This Sunday is
the last of the old liturgical year, and the following Sunday is the First in
Advent, a new Christian year. In 1925,
Pope Pius XI decreed that this Sunday would be called Christ the King, and the lectionary
takes us to Matthew 25 and the stern account of the Sheep and the Goats. Christ the King in glory sits in judgement
and separates the sheep from the goats, on the basis of how they have given
food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcomed strangers, clothed the
naked, cared for the sick and visited those in prison – or how they have not
done these things.
Rather more
ancient is an Anglican designation for this Sunday, which comes from the
Collect for the day in the 1534 Book of Common Prayer: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people;
that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be
plenteously rewarded… So it has been popularly known as Stir-Up Sunday -- and
a timely signal therefore to make the Christmas pudding.
But all this is
putting off the moment when we respond intelligently to this strange picture of
Christ the King, sitting in glory and in final judgement, separating people,
labelling them indelibly sheep or goat, saved or lost, on the basis of their
service record (…unto me) – and
consigning the failed, the goats to perdition.
It is uncomfortably reminiscent of horrifying separations at Auschwitz
or Ravensbrück, and such other hideous things that are happening still to people in
2017. The narrative in Matthew takes no
account of who had seriously tried but failed in life, or of people who never
had a chance, or people who laboured under crippling handicaps not of their
doing or deserving, or people who did everything right but for self-serving
motives. Robert Burns put it
better: What’s done we partly may compute, but know not what’s resisted.[1]
There are numerous
Christians who accept this story with its uncompromising message… and are
presumably unworried about its implications… or simply hope they’re among the
sheep. But there are others of us who
encounter Jesus very differently. In his
kingdom, as he said, we do not have a binary society of winners and losers, us
and them, the right and the wrong, black and white, rich and poor, male and
female, Christian and Moslem, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile, whole
and broken. Neither did St Paul, we
should note. Far from separating the
sheep from the goats, wrote Paul, Jesus demolishes walls, heals divisions.[2] In John 17 Jesus prays: …that they may be one, as we are one.
The walls and
divisions come down first in our hearts, the primary battleground, and the
process continues to happen there in a practice of silence and stillness, dissolving
prejudices, calming fears of difference or of being vulnerable, replacing blame
and guilt with mercy and love. And a
different person means, to that extent at any rate, a different world.
[1]
Robert Burns: Address to the Unco Guid or
the Rigidly Righteous. It’s worth
reading… based on Ecclesiastes 7:16.
[2]
See Ephesians 2:13-22.
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