Seeing Jesus (Part 2)
This is the second part of a sermon on Matthew 25:31-26:6. See here for part one.
Stage Two: A Deep Dive into Seeing Jesus
· Having considered our passage’s literary features, let’s
conclude by taking a deep dive into what it teaches us about
seeing Jesus. I’ll focus on three points.
First: We must see Jesus as the merciful King of the merciful Kingdom of God.
· Jesus is the King of the Kingdom of God.
o Today’s text teaches as much.
· But the text also presumes that Jewish lens I mentioned at
the sermon’s start.
· Consider, for example, that in Deuteronomy 5 God
reminds Israel of its merciful liberation from Egyptian
captivity and oppression before giving the first of the Ten
Commandments.
o Deuteronomy 5:6 reads:
6 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of
Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
· Consider too how God ties Israel’s merciful liberation to
the Fourth commandment to keep the Sabbath.
12 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
· Any Israelite hearing or reading these words would
remember that God hears oppressed Israel’s cries in Egypt,
and responds with mercy, acting to liberate them from
bondage and bring them into abundant life.
· Put differently, OT Israel’s theocracy presumes God is
merciful. It presumes God hears the cries of suffering
people, especially God’s covenant people. And it
presumes God works merciful liberation unto life.
Kids, be sure to remember: Mercy promotes God-honoring liberation—freedom—unto life.
o As Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff writes:
“The biblical God is fundamentally a living God, the author and sustainer of all life.”
o Likewise, Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez
writes:
“The messianic proclamation of Jesus Christ is likewise focused on liberation. The theme runs through the entire Bible and reveals to us a God who loves life; life is God’s will for all beings. To believe in Yahweh, the God who liberates, and to maintain that Jesus, “the author of life” (Acts 3:15), is the Son of God, is to be a friend of life.”
o Again, we see this emphasis on mercy’s connection to
life throughout Scripture.
o As Asian-Latino scholar Robert Chao Romero
observes:
o “[M]ore than 2,000 Bible verses [speak] of God’s heart
for the poor, immigrants, and all who are
marginalized.”
· These quotations point to one reason why Solomon’s
reign—often taken to be one of the best—is grotesque.
· If you read 1 Kings 1-11, you’ll find Solomon building
God’s temple while acting like an oppressive Pharaoh
stamping the life out his laborers.
· This is not how the ultimate Davidic King acts.
o During his first sermon in Nazareth, Jesus declares
that he has come to promote God’s liberating,
merciful kingdom.
o Reading from Isaiah he announces that:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
o King Jesus promoted this liberating mercy throughout
his earthly ministry, caring for the least of these in
every town he enters.
§ Don’t you remember him mercifully healing those
who cried out “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on
me!”
§ From which of these did Jesus turn away? To
which did he say no?
o Similarly, King Jesus emphasizes that God’s Kingdom
presumes that the Sabbath is a day for mercy.
§ This view leaves him at loggerheads with Israel’s
religious leaders.
· Jesus sees the Sabbath as a Kingdom day set aside to
promote mercy and life
· The religious leaders see it as a day to avoid labor.
o King Jesus also makes it clear that only the merciful
inherit the kingdom of God.
§ This is what our passage unsettlingly teaches.
· The sheep are the merciful. They inherit the kingdom.
· The goats are not merciful. God banishes them along
with Satan and the fallen angels.
§ Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount that the
merciful are blessed because they will receive mercy.
§ In the Olivet Discourse, he teaches that the non
merciful are cursed.
Second: We must see that Jesus identifies with the Least of These.
· Recall that Jesus identifies with the least of these while
explaining why the blessed inherit the kingdom and the
cursed are damned.
o Insofar as people do or do not show mercy to those
that hunger, thirst, are strangers, are naked, are sick,
or are in prison, they do or do not show mercy to
Jesus himself.
o Jesus makes this point abundantly clear by identifying
as the recipient of the blessed’s merciful actions 22
times in five verses!
· Throughout the centuries, around the globe, and across
denominations people have seen and emphasized the
implications of Jesus’s identification with the least of these.
· Again, recall John Calvin’s claim:
o [C]hrist is either neglected or honored in the person of
those who need our assistance. So then, whenever we
are reluctant to assist the poor, let us place before our
eyes the Son of God, to whom it would be base sacrilege
to refuse anything.
· The El Salvadorian martyr Archbishop Oscar Romero says
something similar:
o “The face of Christ is among the sacks of baskets of the farmworker; the face of Christ is among those who are tortured and mistreated in the prisons; the face of Christ is dying in the children who have nothing to eat; the face of Christ is in the poor who ask the church for their voice to be heard. How can the church deny this request when it is Christ who is telling us to speak for him?”
· But whereas Calvin and Romero understand this text’s
implications, too few contemporary U.S. Christians do.
· If you ask most U.S. Christians “Where is Jesus?” they’re
unlikely to say, “among the least of these.”
· Now, to be sure, Jesus is not only among the least of these.
o As the Jesuit Priest Jon Sobrino writes from El
Salvador:
Christ is present in his church, principally in holy scripture, in the proclamation of the word, in those who gather in his name and in the person of their pastor.
o To Sobrino’s list we should add that Jesus is uniquely
present with the sacraments and is seated at the right
hand of God the Father.
· But none of these options is mutually exclusive with the
claim that Jesus identifies with and is uniquely among the
least of these in society.
o As Puerto Rican theologian Orlando Costas writes:
“Jesus is today one with the outcast and oppressed of the earth. Wherever there is oppression, there is the Spirit of Christ incarnated in the experience of the oppressed; there is God contextualized in the present history of the nonpersons of society.”
· But here we must pause.
o For some US Christians, the thought that Jesus is
today with the least of these is inconceivable.
o How, they ask, could Jesus be with them?!
§ How could he be with the slothful, the lazy?
§ How could he be with those throwing pity parties?
§ How could he be with the welfare queens?
§ How could he be with those who simply won’t get
up and move around?
§ How could he be with those asking for handouts?
§ How could he be with the hordes of invaders?
§ How could he be with the undocumented—with
the “illegals?”
§ How could he be with criminals?
§ How could he be with the toothless, smelly,
disheveled bit of human flesh choosing to sleep on
top of cardboard in the dead of winter?
§ How could he be with those who don’t speak
English?
§ How could he be with the “underdeveloped
nations” who stubbornly refuse Western
civilization and its riches?
§ How could he be with those shabby souls resisting
pipelines or the removal of Appalachian mountain
tops?
§ How could he be in the ghettos with those people
who have culture problems?
§ How could he be with those old, decayed bodies
a sneeze away from being a corpse—sitting in
nursing homes or assisted living centers waiting for
death?
§ How could Jesus be with this sick child that’s been
keeping me from sleeping?
§ How could he be with those suffering from their
own poor—even sinful!—decisions?
§ How could he be with those who aren’t
assimilating—like my family did?
§ How could Jesus be with the refuse of life? Doesn’t
he want to make the world great again?
· Oh brothers and sisters, I told you we had to pause.
o We are in the thick of it now.
· Jesus tells us that he is with the least of these and, put
bluntly, many of us don’t see him there.
o We’re blind.
· Racism, sexism, nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia,
misogyny, classism, capitalism, individualism, ableism, and
ageism are rendering us blind.
o These are sinful constructions; ideologies of death,
not life.
o They are part of the anti-Kingdom, not the merciful
kingdom of God.
o These ideologies routinely blind us to the least of
these, to the fact that these people deserve mercy.
o And they blind to King Jesus’s presence among the
downtrodden, the suffering, along with his demand
that we be merciful to them.
· Brothers and sisters, if we are to see and love our hungry, thirsty, sojourning, naked, sick, and incarcerated neighbors, we need to change how and where we look.
o We need to repent—to turn from being unmerciful to
merciful.
o We need what Brazilian Christian Paulo Freire calls a
concientización:
The experience of becoming awakened to the reality of injustice in the world.
o We need to sing songs, hymns, and spiritual songs
that help us see Jesus among the suffering, among the
marginalized, among the vulnerable.
o We need sermons, Sunday school courses, Bible
studies, reading groups, and conferences that help us
eradicate vicious modes of seeing so that we may see
with the merciful gaze of our elder brother and king,
Christ.
o We need to pray for the installation and endurance of
our deaconate, without believing or acting as if deeds
of mercy are their responsibility.
o We need to ensure our benevolence giving doesn’t
stop within the household of faith.
o We need to pray for the ability to resist the temptation
to avoid caring for the least of these because it will
cost us—and socio-economic gains our immigrant
parents made for us.
o We need to study chronic illness and trauma, and
improve how we relate to those suffering from either
or both.
o We need to train our children to pray and tend to
broken human bodies, those who Howard Thurman
says have their backs against the wall and who Frantz
Fanon calls the wretched of the earth.
o We need to internalize the redemptive truths that our
sisters Andrea Smith and Rita Nakashima Brock
proclaim: there are no fully innocent victims; and the
lack of such fully innocent victims doesn’t justify
oppression or withholding mercy.
o We need to work with just prison ministries, refugee
agencies, and disaster relief centers.
o We need to find ways to care for those incarcerated in
immigration detention centers.
o We need to support the hard work of learning other
languages that we can welcome our non-English
speaking neighbors. And if you know multiple
languages, use them to promote mercy—not merely
ascend up a corporate ladder.
o We need to collaborate about how to address the
massive economic impact the coronavirus pandemic
is having. We must not miss this opportunity to care
for the jobless, sick, isolated, or abused.
· Let me stop here, recognizing that we should do so many
more things.
· Yes, this list is daunting.
· Yes, we’ve limited resources.
o But last week we learned what God could do with five
loaves and two fish.
o Last week we saw Jesus do the miraculous to perform
deeds of mercy.
o Let us plead with the Father, Son, and Spirit to
multiple our resources and give us mercy-saturated
discernment to use them to advance King Jesus and
his merciful Kingdom.
Third: Let us see Jesus in light of our Passage’s end
· Recall how today’s Scripture ends.
o Jesus makes an educational transition from discussing
the end times to the Son of Man’s crucifixion.
o To many this shift is strange.
o But if we share Matthew’s Jewish lens and remember
Isaiah’s suffering servant, we should expect this
transition.
o Put differently, if we carefully read Isaiah 53, we
should expect Jesus was—and is!—with the least of
these, and that is the Suffering Servant who dies to
atone for sin.
· Consider Isaiah’s presentation of the Suffering Servant.
1 Who has believed what he has heard from us?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
9 And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,
because he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and makes intercession for the transgressors.
· Yes, Jesus is the Son of Man of Daniel 7 and the ultimate
Davidic King of Psalm 2.
· But Jesus is also the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, a social
outcast deeply familiar with rejection, oppression, and the
sorrow they produce.
· Notice that Isaiah weaves these marginalized features into
the Servant’s redemptive work.
o For Isaiah, the Servant’s work comes with being the
least of these.
o The marginalized Servant is the cosmic redeemer
and, as we’ve seen, the cosmic King.
· May this Suffering Servant King cleanse us of our sinful
failures to be merciful. And may his Spirit transform us into
a people of mercy.
