Scriptural Focus: Matthew 25:31-46
This passage from Matthew 25 may be one of the most referred-to passages of Scripture I’ve seen, especially in recent years. I’m encouraged by that. I remember thinking when I was young that this passage was a surprise – it didn’t seem to fit with the way that I was taught to read the Bible in those days. I was raised with an understanding of the Bible – a worldview if you want to call it that – that focused primarily on where we went when we died. Church was all about getting an advance ticket to heaven and avoiding the bad place.
The denomination in which I grew up once contained a variety of perspectives, even though I typically only saw one of them as a child. Unfortunately, today it insists that everyone agree on only one of those views. Today it mostly defines the core of Christianity as what people believe about things. To be a real Christian, they say, you have to agree to their particular set of doctrines. These doctrines or ideas are often things like a 7-day creation, the virgin birth, the literal infallibility of the Bible, and so forth. There are minor variations among different denominations, such as whether you have to be baptized to be “saved,” or speak in tongues, or go to mass every Sunday.
In this worldview, what’s most important is to uphold a literal-minded belief system that has been increasingly difficult to sustain ever since the Enlightenment – that flowering of science and rationalism that began in the 17th century. Just before the U.S. Civil War, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species to make sense of the evidence he saw in the natural world. Many Christians were shocked and cried “Heresy!” Battle lines were drawn that have lasted to this day, resulting in much conflict and grief.
Unfortunately, this angry worldview is all that some people know. They think it’s the only true version of Christianity. I have friends who think the term “Christian” applies only to this group. Some people cling to this worldview tightly and become anxious or even angry when anyone disagrees with it. Other people are just really confused, because they feel pulled both toward their religion and toward the modern world. Many people have ended up rejecting Christianity altogether because they think that this worldview is the only Christianity that exists, and it’s not one they can accept.
But there’s another community within the Christian world, one that some theologians such as the late Protestant theologian Marcus Borg have called an “emerging paradigm.” It doesn’t get much press, perhaps because it’s not as sensational. It seeks a different understanding of the Christian faith than people’s religious opinions. It sees the core, the main point of Christianity, as relationship, the experience of God’s presence and the expression of love toward others. This is the broad understanding of Christianity that holds meaning for me, and I’ve learned much from writers such as Richard Rohr, Ann Lamott, Ronald Rolheiser, and others.
This worldview reclaims much older truths about the faith. It’s held by people who have experienced God’s presence in some way but can’t accept the idea that Jesus came into the world and sacrificed himself in order for us all to agree. This emerging paradigm contains people who can’t or won’t accept the idea that science is a gigantic hoax. They’re not going to force themselves to believe, or pretend to believe, things that make no scientific sense.
The gospels do not record a single instance of Jesus teaching people that they need to hold certain opinions in order to be his followers. Instead he emphasized compassion, and he called out those who failed that test, those who strained out gnats while swallowing camels. He said the greatest commandment was to love God with everything we are, and a close second was to love our neighbors as ourselves. He didn’t teach his disciples to be heroic debaters who could sway people’s opinions. He taught them that loving others was far more important than fitting into the religious establishment of the day.
I once thought of this passage in Matthew 25 as an “add-on,” a nice story thrown in as an afterthought. Now I think it’s the central point where Jesus reaches the climax of his teaching about what matters most. The one single criterion by which people are identified as followers or not-followers, sheep or goats, is whether they showed compassion to others. Did they feed the hungry? Did they clothe the naked? Visit people who were sick or in prison? If so, they were following Jesus. If not, they were identified as goats and sent away, with no mention of their religious opinions.
I think of this a re-emerging paradigm because it entails a certain way of life that Christians have followed before. Even before the first followers of Jesus were called “Christians,” they were called People of the Way. The early church understood that following Jesus was a matter of the way they lived, not their opinions. Faith to them was not a head game where everyone had to agree in order to belong; it was a matter of the heart and the entire body in the service of God’s love.
So we have these two broad ways of understanding our faith. People who see the world through the literal view are often on the defensive, angry and defiant towards a world that seems to be passing them by. They hold tightly to a brittle certainty and react when anything threatens that certainty. People with a softer version of this view are often just confused, bombarded by opposing ideas and unable to fit them together.
The broader worldview typifies what Peter Berger called a “mellow certainty” because it’s open to new insight, new information, and new understandings. If this worldview makes sense to you, you don’t have to assume that you know everything there is to know about God. We don’t have to be certain that we’re correct because being correct is not the point. We can say, “This is how I understand things today, but I still have much to learn.” So when a new idea comes along, we’re able to hear it, weigh it, and if the idea has merit, welcome it. If it doesn’t help us become more aware of God, if it doesn’t help us become more loving, we can leave it behind and move on.
In Matthew 25, we are not called to be passive. We are not called to have the right opinions. We are called to an active faith: loving God and other people as a way of life. Notice that Jesus defined “righteousness” as caring for others. That’s all. Righteousness isn’t a matter of having the right theology or perfectly following some set of rules. It’s caring for other people, regardless of who those other people are. That’s it.
I think it’s significant that the righteous people weren’t even aware of their righteousness. They were as surprised as anyone that the king called them righteous. They hadn’t congratulated themselves every time they showed love; love flowed from them as naturally as breathing. They were not preoccupied with themselves or their status.
That’s the core of what it means to be Christian. It’s not something we have to defend; any God we have to defend isn’t much of a God! We follow in faith, trusting God enough to love.
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