My Sermon from Sunday 20 /11/ 2011
The King is Coming
Eze
34:11-17 & 20-24
Matthew 25: 31-46
Introduction
We
are at the end of the Christian year. Let me explain myself: we who follow
Jesus use a religious calendar that helps us remember our faith.
Next
Sunday is the first Sunday of our Religious year – a year that begins with the
anticipation of a Savior – takes us to Christmas, the birth of the Saviour, and
then through his life. We then celebrate the events of Easter, followed by the
blessings of the Holy Spirit, which we call Pentecost. After Pentecost we
remind ourselves of how the followers of Jesus ought to live. The journey from
Pentecost to this week is one that should culminate with the reminder that this
life is temporary, and that the moment will come when the King of Kings, the
Lord of Lords, will return. This year’s lectionary used the passage from Matthew
25 to do so. It speaks of a time when “the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the
angels with him…… all the nations will be gathered before him and he will
separate people”
Here
is the teaching: The end of all time has come, and the Lord of the Ages has
returned to judge the earth. This is an enduring theme, which has been the
subject of many, many sermons. I have often heard it used to scare people into
the Kingdom of God
-
“if
you misbehave, God will come and get you.”
-
“ We might have suffered for our faith –
but one day the powerful King will return and will wipe all the sinners off the
face of the earth”
This sounds like Christian revenge to me!
The
fact is that this is an image based on Imperial Rome in the time of Jesus: the
Emperor would leave Rome to conquer new lands – and would return in triumph:
with rewards for the people who had faithfully served him, and vengeance for
those who dared to oppose him. But this is not the way of Jesus – and such an
image is a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus! I do not believe that this is what
Jesus intended when he told this story. This is not a story about God rewarding
good people and punishing bad people! This is a teaching about the compassionate
King who comes for those rejected by the righteous.
In
order to understand this story we need to realize that we cannot just lift it
out of the Jewish culture of first century Palestine and paste it in our
post-modern world and expect to understand what is going on. We need to
understand the culture in which this story was told.
This
is a culture that divided people into two groups: the Righteous and the Sinners.
The righteous were those who worshipped God in the temple. They obeyed the law,
paid their temple dues, and kept themselves pure. The sinners were those who
did not.
Which
is not as simple as it sounds:
·
If
you were illiterate/uneducated, you struggled to keep track of the law and
probably remained a sinner for life.
·
If
you were too poor to afford the required offerings and sacrifices – you stayed
a sinner.
·
And
you were a sinner if you did work that was considered unclean – work such as
leather workers, traders, government officials. (Leather workers involved
handling dead animals; Trade involved handling Roman coin with its forbidden engraved
image; and Government officials meant dealing with the foreigners and suspected
of taking bribes).
·
There
were other categories of sinners too:
Ø Sick people were thought
to be sinners – obviously they had done something wrong and God had cursed them
with illness.
Ø The non-Jewish people were
sinners: called strangers/aliens
So
let us now return to the teaching of Jesus and see if we read it with new eyes:
Mat 25:31 “When the Son of Man comes in
his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his
glory.
Mat 25:32 All the nations will be
gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd
separates the sheep from the goats,
Mat 25:33 and he will put the sheep at
his right hand and the goats at the left.
Mat 25:34 Then the king will say to those
at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;
Mat 25:35 for I was hungry and you gave
me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and
you welcomed me,
Mat 25:36 I was naked and you gave me
clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited
me.’
The
King is returning – and he tells us who the people are that he hangs out with:
·
“Hungry
& Thirsty” – the poor people
·
“Strangers”
– aliens / non-Jews
·
“Naked”
– those who have been publically shamed
·
“Sick”
– those thought to be cursed by God
·
Prison
– those who owed money/debtors
Jesus
is emphasizing: God will return for those who were rejected by the righteous.This
is not a triumphant King who comes to destroy the sinners: this is a merciful
King who loves those who have been rejected by the righteous. In fact: those
who so self-righteously rejoiced that they had kept themselves pure by throwing
the sinners out: will find themselves thrown out.
Mat 25:43 I was a stranger and you did
not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and
you did not visit me.'
Mat 25:44 Then they also will answer,
'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or
sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?'
Mat 25:45 Then he will answer them,
'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you
did not do it to me.'
Mat 25:46 And these will go away into
eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life
And
so we ask ourselves whether this speaks to us today?
Good
news: the King is coming: and he will gather all
those who have been rejected and cast aside. If this is your experience of Life
hear the good news: God loves you.
Eze 34:11 For thus says the Lord GOD: I
myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.
Eze 34:12 As shepherds seek out their
flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep.
I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a
day of clouds and thick darkness.
But
there is also a very difficult place in this
teaching:
Is it possible that we too have developed categories
of people we call sinners. Do we think of people who are beyond God’s salvation,
and we congratulate ourselves on keeping ourselves pure?
Certainly there are some groups of people that
are rejected by some Christians:
Some think that Muslim people are beyond the love
of God. I find the current debate in the Vatican fascinating: an advertising
agency has put together a picture of the Pope embracing an Imam and the Vatican
says it will sue. I wondered why? Can the Pope not show the love of God to a
Muslim. Or is this one group of people Jesus commands us to hate
Some think gay people are the group to exclude. There
are Christians who spend all their energy insulting homosexual people, assuming
that the Lord will return and crush them. It is almost as if some believe Jesus
said to us “Hate other people as I have hated you”.
Often this is rooted in our own personal
prejudices:
A good test is to ask who “them” is. Whenever you
want to blame someone for the problems of your world, ask yourself “Who are ‘they’?”
Ø Everything
was great before “they” arrived.
Ø If
only “they” were not my neighbours
Ø If
only I did not have to work with “them”
Ø Why
do “they” always get first choice – said by everyone who has a brother or a
sister.
There is a
warning:
Eze 34:20 Therefore, thus says the Lord
GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.
Eze 34:21 Because you pushed with flank
and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you
scattered them far and wide,
Eze 34:22 I will save my flock, and they
shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.
Conclusion: So as this Christian
year ends, excuse me if I don’t get too excited about the vengeful Christ the
King. I am on my way to Christmas – and I can smell the straw and the cow dung
at a manger. The baby who will be born came for those who needed to know the
love of God – and that is where God has called me to be.
