"A King That Surprises" - Reign of Christ Sunday

 

Saint Matthew 25:31–46

One of the few nice things about us being separated with you at home and me here in church alone is that I can show you things that if we all together I could only tell you about. 

So, come with me now to the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic Church in America. It’s a short walk from the Brookland - CUA stop on Washington’s Metro and you can see its magnificent Romanesque-Byzantine Revival dome from the platform.

Once inside this magnificent building the first thing you will notice as is you walk down the centre aisle is the Mosaic above the high altar. It is an impressive work  called “Christ in Majesty”, or “The Apocalyptic  Christ,” or to some only “Angry Jesus.”

If one could picture the Son of Man coming in glory to judge the nations this would be it.  He doesn’t appear happy. If he were to judge the goats would probably outnumber the sheep 1,000 to one and most of us would be sure that, under his stern gaze, we would be a goat.

It is this process of separation of which Jesus speaks and it is his final parable in Saint Matthew’s gospel.  

Jesus has been fending off the scribes and Pharisees for several chapters now: answering their questions, calling their bluff, and warning them and his disciples of the devastation that is about to come on all the earth. But now he shifts our gaze to the time just after the End, when the smoke has cleared, and all the nations of the world are standing there blinking in the bright sunshine of eternity. That’s when the Son of Man will come in all his glory, Jesus says, and all his angels with him.1

The notion that he would be wearing this kind of expression on his face is enough to make even the least pious person tremble.

We don’t need an angry Jesus to help us to recall those times when we could have helped but didn’t.  We don’t need the penetrating gaze of “Christ in Majesty” to remind us that we have often not loved our neighbours as ourselves.  We don’t need a judge to remind us of all the times we should have plead guilty but got off the hook.

We are hard enough judges of ourselves. We don’t need a Christ of the the Apocalypse to remind us of all those times we look back on in our lives and cringe.  Very few of us go through life believing that we never have, nor have had to, ask for forgiveness.  

It is the first thing we do when we come to church we confess that we are in “bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  So we may only shrug our shoulders and quietly take our place with the goats waiting for whatever will happen to happen.

Then this parable of sorting and condemnation takes a sudden and abrupt turn.  

It is important to notice the element of surprise on the part of both groups.  “When did we see you in need and help you?” the sheep ask. “When did we see you and not help?” the goats ask. And in their question the importance of the word seeing begins to emerge.

A very fine Baptist pastor, James Somerville, tells of the time in seminary when he and a friend participated in a seminary class exercise called “The Plunge” where they immersed themselves in an urban experience in which they were called upon to spend 24 hours on the streets as homeless guys.

They panhandled, spent a night in a Salvation Army shelter, and in general just hung around looking destitute. 

It was sometime that morning that I noticed people weren’t looking at me. I was sitting on a bench outside a big department store, enjoying the sunshine, when a mother and her daughter came walking toward me. I smiled and said hello but the mother at least looked right through me as if I had become invisible. And once I noticed it in her I noticed that everyone was doing it. They were looking around me, or past me, or through me, but they weren’t looking at me. If they had looked at me they might have seen me, and if they had seen me they might have had to acknowledge my presence, and if they acknowledged my presence then they might have had to do something for me. It was so much easier just to pretend they didn’t see, just to look around, or past, or through. Just to walk briskly by with their heads held high while I disappeared a little piece at a time.2

 

On the other side of the nation, in another one of my favourite churches to visit I saw what happened when someone really took the time to see.

I was worshipping one Sunday morning at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a majestic place located in the Nob Hill neighbourhood.  

In the more moderate weather they hold their coffee hour in the plaza behind the Cathedral which is often populated by more than a few of the city’s extremely large homeless population.  I could see them all sitting quietly and politely before worship when I entered the church for a spectacular experience in word and song.  

The men and women were still their afterward as the worshippers emerged to have coffee, sweets and fellowship on the same plaza.

It should be noted that the Cathedral feeds countless under-served people during the week and at Sunday night dinners.  But on the day I was there one dishevelled fellow approached the table where the coffee and cake was being served by an elegantly dressed woman of the congregation.

As man reached for the last of the coffee cake that was on the tray the woman said, “Oh no! Not those” I bristled.  The man was taken aback.

“Those have been sitting out far too long” she said.  Unwrapping some of the fresher baked goods behind her she placed them before the man. “Take some of these.  They’re fresher” she said then asking if he would like coffee or tea she served him with the dignity of royalty.  

“Take as many as you’d like and then come back for more.  There is plenty!”  I smiled and thought I had seen this parable being lived out. 

It reminded me of sculpture at another place that I love, The Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul, otherwise known as the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  

The Rev’d Barbara Brown Taylor describes the scene as only she can:

[T]o enter the is to enter a sacred cave, filled with whispers and footsteps ... to see the high altar you have to travel past all the monuments of the faith, past all the memorials to human achievement and long-gone saints ... only after you have taken that walk do you arrive at the high altar, where Jesus sits on his throne at the end of time, surrounded by the whole company of heaven as he balances the round earth on the palm of his hand like a ripe fruit.3

On either side of him, the Cathedral website tells us, the “110 carved figures surrounding the sculpture of Christ are composed of saints and angels, but the six prominent figures on either side are actually anonymous.”4

Through them the stone mason is preaching a little sermon because the figures closest to Christ are not Saints Peter or Paul after whom the Cathedral was named.  The figures closest are not Matthew, Mark, Luke,  John, or any other of the big name players.  Through these anonymous figures the sculpture is telling us that the those closest to Christ are the ones who gave food to the hungry, clothed the naked, visited those who were in prison, gave a cup of cold water to a stranger, and took someone they did not know into their homes.  Those are the ones who are closest to Jesus.

Sometimes we fear that when we meet Jesus he’ll look angry like the “Christ in Majesty” mosaic at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.  And for some he will because they have looked at the poor, and hungry, and downtrodden, the least, the lost, and the last, and said: “So what.  What is that?  What are they to me?”  And they, who have been rewarded in this life with riches beyond measure, the angry Jesus tells us,  will certainly be surprised by the reward they get in the next.

But those of us who have heard Christ’s word in this place and places like it and just went about trying to follow him as best we could.  And even those who have never heard about him or even given a second thought to him in years but yet went about doing his will will hear the one who holds the whole world in his hands, say: “Truly I tell you, just as you helped one of the least of these who are members of my family you helped me.”

And when that happens, whenever that will be, even the “angry Jesus” there at the shrine in Washington just might smile at our surprise.

So we pray: “Destitute King, one with the hungry, the naked and the scorned: may our faith be proved not in dogma or piety but in serving you in the last and the least, through Jesus Christ, the stranger’s Lord. Amen.”5

____________ 

1. James Somerville, “I'd Have Baked a Cake,’” A Sermon For Every Sunday (ASermonforEverySunday.com, November 17, 2020), https://asermonforeverysunday.com/sermons/a53-christ-king-sunday-year/.

2,  ibid.

3. Barbara  Brown Taylor, Sermon. Morning Worship at the Duke University Chapel Durham, S.C. (November 25, 1987).

4. ”Washington National Cathedral - High Altar.” (The Washington National Cathedral), accessed November 21, 2020, https://cathedral.org/what-to-see/interior/high-altar-3/.

5. Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church (New York, New York: Church Publishing, 2009), 43.