, death, and hell, He returned to us with a Gospel of peace and reconciliation with God our Father.  Jesus comes with His eternal Gospel, that all who believe in Him, living by grace through faith in Him and His Word, might not perish but have everlasting life.  Jesus has come to save sinners like you and me, from the cup of wrath that will be poured out on that Last Day.

Alive in Him, His life flows through us to accomplish His will in this world.  With the love and faith He gives to us, we are empowered to repent of our selfish idolatry, and care for our neighbors as fellow children of God.  With His Word living in us, we become the voice of His Word to all creation, that our lives are not meaningless pursuits of selfish pleasures, but eternal relationships with our Creator and Savior.  We are given a faith, a hope, and a love that flow from Jesus into us, that repenting of our sins, we may rise up to a new life, having new eyes that see both God and our neighbor through the Mystery of Jesus’ Cross.  We see that Day approaching, and we work in faith for the love of God and our neighbor, knowing that He desires the death of no one, but to seek and to save all.  We live and move and have our being in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, so that by faith in His grace, our ears may one day hear, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”  Amen.