There are endless jokes about the scene that confronts people after they die. Most of them involve St. Peter, and a gate, and a large book in which records of their lives are kept. These stories might also involve three priests, or a priest, a minister and a rabbi. Many of the funniest ones, for some reason, involve lawyers. You’ve all heard them. They all tend to hinge on what you have to do to get through the gate into heaven, and there’s usually a lot of confusion and strange loopholes, or cases of mistaken identity or complicated questions you get asked. Maybe we tell so many jokes because the real thing the way Jesus described it, the scene we see in today’s gospel, is way too much for us. Suddenly, it’s a matter of life and death for all of us.
This gospel reading about the final judgment in Matthew 25 has turned more people’s lives upside down than maybe any other gospel reading. There are twenty centuries’ worth of people like the great Catholic radical Dorothy Day who have allowed this one reading to shape an entire life of service. There are also probably twenty centuries of other people who been put off the whole idea of being a Christian by this same passage, who decide that the idea of a judgment like this is not believable at all, or that if they do believe in a God, it won’t be a God like this one. At best, we dismiss it uncomfortably as yet another demand from God that it’s almost a joke to think we could ever live up to.
In a way, though, there is one feeling that maybe we should have when we hear this reading that we almost never do have. And that feeling is a sense of relief. Look at how simple it turns out life actually is. Look at all the questions you don’t get asked here: You don’t get checked up on to see if you were always a good Catholic, or apparently Catholic at all. The fact that you were pretty much a jerk when you were a teenager, as I was, seems not to be part of the interview. You don’t get asked how successfully your children turned out, how well you did in a career or whether you mostly spent your life bouncing around. You don’t get asked your orientation in any direction, or how many times you failed at your attempts to be a better person. Elsewhere in the gospel we might be led to ask ourselves plenty of other questions about our lives, but here, at the last judgment, those other questions are not on the table, are they? What it all comes down to, apparently, is our willingness to look for God in a very unlikely and not very attractive place, a place where it is not at all obvious we will be able to see him.
How should we feel about this, that this might be all we really have to do, the one thing that matters? We could feel relief at the simplicity of what God wants from us: be with the poor, the imprisoned, the thirsty, the hungry, the sick. But of course, simple doesn’t mean easy to decide to do. If it was obvious there was such a payoff here, we’d be there already — but mostly we’re not, and let’s be honest about the reasons. The prisoners we’re supposed to visit mostly deserve to be in prison, and most of them don’t have hearts of gold. Sick people don’t always get better, and some of them are notoriously depressing and ungrateful. The poor often can’t get out of their problems and afflictions and failures no matter how hard we try to make it happen. Those are all good reasons we spend our lives mostly trying to do other things than what Jesus tells us to do today. It’s easier to go get other types of work done, have some success, do things where you can do something enjoyable, see tangible results, get some tangible thanks. At times, we think that’s where God is to be found, in happiness, that nice life free from difficulty, filled with projects and relationships where we can see progress and feel good about what we have done.
And yet, Jesus tells us today that if that is where we are looking for God in the end we will fail at love. Giving love when there is no reward is not the extra-credit course in Christian life, it is Christian life. Jesus is very direct today about what’s involved: We don’t put ourselves with the poor and prisoners and the sick because it’s an order and we have to do it, we do it because they are actually where Jesus is. It’s as if he is saying that there, and maybe only there, is the sure place to find him. Sometimes we all wonder where to find God, how we can feel a stronger sense of God’s presence and mystery, how we will believe that God is there for us. Today we find out where to go to find the answer.
Today is the feast of Christ the King, and we are not used to seeing Christ in the role of king. We would rather have Jesus the teacher, the Jesus who said his burden is light. It doesn’t seem so light today, as we hear a story about how much people who lose sight of this king stand to lose. But as one great preacher said about Jesus, if Jesus is a king, then what he is is a king of hearts, the only kind of power he wants is the power to bring us to him, to bring us there through acts of love that might not make any human sense really, but where one act of love can redeem us, a single act of love to someone who doesn’t deserve it, and then another one, and then maybe more if we’re up to it. In the suffering of other people we suddenly recognize Jesus, on the cross with them. In the love we struggle to give someone else, we find that same love, given to us.
A Methodist bishop tells a great story about visiting a community kitchen in his diocese where a man was pointed out to him who had worked there free every week for 21 years. The bishop introduced himself and told this man that it must be very satisfying work for him to have been so dedicated to it. The man turned and replied that actually he didn’t like it at all. He didn’t really care for a lot of the people they helped, it was boring work, and all the problems he saw in the city around him kept getting worse. So it wasn’t rewarding. But he said to the bishop, “I’m here because Jesus is here. Why are you here?” Maybe life is pretty simple: Love saves us.