On Matthew 25:31-46
So I've been reading a book lately, about the life of Christ: The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey. In a chapter based on His "Great Commission" and ascension, Yancey describes our jobs, as His church - as His body. Yancey writes:Commenting on this passage, the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards said that God has designated the poor as his "receivers." Since we cannot express our love by doing anything to profit God directly, God wants us to do something profitable for the poor, who have been delegated the task of receiving Christian love.
One night I was absently flipping the channels of television when I came across what seemed to be a children's movie, starring the young Hayley Mills. I settled back and watched the plot unfold. She and two friends, while playing in a country barn, stumbled across a vagrant (Alan Bates) sleeping in the straw. "Who are you?" Mills demanded. The vagrant jerked awake and, seeing the children, muttered, "Jesus Christ!"
What he meant as an expletive, the children took as the truth. They actually believed the man to be Jesus Christ. For the rest of the movie (Whistle Down the Wind), they treated the vagrant with awe, respect, and love. They brought him food and blankets, sat and talked with him, and told him about their lives. In time their tenderness transformed the vagrant, an escaped convict who had never before known such mercy.
Mills's mother, who wrote the story, intended it as an allegory of what might happen if all of us took literally Jesus' words about the poor and the needy. By serving them, we serve Jesus. "We are a contemplative order," Mother Teresa told a rich American visitor who could not comprehend her fierce commitment to the dregs of Calcutta. "First we meditate on Jesus, and then we go out and look for him in disguise."
As I reflected on the last parable in Matthew 25, I became aware that many of my own questions of God are actually boomerang questions that come right back to me. Why does God allow babies to be born in Brooklyn ghettoes and by a river of death in Rwanda? Why does God allow prisons and homeless shelters and hospitals and refugee camps? Why did Jesus not clean up the world's messes in the years he lived here?
According to this parable, Jesus knew that the world he left behind would include the poor, the hungry, the prisoners, the sick. The decrepit state of the world did not surprise him. He made plans to cope with it: a long-range plan and a short-range plan. The long-range plan involves his return, in power and great glory, to straighten out planet earth. The short-range plan means turning it over to the ones who will ultimately usher in the liberation of the cosmos. He ascended so that we would take his place.
"Where is God when it hurts?" I have often asked. The answer is another question, "Where is the church when it hurts?"
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