Posts Tagged ‘sheep and goats’

Getting the relationship right

November 21, 2020

The Reign of Christ

Matthew 25:31-46

Marian Free

May I speak in the name of God who gives us everything that we might give God our all. Amen.

My sister used to work for Family Services. It was a traumatic experience for someone who had just left university. Every Sunday lunch she would regale us awful stories – her way of dealing with the stress. Needless to say a number of her stories have stayed with me.  One relates to a young boy who was placed in a foster home in January. Somehow his foster parents discovered that Santa had never been to his home. His mother has always said that he had been too naughty. His foster parents were so sad to hear his story that, even though Christmas was long gone, they organized the local Rotary to bring Santa to their home just for this child.

Parents use a variety of techniques to discipline or control their children  – corporal punishment, coercion, persuasion, rewards, positive reinforcement, behaviour modification and so on. A certain amount of discipline is necessary. A child who knows what the boundaries are is likely to feel more secure and a child who understand that some things and some situations are dangerous will be better able to keep out of trouble. Whether we like it or not, we are all part of the wider society and we need to understand how to get along with other people and how to respect the law and the rights and needs of others. At its best, discipline encourages a child to be their best self and to get along with others. Few of us make perfect parents, but I am sure that those of us who have had the opportunity to be parents have done our very best to raise happy, confident children.

Unfortunately, there are some for whom discipline too easily slips into control. There are parents who say such things as, “if you don’t do what you are told I won’t love you”, “if you don’t behave I’ll leave you on the street”. A child raised in such circumstances would live in a state of constant anxiety, never knowing what behaviour might lead to the threatened punishment or when their parent’s love might be withheld. Instead of feeling valued and growing into mature and happy people, they would always be insecure, always trying to please their parents in order to earn their love.

Young or old, we all respond much better if we know that we are valued and loved by our parents.

Sometimes the Bible appears to  present God as a demanding and hard to please parent, one who says! “If you don’t behave I won’t love you.”  I have known many people who have not been taught to believe that God loves them unconditionally and live in constant fear that they have done something to displease God. In reality there is no impossibly high standard that we have to reach in order to earn our entrance into heaven. Nor is God watching every detail of our lives in order to catch us out so we can be punished. Instead God is urging us on from the sideline, conscious of our frailty but willing us to be our best selves.

Today’s gospel, indeed the gospels of the last two weeks, could easily be used (indeed have been used) to support the view of a harsh and unforgiving God. If you do not have enough oil the door will be locked, if you haven’t appreciated and used God’s gifts you will be thrown into outer darkness. It seems clear if you don’t reach the bar, God won’t have a bar of you!

I’d like to put the three parables into context. All our gospels were written at least 40-50 years after Jesus’ death. By this time those who knew Jesus would have died and it is possible that the second generation of believers would also have also died. The initial enthusiasm for the faith would have waned and the believing community would no longer be able to rely on the shared excitement of the original believers to shape behaviour and to draw new converts to the faith. At such a time the church would have been looking at new ways to get members and new ways of encouraging members to hold on to the faith.

There is considerable evidence within Matthew’s gospel to suggest that the community, having left behind the first flush of enthusiasm is looking for ways to encourage people to stay and ways to draw others in. What better way to put the ‘fear of God into people than to threaten believers and non-believers alike to an eternity of punishment. Of all the gospel writers none does a better job at this than Matthew. Only Matthew, for example has the parable of the wise and foolish maidens and the sheep and the goats.

Let me make it clear. I do believe that I/we will one day have to answer to God for our lives on earth and let me tell you, that will be close enough to hell for me.

It is easy to think that God is harsh and unforgiving, but the parables of the wise and foolish maidens, the talents and the sheep and the goats may be pointing in another direction. They may be challenging us to ensure that our relationship with God is so strong and secure that we always have something in reserve, have the confidence to use our gifts and the desire to support and encourage others.

If you put your relationship with God first, everything else will fall into place.

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A sheep or a goat? Which are you?

November 25, 2017

Christ the King – 2017

Matthew 25:31-end

Marian Free

 

In the name of God who is who is present in the poor and the vulnerable. Amen.

 

One of the things that comes with the territory of being a priest is the requests for assistance. These can vary from food, to transport, to accommodation – even to storage facilities. Over the course of my ministry I have helped out with train and bus fares, food vouchers and even overnight stays in motels. On some occasions the person asking for assistance is mortified that they have come to this position, incredibly grateful for some help to get back on their feet and he or she never asks again. Others are experts at spinning yarns that tug on your heartstrings making it difficult to refuse help, or leaving you feeling guilty if you do. Some, sensing an opportunity, return over and over again until you wake up to their tactics (or are warned by someone else).

Even though I have a psychology degree, have staffed the Life Line phones and have worked at the relief centre at Inala it doesn’t make the situation any easier. I am sometimes caught up in a person’s story before I realise that it is full of holes and by then, often the only way to move them on is to go some way to meeting their request. The problem is made even more difficult by the fact that, as I have said, sometimes the person asking for help has a genuine and temporary issue – they have just moved house and having paid the bond, the removal costs and the reconnection costs, they don’t have anything left for food. Perhaps the case that makes it hardest for me to turn people away is that of the woman who turned up at 5pm on a wet Saturday afternoon. She had come to Brisbane with a boyfriend who had encouraged her return to her drug taking habits. Between them they had no money and in order to pay for accommodation out of the rain, the woman had been prostituting herself. What she wanted was one night’s sleep out of the rain. Reluctantly I organised a motel room and saw nothing more of the woman until, six months later when she passed the grounds as she was out walking. “Hi,” she said, “Are you the pastor?” When I said that I was she said: “I’m that woman you got a motel room for. I’ve ditched the boyfriend, given up the drugs and I’m in a really good space.” The implication was that my assistance had made a difference in her life.

How, and how much, to help others is a fraught issue. It is hard to know who to help and whether our help will really make a difference. Only those who are professionally trained know how to tell the person with genuine need over the person who is taking advantage of us. So when we are confronted with a gospel reading like today’s we can feel that we are in a cleft stick – we can’t do nothing, but we don’t know what’s the best thing to do.

The problem isn’t helped by the fact that twenty-first century Australia is vastly different from first century Palestine. In Jesus’ time widows, orphans and those with any form of illness or disability were utterly dependent on the kindness of others. In our day we pay our taxes to contribute to welfare payments and to public health care. We make donations to charities that provide aid to those who cannot afford to support themselves and their families. Our clothes and other unwanted goods are given to jumble or other organisations who ensure that they go to those in need.

In first century Palestine a great many people lived in villages. Everyone knew everyone. They knew the rogues who would try to exploit them and they knew who needed what. The charity offered may have been meagre but in most cases help was given directly from one person to another and the donor could see whether or not the money was wisely spent. In cities of a million people we are not intimately connected with the hungry and the thirsty, the naked and those in prison and it can be difficult to discern which charities make the best use of our money.

At the same time the inter-connectedness of our world means that we are bombarded on a daily basis with statistics about homelessness, information about people who fall through the welfare or health care cracks. On a world scale we are confronted by the refugee crisis of the Rohinga in Bangladesh, poverty in the Philippines and elsewhere, the suffering in Syria, Yemen, Sudan and countless other places. The scale of the problems can make them seem insurmountable. How can we possibly feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked and provide appropriate care to those in prison? Sometimes the vast scale of the problem can leave us frozen in indecision.

The problems faced by some people and by some families often seem beyond our capacity to make any kind of difference. There are some things that we can do. We can think carefully about how we spend our money (and about how much we really need for ourselves). We can try to be generous with what we do have. We can endeavour to spend our charity dollars wisely and where the need seems to be greatest. In this great and wealthy nation we can use our democratic freedoms to create a just, compassionate and generous society that takes responsibility for its most vulnerable members and that strives to support nations and people who are weighed down by corruption, overwhelmed by poverty, natural disaster and disease or held in the grip of war and violence financially and through other means.

“Come you blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you: for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed me, in prison and you visited me.” Sometimes the poor come to us, when they do not, we must find ways to reach out to them.

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Who gets to judge?

November 22, 2014

Christ the King

Matthew 25:31-46

Marian Free

 

In the name of God who is known and served in various and many ways. Amen.

I’d like to begin with two stories that reflect a particular faith perspective and way of interpreting scripture. Some twenty years ago I attended a funeral of someone who had been the former treasurer in the parish and was respected and loved by all. His nephew who had spent many of the previous years as a missionary conducted the funeral. During the sermon the nephew said something that took me completely by surprise, but which was welcomed by many of those in attendance. What he said was: “At this point in the service, I often have the difficult task of telling the family that the deceased person hasn’t made it.” By this I think he meant that this is what he would say if the deceased had been an unbeliever. To this day I hope that he was using poetic licence and that he wouldn’t really have used those words. That if that statement represented his theology, that he might have had the discussion with the family before the funeral and as a result might have refused a Christian funeral or better still, that he might have reminded himself that it is God’s place to judge not his.

The second story relates to a conversation with a Parish Administrator whom I’ll call Sarah. Sarah arrived at work one morning in a very distressed state. The previous night she had watched a documentary about teenage homelessness. One of those interviewed was a young girl who was living on the streets to avoid a situation of abuse that included sexual abuse. In order to eat, she prostituted herself and in order to dull the pain of her past and her present she took drugs. In the process this girl was damaging her health and reducing her life expectancy. Sarah’s question was: “If the girl doesn’t come to faith before she dies, will she go to hell – hasn’t she suffered enough?” I suspect that Sarah hadn’t thought much about the issue of judgement until then. As a result of what she had been taught, she thought, presumably based on John 14:6, that only those who accepted Jesus were eligible for eternal salvation. Confronted with the reality of this young girl’s plight, Sarah was questioning her certainty about this position, but she had no tools to help her to find an answer. Her compassion for the girl was competing with her belief that only those who believe in Jesus go to heaven.

Today’s gospel suggests the solution to Sarah’s dilemma and a point of view that the nephew of the deceased may have overlooked. Most of us hear the parable of the sheep and the goats as an account of the judgement of believers, of God separating Christian from Christian on the basis of good works. Yet the text doesn’t say this at all.

In terms to the two scenarios above a number of things are worth noting. First of all, in this account, none of those who are gathered before the king are believers. They are all non-believers – some of whom receive eternal life and others of whom who are cast into everlasting punishment. The idea of a separate judgement for those who are non-Jews has an Old Testament precedent and the concept that those who are not Jews can still know God is consistent with Paul’s argument at the beginning of Romans. What is being described here is not a separation between those who believe and those who do not.

A second point is related. If those who have been assembled are not believers, then faith in Jesus or lack of faith is not the criterion according to which they are being judged. This leads to a third point. According to this narrative, the criterion on which one is judged relates to what one has done or not done to the “least of these” – whoever they are. Good works are not sufficient. It is the beneficiaries of those who deeds which is the pertinent issue.

When Matthew uses the expression “the least of these” elsewhere, he is referring to Christians – whether they are missionaries or disciples. For example, earlier in the gospel, Jesus is reported as saying: “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” The argument then is that those who do not believe in Jesus will be raised to eternal life if they provide relief to Christians who are thirsty, hungry or in prison even if they do not realise that that is what they are doing. For those who do not believe, genuine compassion for and consideration of others – without any thought of reward – is the key to a good outcome at the judgement. If a person acts generously they may well be generous to a disciple of Christ without recognising that that is what they are doing. (You will notice that those who are commended by the king, are as surprised as those who are condemned. They were not acting out of self-interest, but out of genuine concern for the suffering of another.)

Fast-forward two thousand years – if this is not a story about doing “good works” what does it mean for us today? In the light of the two stories with which I began, may I suggest that the parable is a warning for us not to be too hasty to judge others or to presume to know the mind of God. In the light of the parables that precede this one, it is better that we ensure that we are prepared to face the judge than to become absorbed in worrying about the fate of others.

We will all come before the judgement seat – Christian and non-Christian. Let us not make the mistake of presuming ahead of time, that we are in a position to predict the outcome.

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