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A man saw a child hungry: “God, Why don’t you do something?” God answered: “I did, I made you”?
In today's Gospel there is a scene being set for us where Jesus comes as a Judge… It says: WHEN the son of man comes…. It is not IF, but WHEN --- there will be a time of reckoning, a time of judging..
You could ask: Who will judge? Or: how will I see myself?
At first glance it seems to be a pretty severe type of judging, being divided into two camps, two groups (Cf Australian sheep farmer.. sorting sheep) To one group he says; "Take your heritage" and to the other: "go away from me".
Is it such a black and white thing that with one bang of the gavel people will be condemned or saved?
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Jesus gives us so many examples of patience, of a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, a mother who can never forget a child, the prodigal son. The world cannot simply be divided into sheep and goats, and people are not either good or thoroughly bad. Basically, we do not believe in a God who looks at us in black and white and condemns us with a bang of the gavel.
So, here we read today that passage from Matthew's Gospel that speaks of a king who radically divides people into two camps. But immediately he enlarges, he widens the horizons. He does not speak of a long ago past, but of a very actual presence.
When one day we shall appear before the heavenly king, we will see that our sentence had been signed long before. It was signed not by the heavenly judge but by the stranger who begged for shelter, by the sick person who needed help, a sad person who needed encouragement….
Just a story: It was a familiar situation with a creative solution. The teacher was having a hard time keeping her class under control. There were too many ego clashes and frustrations. Finally she told her students to put their books away, and to take out one sheet of paper. On that paper they were to write one nice thing about each of the students in the class. She collected the sheets of paper, took them home and arranged the comments on a list and handed the results to the class the following Monday.
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Immediately the tenor of the class changed. "I never knew that anyone thought anything nice about me", she heard one student whisper to another. But the class began to work in harmony and to progress.
Years later, at a class reunion, the teacher was stunned and delighted to find that many of these students still considered that list as one of the defining moments of their lives - a moment when they realised that they mattered, that they were of value, that something was good in their lives. Surely Jesus would appreciate this and say, "The Kingdom of heaven is like this".
One day we shall appear before our heavenly king, we will see that our sentence has been signed long before. It was signed not by the heavenly judge but by the stranger who needed help, the sick person who asked for comfort and friendship.
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