Pentecost 26A - “Seeing and Seen by the King”

 Saint Matthew 25:31–46

If you ever visit Washington, D.C., along with the myriads of other sights, there are two places you really should see.

The first you will probably be able to see from the aeroplane because it sits atop Mount Saint Alban, arguably the most commanding spot in the entire Washington area.

The other is a little tougher to find.  You have to take the Metro to the Brookland - Catholic University of America stop but you will be able to see it from the platform. It is the majestic Romanesque-Byzantine Revival dome Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Roman Catholic Church in America.

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 “The 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. He is muscular, strong, and severe. 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 an angry expression on his face is enough to make even the least pious person tremble.

Strangely enough, one of my intellectual heros, the conservative columnist, the late Dr. Charles Krauthammer, said once “‘I don’t believe in God, but I fear him greatly.”

Believer or non-believer the “fear factor” looms large.

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 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.3

 It is important to see.  And, when we do, another image of Jesus appears.  This time he is welcoming but we must see who he is welcoming and why.

Across Washington, a bus ride up Massachusetts Avenue, it the Cathedral that could have been seen from the plane.  It is the Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul, otherwise known as the National Cathedral.  

Presidents get buried from there, as do other notable persons of state, celebrities, and it is even the final resting place for the remains of Matthew Shepherd, “the young gay man [who in] October 1998 ... was beaten unconscious by two men he had encountered in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. After robbing him, the men left 21-year-old Shepard tied to a fence on the outskirts of town. Eighteen hours passed before he was found by passing bicyclists. He died from his injuries five days later without regaining consciousness.”4 His ashes are in the Cathedral too.

So, they live up to their mission statement of being a house of prayer for all people.

The Rev’d Barbara Brown Taylor describes what is like to walk down the centre aisle of that great place 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.5

 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.”6

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 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.

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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. William Kristol, “Charles Krauthammer: In His Own Words,” Washington Examiner, June 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/charles-krauthammer-in-his-own-words.

3. Somerville, loc.cit.

4. Tom Gjelten and Amita Kelly, “‘You Are Safe Now’: Matthew Shepard Laid to Rest at National Cathedral,” NPR, October 26, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/10/26/659835903/watch-matthew-shepard-laid-to-rest-at-national-cathedral.

5. Barbara  Brown Taylor, Sermon preached at the Duke University Chapel Durham, S.C. (November 25, 1987).'=

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