The Final Judgment

by Jerry Fuller, OMI

Mt. 25: 31-46

• “Dr. Robert R.Kopp, a pastor in Pennsylvania, was driving through traffic one day when he spotted a cheery bumper sticker on the car ahead of him that read, ‘Honk if you love Jesus!’ Naturally, Dr. Kopp honked. The driver responded with an obscene gesture. [i]

“Somewhere there there seems to be a major disconnect between that driver’s beliefs and his actions.

In today’s gospel Jesus tells all of us who claim to believe in him to put our money where our mouth is; he tells us where it is that the rubber hits the road. He says our good intentions will do us no good on the final Day of Judgment if they have not been supported with good works.

Our Bible passage today reminds us that one area in which the church’s credibility gap is most evident in our lack of compassion for the poor and hurting.

• In 1982, New York City was facing a budget crisis. Winter was approaching, and the city’s social service agencies were unable to care for all the homeless citizens who needed help. Mayor Ed Koch called upon Manhattan’s religious institutions to help care for 36,000 homeless men and woman who would “fall through the cracks” that winter. If every one of the city’s 3500 churches and synagogues would help out 10 homeless people, the problem would be solved. According to an investigative piece in The New York Times, the churches and synagogues didn’t exactly jump at the idea. The article quoted one Protestant minister who said, “The mayor never mentioned this to me. Nobody in his office apprized me of this.” The Catholic spokesman sidestepped the question, and a leading Jewish rabbi, said, “We haven’t the money to heat the building for this extra service.” [ii]

Think of any predicament or situation that is impossible and write across it in bold letters: “Nevertheless, Christ Jesus is King!” This is called perspective.

• One day [says a minister] as I stood in my office, a man came in and introduced himself as a Lutheran minister from another state. His children would be moving to our small town and he had looked diligently and not found a Lutheran Church. I told him that he was correct. We had Presbyterian, United Methodist, Baptist, and Church of God, but there was no Lutheran church in our county. He had stopped by to see if his children would be welcome at our church. I assured him that they would. As he got up to leave, he turned to me and said, “My son-in-law played football for the University of Kansas. He is black. Will that make any difference in your decision to welcome them?” “No,” I said, “but it will be exciting.”
  Two Sundays later his daughter, her husband, and their two children joined our formerly all-white church. I invited her father to baptize their youngest on the day they joined. It truly was a great day for Jesus’ kingdom. Most of the Men’s Bible Group stayed home the next week. People talked, but most of the people stretched their love to include our newest family. I visited the Bible class leader and explained that he was way too close to meeting Jesus to act like this. He was 84. Things settled down, and the class came back. I thought we had passed some sort of test.
  After a few months, one of our long-term members came to me and said her daughter was moving home with three children. I had been her pastor for four years and did not know she had a daughter! I inquired. “Our daughter who met and married a football player from Florida State University. The one we disowned because he was black. The one who was once Miss Tallahassee. She called, and I knew she could come home, because of the new family our church had embraced.” [iii]

The gospel can be played out in various anecdotes and illustrations, but it comes down to one thing: God loves the poor and downtrodden. In fact, he has a special love for them because his son became one of the poor and downtrodden; and whenever we see and help such poor, we are seeing and helping Jesus himself. He said so in today’s gospel. And stories that bring out this truth are pleasurable to our ears.

• In September, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his explosives on a crowded bus in Tel Aviv. Among the victims was 19-year-old Jonathan Jesner, a student from Glasgow, Scotland. Five people were killed outright; Jesner, a Jew who had postponed medical school to participate in a religious retreat, was critically wounded in the blast; he died a day later at a Tel Aviv hospital.
  The young man’s family volunteered to donate Jonathan’s organs – and placed no restrictions whatsoever on the choice of recipients. The Jewish teenager’s kidney was transplanted into a seven-year-old Palestinian girl named Yasmin who was suffering from a genetic life-threatening kidney disease. The little girl, who had waited two years for a transplant, is doing well.
  Jonathan’s family said that the seven-year-old’s religion and nationality were “unimportant.”
  “We believe it was what [Jonathan] wanted us to do. … The most important principle here is that life was given to another human being. We are happy and delighted that [Jonathan’s] memory will live on.” [iv]
• “When the Christians of Caesarea, a powerful and wealthy city of world affairs in the fourth century, sought advice from their bishop Basil on how they should respond to the needs of the poor, his response lacked any of our present day nuances. His message was simple and to the point. “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in the closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your home belong to the one who has no shoes; the money you put in your bank to accrue interest belongs to the poor.”

There is a timelessness about Basil’s words. His tough and uncompromising message applies equally to us as it did to the Christians of that wealthy city seventeen centuries ago. His words remind us that giving from our surplus, in other words, from what we don’t need for ourselves, is more a question of justice than charity. Charity is when we give at a cost to ourselves. And this is the challenge of today’s gospel. Jesus is asking his followers not just to share their material good fortune but also their time. Time is the most precious gift we have after life itself, and time is something that we are all called to share.” [v]

• “A man Michael Christensen spent some time with Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta. In his book City Streets, City People, he tells of the incredible burden of suffering that Mother Teresa witnessed each day. He reports that one day Mother Teresa rescued an abandoned baby from the gutters. The child’s hand and feet had been gnawed away by rats. At the end of that day, Mother Teresa asked Christensen if he had seen Jesus. Christensen, still focused on the horror around them, admitted that he didn’t see Jesus anywhere. Mother Teresa explained Jesus’ teachings from Matthew 25 about taking care of the poor, the hungry, the weak. And then she said quite simply, “You did it to me.” “You did it to me.” Mother Teresa saw Jesus all around her every day. [vi]
• During the war in the Balkens, a Catholic nun in Croatia found a unique way to get help for the war refugee. Dressed in her nun’s habit, she would go to a door and plead with those who answered her knock, “I have no place to stay. I’m hungry. Can you take me in?” Croatia is a deeply Catholic country, so the answer to the nun’s plea was almost always, “Of course, Sister.” Then the nun would step back to let the real refugees with her be seen. They were usually taken in by the family. [vii]

That nun understood the nature and priorities of Jesus. Our treatment of the “Least of these” in our society directly reflects our love for Jesus. We can talk all day about our being a “Christian nation.” We can plaster the walls of our public buildings with posters of the Ten Commandments. We can dress from head to toe in WWJD clothing. But all our devotion and worship is worthless in God’s sight if we don’t take care of the needy.

According to a 1994 report from the organization, Bread for the World, “The global community has the capacity to provide for every man, woman, and child with adequate food, clean water, safe sanitation, primary health care, and basic schooling by the end of the century at an affordable price. UNICEF estimates that the U.S. share of such an effort would be an additional $2 billion a year. That’s less than what people in the United States spend MONTHLY on beer.” [viii]

The famous evangelist Billy Sunday was once asked, “What must I do to go to hell?” Sunday answered, “Nothing.” [ix]

That’s the message of Matthew 25 also. If we want to have hell on earth and hell for eternity, then we will look the other way. The goats were those people in Jesus’ parable who saw the need, but did nothing to help. The goats’ response is captured perfectly in this paraphrase of today’s passage:

• I was hungry and you said apply for food stamps. I was homeless and you said there is a [Salvation Army] shelter in town. I was lonely and you said get a Sony Walkman. I was beaten and you said avoid dark alleys. I was naked and you said a local church has clothes. I was sick and you said apply for Medicaid. I was illiterate and you said there are library cards. I was poor and you said God loves the poor. I was imprisoned and you said try the parole board. I was depressed and you gave me a Smile button. I was dying and you said there is eternal life. Now I know why the answers are not the solutions.” [x]
• “An army chaplain was visiting wounded soldiers in the hospital. The chaplain offered to read some Bible passages to one young soldier. But the soldier said, “I’m cold,” so the chaplain wrapped his own coat around the young man. Next, the soldier asked for something to drink. The chaplain propped up the soldier’s head and held his own water canteen to the young man’s lips. Then the chaplain asked again if he could read some passages to the young man. This time, the soldier replied, “If there is anything in that Bible that caused you to do what you’ve done for me, yes. Please read to me that part of the Bible. [xi]

“’For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The world will judge the Church by how well, or how poorly, we follow this teaching. [xii]

1. “God is Love, But He Hates … “ by Dr. Robert R. Kopp, Feb 18, 1996. p. 1, as quoted in Dynamic Preaching 17 (2): 49 (Seven Worlds Corporation, 310 Simmons Road, Knoxville TN 37922) October, November, December 2002.
2. Bruce Larson, Living out the Book of Acts, (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1984), p. 80.
3. “It is all small stuff,” Lectionaid 10 (4): 46 (LectionAid, Inc., P.O. Box 19229, Boulder, CO 80308-2229. J. Nichols Adams, publisher) September-November 2002.
4. Reuters, September 22, 2002, as quoted in “A vision of life,” Connections Solemnity of Christ the King, (MediaWorks, 7 Lantern Lane, Londonderry, N.H. 03053-3905) November 2002.
5. Model homily, Good News 29 (11): 398 (Good News, Liturgical Publications Inc., 2875 South James Drive, New Berlin, WI 53151) November 2002.
6. “Loving the unlovely,” by Michael E. Williams, Preaching, Nov./Dec., 1998, pg. 34.
7. From Plough magazine, cited in Salt, as quoted in “Sisters of Mercy,” Connections, _ 20th Sunday OT, Year A, Aug. 1993. Fuller, Gerard, O.M.I. Stories for All Seasons (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1996) p. 36.
8. Bread for the World Background Paper (quoted in Salt, Jul/Aug 1994), Current Thoughts & Trends Sept. 1994, p. 38.
9. A. Philip Parham, Letting God: Christian Meditations for Recovering Persons (Harper San Francisco, 1987).
10. “Peace Times, Salt, June 1994. p. 24.
11. “In His Own Words ‘By This Everyone Will Know That You Are My Disciples,’” by C. Thomas Hilton, The Clergy Journal, August 1998, pp. 31-32.
12. “Hungry for bread,” Dynamic Preaching 17 (4): 51-3 (Seven Worlds Corporation, 310 Simmons Road, Knoxville TN 37922) October, November, December 2002.

(Comments to Jerry at padre@tri-lakes.net. Jerry's book, Stories For All Seasons, is available at a discount through the Homiletic Resource Center.)