Sermon on November 22, 2020: Christ the King
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In his little novel The Great Divorce, the writer C.S. Lewis tells the story of a man’s journey from hell to heaven. The book stands in the tradition of otherworldly pilgrimage and, like Dante’s Inferno, begins with a man who discovers he is standing in a place that is unfamiliar to him. He finds himself in line at a bus stop, in what is called the “grey town,” a seemingly abandoned place where it is perpetually drizzling, and the sky is dim but never grows fully dark. Before he boards the bus that will eventually fly through the air and transport him to heaven, the man learns about the grey town from one of his fellow passengers. The reason the town seems to be abandoned, he learns, is that when new people arrive, they quickly develop an intense dislike of their neighbors, and so they simply up and move farther out—until they grow unhappy with their neighbors farther out, and then move even farther. And on and on they go, moving farther away from others, pursuing a peace that will never ever come. At one point, someone stumbles across Napoleon Bonaparte, living millions of miles from the center of grey town, alone in a mansion he built by himself. But they can’t talk to him because all he can do is pace back and forth, left and right, “never stopping for a moment … and muttering to himself all the time” about how everything that happened to him was someone else’s fault.
In 1944, two years before Lewis published The Great Divorce, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published the play No Exit, where three souls are trapped in a room somewhere inside hell. Near the end of the play, one of the souls says that “hell is other people.” Lewis and Sartre did not have much in common philosophically. I doubt that Lewis would have agreed with the sentiment that hell is other people. Instead, in The Great Divorce, what Lewis seems to say is that hell is believing that hell is other people.
On the surface, today’s Gospel reading is not really about hell. Jesus is telling a story, making a prophecy of sorts. It is not, strictly speaking, a parable—but a vision of the future with parable-like elements. It is the culmination of his series of teachings in Matthew’s Gospel, following right after other parables of judgment. After he finishes, he knows that they will be coming for him. “You know,” he tells his disciples, “that after two days … the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.” This is right after he says that the Son of Man will come to judge the living and the dead, and separate one from another as a shepherd might separate sheep from goats. It is a separation of true disciples from fake ones, a separation that places them on either side of a great chasm fixed between eternal life and eternal punishment. And, in the words of the song from my mid-90s youth, from the musical group Cake: “Sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell.”
Why do the goats go to hell? Jesus says,
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.
The goats are stunned. They were not aware that Jesus was anywhere in particular; it had not occurred to them that they should seek and serve Christ in all persons, especially those people they would prefer not to see. “When was it that we saw you, Lord?” they ask. It wasn’t that they did not see, but that they preferred not to see. They did not want to see Christ in all those unlovable and unworthy people. Perhaps those people bothered them. Perhaps they didn’t want them living near them. Perhaps their presence represented a judgment on the way they lived their life, the way they wanted to live their life. Perhaps their presence made their life a living hell. And if hell means going through life believing that hell is other people, then it turns out that the goats were already there. They had been living there all along.
Do you think that the goats know that they are goats? That is the unsettling question that lingers with me in today’s Gospel: is it possible that we are not the followers of Jesus that we think we are? When the Son of Man shows up to render judgment, both sheep and goats alike seem surprised, in a way. And although it’s true that we cannot earn our way into the kingdom of God, that our salvation is not based on our own merit, today’s Gospel forces us to reckon with the reality of our actions, our deeds, and what they reflect about the state of our hearts.
Just as you did it to one of the least of these … you did it to me.
The dream-vision of the sheep and the goats tells us that, at the last day, we must give an account of what we did when we encountered Jesus, whether or not we knew that we saw him. An account of whether we were willing to seek and serve Christ in all people.
Today is, of course, the last Sunday of the church year, which is the feast of Christ the King. And pretty much every year, when I’ve preached on this day, I have given a short history of this feast, which is less than 100 years old, and was instituted in 1925 by Pope Pious the 11th. And every year I think I sound like a broken record, because I keep saying more or less the same thing; but the circumstances feel less like the past and increasingly like the present. The Feast of Christ the King emerged in an environment of European nationalism and fascism. For Pope Pious, it was concerning that European Catholics would be more likely to pledge allegiance to their respective states than to submit to the reign of Christ—to imagine the supremacy of their race or their nation rather than the supremacy of Christ. This Feast was meant to be the Church’s corrective to that way of thinking.
For American Christians in this moment, in 2020, this is not simply interesting historical material. It is the history we are living in. Wide swaths of Christians in America subscribe to some version of a nationalism, which can only whittle away at our identity as followers of Jesus, for we are members of one Body that transcends space and time, composed of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Nationalism distorts the love of country into the worship of country, which makes it incommensurate with the Christian faith. But Christians are a people who confess that Jesus is Lord, which means that his is the only allegiance to which we must pledge. It means that the only supremacy is the supremacy of Christ. All monarchs and presidents and earthly rulers are temporary. The reign of Christ is eternal, for he is the King of kings and Lord of lords.
To confess that Jesus is Lord puts us in an awkward position. If we follow that claim all the way through to its logical end, it will put us at odds with most of the world as we know it. It requires us to trust in the judgment of Christ, and that his judgment is just when he separates the sheep from the goats. It means placing our hope in a king who was crowned with a crown of thorns, who is not found in high and lofty places but rather is present among the hungry and the thirsty, the foreigner and the homeless, the sick and the imprisoned. It compels us to believe that among the least of those in the kingdom is where Christ the King is found.
By drawing near to us, and giving us the grace to draw near to one another, Jesus shows us a glimpse of heaven. Though we are divided and held captive by sin, he will gather us under his most gracious rule. In the time that he has given us, our task is to open our eyes, and imagine that Christ is present in every person that we see, and even in those we may prefer not to see. And to trust that when we do that long enough, we will have found the path into the kingdom of heaven. So that, one day, we might hear the words: “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
I have spoken these words to you in the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.