Matthew 25:31-46 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.”
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"It is evident that Jesus did not simply accept the social duality of his time, the division between good and evil, pure and impure, Jews and non-Jews. In fact, his practice and his teaching add up to a powerful subversion of this duality. Neither did he accept the cosmic duality, as can be seen in his announcing the coming about now of the Kingdom of God, and, for example, in his teaching his disciples to ask, in their prayer to God: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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"There is then a good prima facie reason for thinking that the subversion of the apocalyptic imagination by what I have called Jesus’ eschatological imagination is something proper to Jesus rather than something invented by a disconcerted early community in the face of the indefinite postponement of the Day. This prima facie evidence deepens somewhat when we discover that at the root of the subversion which Jesus was making of these dualities, the criterion of the victim is to be found.
"Jesus offers a prophetic criterion in terms of ethical demands that are capable of being carried out as the basis of his subversion of these dualities: the social duality is redefined in terms of the victim, so that the victim is the criterion for if one is a sheep or a goat (Matt. 25), or if one is a neighbor (Luke 10); it is victims and those who live precariously who are to be at the centre of the new victim people, to whom belongs the kingdom of God which is arriving (Matt. 5-6). No one can be surprised that this insistence, more in the line of the prophetic imagination than the apocalyptic, comes also to be subversive of the cosmic and temporal dualities. It is thus that the forgiving victim, the crucified and risen one, comes to be, himself, the presence of the kingdom in the here and now."
- James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, pp. 125-26
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"So, with Matthew, apocalyptic language and all, we see that his three final parables have to do strictly with how to live in the time of Abel: first, being alert means preparing yourself patiently for the duration; secondly, the patient construction of the kingdom means having your imagination fixed on the abundant generosity of the One Who empowers and gives growth; and thirdly, what is demanded is a non-scandalized living out which is flexible enough to be able to recognize those whom the world is throwing out, and then a stretching out of the hand so as to create with them the kingdom of heaven. All of this is a making explicit of the eschatological imagination through the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination."
- James Alison, Raising Abel, pg. 158
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"Today's gospel is the last of Matthew's parables, the great parable sometimes referred to as 'The Last Judgment' but really more properly referred to as 'The Separation of the Sheep and the Goats'. Just to give us a bit of context you remember that after Jesus gave his apocalyptic discourse to the disciples, the one in which he told them all about how the world would change after his going, and how they were to notice and survive that change, he gave the three parables as ways of allowing them to inhabit this time that was opening up. The first was that of the bridesmaids with their lamps and that was to do with training the eyes to see the coming. The second was the servants with the talents and that was to do with having your imagination built up so as to be a healthy creative partner in building up creation, including yourself, in this difficult time. And the third that of the separation of the sheep and goats, which as we will see is really about the revelation of the reality of what really is all along.
"Just to take us back to the end of that apocalyptic discourse [in Matthew 24], one of the things which Jesus does there is talk about the coming of the Son of Man in language which he will take up again in [this] parable. ... Now every one of those elements was fulfilled at Jesus' crucifixion. That's the sign of the Son of Man coming; that's the moment at which the angels go out to the four corners of the earth to start bringing in the heavens; that is when the true nature of reality is revealed and the beginnings of the collecting ends of the tribes from all nations come.
"What does that mean? It means that the criteria for what it is to be of God starts to be revealed. The criteria of God is the forgiving lamb standing as one slain [Revelation 5:6]. It is the Lord giving himself up to death in our midst. Any of those who perceive it find themselves on the inside of this process which will be taken to all the nations of the world. And eventually that will all become visible, if you like, the criterion will make itself known throughout the world. And at that stage it will be possible to see what has really been going on all along. So this, the parable of the separation, is if you like a confirmation of that. It's making that more of a three-dimensional understanding.
"Let's let's see where it starts. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him.” Okay, so the coming of the Son of Man, that was on the cross. And all his angels with him means that after the Word has been spread throughout the world, after the criterion, the lightning has lit up the reality of creation. And so he's going to come in his glory, which means that what looked like a place of shame and death will start finally to have its full sense and reality made available, that it was the culmination of creation, the opening up of the possibility of the new creation.
"“Then he will sit on the throne of his glory.” In the other gospels this is worked towards with the language of ascension. The ascension was the enthronement of the most high. In other words, the becoming a king, that was the end of the rite that started with atonement.
"So all the nations will be gathered before him, he will have become king over all, he will be, if you like, the criteria the principle of discrimination, of discernment, to use a less frightening word than judgment. And he will separate people from one another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. Now please notice he's separating things that are from things that are. He's not engaging in a moralistic analysis of whether this person is this or that. So there are sheep and there are goats, people have become who they are during the course of their life. Which is why the language of judgment, which we suppose is someone saying something about you, is not helpful here because it's far more a recognition of who you have become. If you have become a sheep then you will be recognized as a sheep; if you have become a goat then you will be recognized as a goat.
"“Then the king will say to those at his right hand,” and here ... it's the only place in the parable where he's referred to as king. It was the Son of Man coming in glory, that's the Crucified One, and the ascended is the king. In other words, all power all authority over heaven on earth has been given to him. The enthronement has been completed and now the reality of what has been going on all along is finally shown - not something extrinsic to that reality, but the reality itself is being shown.
"“Then the king will say to those his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’” Now please notice that language gets passed over very quickly in most of our readings, but it's hugely important if we understand that what Jesus is talking about is how he is revealing the real axis of creation. His enthronement is the culmination of creation as it was always meant to be, not the failed futile closed down version in which we were all somewhat entrapped until his coming, but the fulfilled, real, entirely alive version that has been made possible by him coming into the world, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. In other words, this language is the language of the real axis of creation, if you like, what creation is really about the real structure of creation being made available and visible.
"He said, 'some of you are those who have in fact found yourself on the inside of the making fully alive of the axis of reality, of creation, this is not a moralistic extra thing. No, you've actually discovered yourselves on the inside of this project from the beginning'. ... He returns to the [language from the] beginning of the Sermon on the Mount to refer precisely to people in situations of precariousness. That is how he has been present: he has impressed himself into the lives of those who then went on to live precariously, thus bearing witness to the real truth of what is going on and how creation is to be brought into being. ...
"Having become as it were elements of the new creation pressed through into our time, that's what it looks like to be him. He gave us his body to make his body present in the world in all these sorts of ways. And it's as we go through the grind, becoming radiant, bringing that into being, that we become the least of his family, we become him. And rather than this being an exclusionary tactic, anybody who gets with the dynamic actually becomes part of that whether or not they know that that's what they're doing. Anyone who finds themselves caught up in what we would call the contagion of the Holy Spirit so that actually we enter into the dynamic of being able to give our lives away in the midst of mourning, prison, violence, hatred, all of the sickness - all of those things - find ourselves actually being turned into radiant signs of the coming in of something more. All of us are in fact already on the inside of what is true. We are being brought into complete being.
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"The notion of two things going on at the same time, the bringing into being of creation happens in the midst of the grinding down of futility, and those who are strong, who consider their values to be those of power and domination are those who have not got with the axis of what it was all about at all. It's not that they're being judged extrinsically by somebody saying, 'oh let me tot up your offenses', here it's that they've missed the whole point of creation. They haven't been on the inside of what's been going on at all, so they are simply blocked off definitively. And the promise of eternal punishment, apparently the word behind that is not so much a question of the length of time as a question of definitiveness. In other words, that whole world of futility of which you have made yourselves part will simply be definitively blotted out, come to an end.
"What I want to bring out here is that what's being revealed is the coming to life of what really is. This is Jesus, not as an extrinsic judge, but as the internal criterion for reality. This is absolutely central to the Gospel and something which we forget at our peril. We're talking about the Word, through Whom all things were made, coming into our midst and making it possible for us to become children of God (in St. John's language, but that's what's going on here). He's talking about how reality, the reality opened up by him, can press us into becoming signs of Him, and it's that transformation of the shame of death and the revelation of glory, our route through into radiance, losing ourselves out of love and carelessness into the coming in of the kingdom. It's that that is what blessedness looks like."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6mCawuI2Bc)
[Source of quotes from James Alison's Raising Abel, and for discussion and resources on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/xrstkinga/]
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