The King's Judgement
Matthew 25:31-46
The liturgical year ends this week, and so does our year of Matthew. The parable (*see below) we read on this last Sunday is the end of Jesus’ final discourse, and is followed immediately by the events of his arrest, trial, and passion. We have multiple endings: of a narrative, of Jesus, of all things.
This Sunday is also known as the feast of Christ the King. This was created in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in response to the revolutionary changes of preceding decades that seemed to threaten the traditional influence of the Church in the West. Christ the King was initially observed in late October, on the Sunday before All Saints’ Day, but was moved to the end of the liturgical year in 1970 when the current lectionary was introduced, which made it ecumenically viable when others adopted the three-year cycle too. Now the feast is less a reactionary assertion of Christian influence and values amid the secular, and more a challenge for Christians themselves to consider the reign of Christ.
God’s reign—for Matthew the “kingdom of heaven”—is a central theme of the Gospel we have been reading. The phrase “kingdom of heaven” occurs only in Matthew—the other synoptics use “kingdom of God”—but Matthew uses his version of the phrase over thirty times (“kingdom of God” appears fourteen times in Mark). The dramatic parable of the King and his Judgement also presents a digest of Matthean themes; a sort of review session, in a cosmic and eschatological frame, of issues raised again and again through this Gospel.
We should read this as a parable, at least in part. This whole chapter consists of three stories with related themes (see “Torches” and “Talents”) about judgement, readiness, and lived faith. All three concern inclusion and exclusion, and all concern the ways the characters had acted (or failed to act) prior to the return of the bridegroom/landowner/king. In today’s Gospel the story-telling imagery may seem to have fallen away, but there is still a hint of it: the unnamed “king” reminds us of some earlier stories, and the sheep and goats imagery is clearly parabolic. While Matthew draws this imagery with a lighter pencil and allows something more straightforward—and confronting— to appear, his tendency to play with whether and when are dealing with truth via story or otherwise is found elsewhere too (see the Wedding Banquet).
The themes occur elsewhere in Matthew as well; in both the wedding banquet scenes for instance, the sense of festivity was qualified by recognition that some who thought they had been included were not. Just as here, those excluded were notionally in the “in crowd.” The “goats” of this Gospel thus exemplify the saying in the Sermon on the Mount: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (7:21).
In all this material we hear the priority of practice, of concrete obedience and action. The parable of two sons, the Sower, the Talents, the contrast between Pharisaic deeds and words, all drive home Matthew’s concern for actions, and warn of apparent but ineffective discipleship.
Matthew is writing in a time when confession of faith in Christ did not always lead to the practical outcomes that the teaching of Jesus had seemed to demand. The initial enthusiasm of the new religious movement seemed to be fading in the cold light of day—more days than they had initially thought were left. So this Gospel imagines people who said “Lord, lord,” imagining they were bearing fruit but actually springing up like green sprouts without producing a harvest (see “The Sower”).
While the dynamic of the judgement scene thus fits well with other Matthean material about the inner life of a Church, we have to reckon with the fact that the “king” comes, not just to sort out the Church but to confront “all the nations.” There is disagreement in the scholarship and the traditions of interpretation about the meaning: is this about sorting out Christians (as the Matthean context initially implies) or about sorting out everyone? And are the poor, in whose need the king was to be found, just the community members themselves, or the poor of the whole world?
The ease with which modern interpreters assume both latter alternatives, and thus construct the liberal and privileged Christian theology of earnest service to others, sits uneasily with everything else we know about Matthew. This text is not written in or for a community pondering how to inflict themselves on the lives of others, but for people who themselves experienced insecurity in material as well as other terms.
In fact the connection between the judgment of the Church and of the world has appeared before in Matthew (see 7: 21-27; 13:37-43 etc.). The ancient readers do understand their own call and fate in universal terms—not (just) in the sense we may be tempted to project, of universal niceness and social responsibility, so much as in terms of the personal and ecclesial relevance of the kingdom of heaven.
In the end the reader (and preacher) must avoid using this interpretive dilemma to let themselves off whichever hook they find least comfortable. That would provide an ironic update of the interpretation of the passage: “Lord, when did I let my interpretive preferences get in the way of hearing and obeying you?” This is personal as well as political, religious as well as social.
What may have been crucial and surprising here, first for ancient readers and now modern ones, was not the fact of a universal judgement, or even its ethical inflection, but the inclusion of professing Christians among the goats. The Gospel thus applies the idea of universal judgement to its own local and specific life. The breathtaking lesson for the Christian reading is that their profession of faith does not exempt them from how the expectations of God will appear. Thus the movement the text looks for is not so much from the local or personal faith to a vision of universal ethics, but something like the reverse; a movement from understanding the final truth of the world to making our ecclesial and personal response.
To acclaim Christ as King is not to hanker after a lost cultural hegemony for the Church, but to receive his confronting and yet tender insistence on the immediacy of the kingdom. To acclaim Christ as King is not a rallying cry to such mistakes as Christian nationalism, but to open our whole selves to the kingdom of heaven and all it entails. That kingdom calls us to envision and create the feeding of the hungry and the visitation of prisoners, not only because of their need but because of our own. The poor in spirit, Jesus had said, will inherit the kingdom.
Thank you Andrew. I really appreciate your careful exegesis--going a bit further into the historical background than most of us are able to do. I find I agree with you almost every time, especially in the hard readings. It's really ironic that people use this chapter to comfort themselves about how well they are doing when it's so clearly not letting anyone off the hook.
I've been the priest at a poor church in the south Bronx over the past 9 years. Its last service will be on the morning of Christmas Eve, since there's no money to meet the huge capital expense associated with structural problems in the parish hall. Over these years it has been a revelation how the various liberals of the church tut-tut about racism and the poor while being patronizing to their Black members and failing to listen to them--at the same time putting no priority into investing in ministry among Hispanic populations (or the Bronx as a whole). Words can be pretty, but budgets, balance sheets, and the composition of the vestries that control big endowments, tell the actual story.