Monday March 11
Readings: LV 19:1-2, 11-18; MT 25:31-46
Either one of these readings from today could be a doctoral thesis: the commandments or the Last Judgement.
I’ll focus on the gospel, but I would invite you to go back and read the reading from Leviticus carefully. I think there is so much more there than most of us knew in terms of justice, labor practices, human relationships, etc. It’s no wonder many Christians didn’t understand Jesus. We never even understood the scriptures that shaped his consciousness!
But today’s gospel is one of the most famous. It’s the end of time and everyone is lined up and separated. People on both sides are basically told and say the same thing, “Lord, when did we see you hungry, sick, imprisoned, etc.?” God says, “When you did it for the least…”
Of course if we knew God was going to be appearing to us today in the form of the homeless man, the lost child or the irate co-worker, we’d be prepared and would likely respond accordingly. But God says, “I will take a disguise….”
So who is the least?
Believe me, if I knew I’d tell you. And what I like is that the category “the least” seems to be one that can take many forms. Yet Jesus does give us some examples: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the ill, the imprisoned and the naked.
It would probably require a lot of unpacking to go back and explore each of these categories of people in the time of Jesus and explain what it meant to attend to these folks and why Jesus might have picked them. But the bottom line is that if we cannot see the image of God in EVERYBODY, the we have missed the central message of the gospel.
In Jesus time, as in ours, people ended up hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned, naked and a stranger because they had been marginalized somehow by addiction, abuse, mental health issues, loss, violence, oppression, discrimination, etc. And so to associate God with those people is to turn the social order on its head.
Jesus might be the first to admit that it is easier to see the image of God in some than others. Yet it seems precisely the people and places where we do not think God could be (in a certain life, in a certain community, in a category of people) that we find out, in the end, that God was there and we missed it.
This is the only place in scripture where Jesus tells us what it’s like at the “end of times” and the criteria seem pretty minimal. Did you do concrete actions that helped the people who really needed it – the people in your immediate life and in the wider world? Did you attend to the people who were outcast and shunned somehow?
I couldn’t help but add this photo:
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