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Grace, mercy and peace be to you …
[As we said before] This is the Last Sunday of this current church year. The cycle has taken us from the anticipation of Jesus’ birth … through Christmas, through His Passion, His death and resurrection… the coming of the Holy Spirit, and finally now, the anticipation of Jesus’ coming again at the end of time.
In our reading from Matthew’s Gospel for this morning, Jesus speaks to us directly about what comes after His return … the final Judgment. This passage has caused a lot of confusion and has led to more than one interpretation. And so what we want to do today is to peel the onion, as it were, to discover what really is happening in this reading and how it can be of great comfort to us.
The context is this. Jesus and his 12 disciples have left Jerusalem proper and crossed over the Kidron valley where they have a good view of the temple. The disciples excitedly point out the magnificence of these man-made temple buildings … and Jesus then tells them that a time is coming when not one stone they see will remain on top of another.
What Jesus was alluding to was a “Day of Judgment” to come on Jerusalem in the year 70 AD at the hands of the Romans. And indeed that’s what happened to the temple at that time. Not one stone was left on another.
However the disciples, astounded by Jesus’ statement, want to know more. And so they ask Jesus about three different questions in one breath, “When will this be? What will be the sign of your coming? … and the close of the age?”
Well then, Matthew records Jesus’ interwoven answers to their questions in Chapters 24 and 25. The basic problem was the Disciples assumed that the destruction of Jerusalem and Jesus’ Coming and the End of the age were all one event. We know from history that they are not.
But now… the picture that Jesus paints for us in our reading for today is at the very end of His two-chapter answer to their questions. It is without a doubt a picture of the final judgment of mankind on the Last Day, the Final separation of the sheep from the goats.
But when we look at it … on the face of it … it appears that the final judgment is being made based upon some people extending acts of charity and compassion, while others are damned for their lack of such acts.
So let’s look at this like we said, peeling an onion. The outer layer of our onion would have us to believe that the Final Judgment is based on works. Works extended to “the least of these” which Jesus interprets as being done for He Himself.
Let’s pull back that layer and see what’s underneath. It would appear that one group is being consigned to the fires of hell because of some sins of omission … failing to extend charity and compassion on the less fortunate representing Jesus Himself.
Are any of us guilty of this? Have you ever cut a phone conversation short with a telemarketer acting on behalf of some worthy charity? Have you ever file-13’ed a solicitation from a worthy charity that came in the mail? We don’t give to them all, do we? Could we be accused, then, of not showing charity and compassion …? Probably.
But did Jesus heal all the sick that were brought to Him? Raise all those who died in his vicinity? Calmed every storm?…made wine at every occasion? Obviously not. And neither are we obligated to show charity and compassion to every cause and every request.
But more importantly, as we are under grace, EVEN if we do commit a sin of omission in this regard … is that something that we might expect to see brought up against us in the final judgment? No.
That sin, in fact, all of our sins, have been removed from us as far as the east is from the west. They were buried at the foot of the Cross. Even their punishment, temporal and eternal, has been satisfied in God’s eyes by the blood of Christ.
So … how can the Sheep and the Goats be separated on the basis of works… or sins, for that matter… when both groups sin? That can’t be the criteria.
So, let us peel the onion one more layer … and there we find that the Judgment really isn’t based on our “doing” or our “not doing” as it may seem on the surface … but by our Being or not Being…. Being or not Being what? God’s Child.
Notice this important part of Jesus’ prophecy here … before anything is said to anybody … the sheep are first separated from the goats. What follows then is a justification for what has already taken place.
And notice how the sheep are described. They are those who have been blessed by the Father in Heaven … and addressed as those who are to inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world.
Blessed by the Father? Inheritors of the Kingdom? Who do those sound like? Children of God. Made so by God Himself through Water and the Word. Or “blessed by the Father.”
Remember what also happens in Baptism? God gives us His Holy Spirit. The works that we do, then, are Spirit Driven, and so then, they are seen as Good works in God’s Eyes. These Good works do not save us … but they do give evidence of Whose we are.
These are the Works that Jesus speaks about in this Judgment scene. The sheep doing things not to gain merits for themselves, but doing them solely out of the Love and compassion which comes from the indwelling of God’s Own Spirit.
So, what about the other camp, the goats? It’s described as cursed. Why is it cursed? Because we all are under the curse as we come into this world. Without a savior from Sin, we all are under sin’s curse before God, no matter what we do.
It is by God’s Grace, and by His Grace alone if we find ourselves in the Blessed camp. If we are counted as one of His flock, His Sheep.
And so as we peel the final layer of the onion we find at its core this axiom: Only unbelief in Jesus as God’s savior from Sin damns, not our sin itself, for we all sin. For in belief, our sin is covered by God’s Grace in Jesus Christ. In Unbelief the sin remains, and with it, the curse.
And so at the final Judgment … it is who you “BE” … not what you did or didn’t do that will make the difference.
Just think about that difference between the two camps for a second… what if you were in such a state in this world that you couldn’t offer the compassion and charity of which Jesus speaks here?
What if you were on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder? What if you were incapable because of physical or mental impairments of doing “good works” like visiting people sick or in prison?
Would, or should, those things keep you from being counted as one of God’s sheep? Heavens no. The doing is only an outward expression of the grace that has come to live in one’s heart.
And since no one can see the heart of another … how else can the judgment be validated… other than pointing to externals which are evidences of a different state of “being?”
And so, as we said at the outset … what Jesus describes here should be of great comfort to us. First of all, our judgment is not going to consist of putting our sins on one side of a scale and our good deeds on the other and see which way it falls. Our Sins… sins of commission… sins of omission… are off the table, as it were.
What’s neat, though, is that we may see in this judgment a lot of things that we did unknowingly or unnoticed that were actually God working through us unawares. Things we did just because … of who we are.
Things God did in us and then turns around and blesses us for. Amazing.
Now, as we said, the core of the onion exposes this truth… you remain under the curse only due to unbelief in Jesus as your savior.
And as much as we think of believing and not-believing as intellectual activities … they aren’t when it comes to faith. Being of faith is a state of being which is a gift of God. Otherwise we’d be back to being saved by our works… namely the intellectual work of believing.
So if we’re saved … it’s only by God’s Grace. And that’s where we should stop… with ourselves. We can’t read anyone else’s heart … and believe me, I’ve known some pretty crotchety Christians.
Truth is … it’s not the amount of faith that matters … a mustard seed of faith saves … and only God knows if it’s there or not. And so … casting aspersions on someone else’s eternal destiny is not something we are enjoined to do in the Scriptures.
We are encouraged to give an answer to any one who might ask us about the Hope that we have. To give witness to the grace of God, and let Him do the rest.
Remember, God is a God of Love, and He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but would that they would all come under grace in Jesus Christ.
Wouldn’t it be cool at the final judgment to meet some sheep that God brought into His fold through words you can’t even remember speaking? That’s what we have in this picture Jesus has painted for us today.
Take heart. God is Good. And each day we live “all for Jesus” is another day that His works are abounding in us.
In Him,
Amen.
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