Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Last Sunday after Pentecost A - Christ the King - Sunday 23 November 2008
Matthew 25: 31-46
Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King, whose theme invites us to consider the nature of power, authority, rule: Christ in majesty. It is a moment to ponder ideas of power, our own among many others, in relation to Christ, and to place our systems of power, of whatever sort, under Christ’s judgment.
Today’s gospel passage has the ultimate place of rhetorical and narrative emphasis in the gospel; it is the culmination of the central section of Matthew, the last of the parable of Jesus. It is utterly familiar to all Christians. We have all heard it many times, and, I trust, wondered on which side of the great divide we will find ourselves. Our egotism almost always focuses our attention on our own place in this great dramatic scene, and well it should. It contains a key teaching of Christ, which cannot be missed, and it also contains the motivation for putting it into practice. It has had an incalculable effect on the social and political development of the Christian world.
But rather than flog you on the left as goats and praise you on the right as sheep this morning, I would like to pay attention to two aspects of the figure of Christ in this story, one Roman and one Jewish. They are both in the nature of explorations, not settled interpretation. But I believe they can tell us a great deal about the Christian vision of power and authority.
There is increased scholarly attention these days to the possibility that the New Testament was written as a direct challenge to Roman, imperial authority. It is an exciting field to dip into, and yields some surprising results. The Nativity stories, for example, seem at least in part to take their structure from miraculous birth narratives circulating about Julius, Augustus and Tiberius, as well as their less illustrious successors. The point would seem to be a mockery of the pretensions of imperial propaganda, saying that real divine power comes from the unexpected, the disenfranchised, the marginal, the poor, the oppressed, the meek and the weak.
The scene of today’s story is a trial, but not a trial most of us would recognize. The analogue of this trial in Jesus’ time is a first century magistrate’s court. In the Roman world, judging was done by a variety of people, but the head of government always acted as a judge. It was the job of the head man to preside in court, whether he was the mayor of a village, the governor of a province, the king or even the emperor. On the stated days he would rise early, dress himself as impressively as he could in the right robes, wait until his cohort of official bodyguards and escorts assembled, and walk in a great group to the place of=2 0judgment, a spacious place where the public could gather and watch the public’s business being done. Even the most irresponsible Roman emperors managed this fairly well, even Nero on a morning after with a hangover.
So the Son of Man arrives “in his glory”, “all the angels with him”, and sits on “the throne of his glory”. Note the superlatives here: two glories in a single sentence, seeming to say that this glory, unlike that of a mere king or emperor, cannot be surpassed. And he arrives not with just the usual retinue of paid bodyguards and political ladder climbers, but with angels, and not just angels, but all the angels. This is the court of courts, the judgment to end all judgments.
The power of courts rested then and still rests on two pillars: the undisputed law and the legitimacy of the magistrate. The court’s job is to discover the law, which might be obscure, to examine those brought before it, and to apply it with impartial equity.
But this is not an imperial court. The law discovered is not some tort or contract or criminal offense. It is, in fact, the law of God for his world, a law that conscious beings in God’s world are expected to know and will be held responsible for.
The real challenge to imperial ideology in this story is a surprise. The Roman imperial system rested on the cult of the emperor, who personified divine power effective in the world, even before formal cult worship developed. The coins of Augustus had inscribed on them the letters DF - divi filius, son of the divine one, meaning the divinised Julius Caesar. To act against the law was to act against divine power. So the emperor is present in every legal proceeding not simply as the chief magistrate but also as guarantor of the divine will. To act against the law is to act against Caesar.
This imperial ideology is turned on its head in Matthew’s parable. The principle is accepted; the divine will is to be found in the most ordinary of keepings and breakings of the law. But where is the divine one to be found? In power, intervening, coercing, judging from the throne? No. If you want to find the real emperor, you must look for him in the unlikeliest of places. You must look for him in those in need, the sick, hungry, imprisoned riffraff of the part of life respectable people do not wish to see. No wonder the imperial authorities did not like Christians. This is not simply an ethical recommendation for mutual support in the human community. It is a pointed insult to the pretensions of the government and its entire ideology. I suspect the Romans, and every other thinking person as well, knew perfectly well what stories like this meant.
Our second interesting aspect of this story is deeply Jewish. At the beginning of his book, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision of the throne of God. It is a wheeling chariot surrounded by angelic hosts, sacred animals, and complex sounds and motions, and high above, “something that looked like a sapphire; it was shaped like a throne and high up on this throne was a being that looked like a man” (Ezekiel 1:26).. The prophet is then sent on a mission of judgment to Israel.
Jewish thinkers in the first century, and before and after, were fascinated with the idea of the throne of God, and a central school of Jewish mysticism, called Merkabah, or chariot/throne, mysticism, grew up around it. Central to this mysticism is the idea that God from time to time lifts the veil to show His true nature, and that in doing so, enacts ultimate justice. With a few simple strokes, Matthew indicates that this ineffable experience is the one we are invited to imagine.
How often do we hear this parable and miss the double glory, skim past the word “all” applied to the angels, and take the throne for granted? I think that in the first century this parable would have signified to the alert nothing less than the revelation of the nature of God in Jesus Christ. This is not simply social justice in apocalyptic clothing. This is the Merkabah of God himself, about to reveal the true nature of his creation and its law. And if we failed to miss the mystic=2 0reference, it is spelled out in open court in so many words: “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”. The law you have kept or not kept is the foundational principle of creation and of divine activity in the world. And what is that law? To notice those in need and come to their aid. When you do that, you have found God and entered into right relation, even into union, with him. When you brush past the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the ill and imprisoned on your way to something more urgent, you are leaving God in the dust.
That is the glory. That is the throne. That is how you encounter, how you become, divi filius.
Emperors and dead ideologies, obscure prophecies about thrones, it all seems so far away, and why is Adam loading this on us so thick this morning, you are perhaps thinking. Well, this lesson is for us as well. We are still crafting ideologies of power, rejoicing when we find what we think will give us the answers. We need this reminder of God’s ideology of power. We need this reminder all the more when we think we have found the answers and won the victories. The Christian faith says, No human ideology is ultimate. Every system of power is under judgment. Remember the criteria of divine presence, and re-evaluate.
How many of our political ideologies have promised the in-breaking of the twentieth century version of divine power and justice and did not ultimately deliver? This parable’s power over the centuries lies in the uncompromising way it holds God’s values against the world’s values. Matthew’s parable is shocking in its implications. No less today than in the first century does it scandalize us. And if it doesn’t? We are worse off than we think. How much energy and craft we employ to get power, and for what? this story seems to ask. The real divine in-breaking is all around us. It is in those we wish not to see. And what if we are among them? It is worth thinking about when your world is crumbling. And more radically, would we place ourselves among the least in order to be close to God’s foundational presence in creation? Would we choose to be truly poor, truly humble?
Do you want to see the glory of God, to be caught up into the third heaven with St. Paul, who was also a Merkabah mystic? Then look to the least of these. Would you find the divine presence in the world, conforming your life to what is good and just and right? Then act with generosity and graciousness to the least of these. For they are the face of God.
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