By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Nov. 26, 2023)
Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost. Next week is a new year in the church calendar advent. This Sunday is traditionally known as Christ the King Sunday, and once every three years on Christ the King Sunday, we have this lesson from the Gospel of Matthew about the final judgment, partly because it's one of the few places where the Greek word king is used to refer to Jesus.
I didn't turn to my preparations on this sermon until after Thanksgiving. I was busy with the holiday and cooking and all the joyfulness and busyness of that time, and at breakfast on Friday at our dining room table, I was sitting with my son Danny, and I just said to him, "what should I preach about on Sunday?" And he said, "can you say anything?" And I said, "well," I said, "I have to talk about the lesson that's given, but maybe I'll start with a funny story about you kids. Can you think of a funny story about you kids?"
And Danny asked what the lesson was about that I had to talk about, and I told him that it was a story of Jesus at the final judgment, and he's going to come to these people and say, "oh, you are the good guys because when I was hungry, you fed me. And when I was naked, you clothed me." And they're going to say, "when did we do that?" And he'll say, "whenever you did it to anybody who was hungry or naked, you did it to me." And then he'll go to the bad guys and they'll say, "you didn't do this to me." And they'll say, "when did we not do that?" And he'll say, "whenever you didn't do it to anybody who was hungry or naked, you didn't do it to me." And Danny said, "I don't think you should talk about us, I think you should just talk about that."
I got some students from my preaching class here today. So here's some good advice from a nine-year-old. Danny has a big heart. He's the kind of kid whose heart goes out to others the first time, that when we moved up to Boston a few years ago, as is often the case at long stoplights in Boston, you'll see unhoused people asking for money. And the first time we did, I didn't have any small bills and I drove on and I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw Danny looking out the rear window staring at this guy. And for days afterwards, he kept asking me, "what do you think happened to that guy? Why was he there?" And now before we go anywhere, we keep small bills in the console.
Danny wants me to just talk about that, so that's what I'm going to do. So this is Christ the King Sunday, and Jesus is referred to as king, the Greek word, Basileus, king, which isn't the way he's usually talked about. When they talk about his political authority, he's referred to as the Messiah. Messiah was, or Christ in Greek, Messiah was the word that the descendants of the people of Israel used to refer to the man who would be their king. So Messiah was a political term, and Jesus is often referred to as the Messiah in the gospels. But this word king is used in this passage.
And Jesus is coming into his kingdom in this scene of final judgment, and there's actually a little bit of a switcheroo going on. I talked about it a little bit a couple of weeks ago, because folks were expecting a Marshall King, a political ruler. The Judeans had been oppressed, murderously oppressed by the Romans for years and years and then by others before that, and they were waiting for someone to restore the kingdom. They were waiting for the Messiah to restore the kingdom. And that's what they expected of Jesus when they called him Messiah. And Jesus kind of plays with this. He tells them, "the son of man will come riding in on chariots of clouds with heavenly armies. There will be this great bee, this great conquest."
And then he tells this story. All throughout, like the last couple of chapters, he's been predicting this ruinous time when the temple will be destroyed and Jerusalem will be flattened and thousands upon thousands will be killed. And then there will come this apocalyptic moment and he tells them, "stay alert, stay awake" over and over again in these last two chapters. "You don't know when the son of man is coming, so stay awake, stay alert." And then he does the switcheroo here in this lesson and he says, "he wasn't coming, he was already there. Whenever you saw the least among you, I was there with you and you missed me. That's why you need to stay awake. That's why you need to stay alert. Not because I am coming at the end, but because I am already with you. Pay attention to where I am, where I am telling you I will be, because that is where you will find me in the world."
He's playing with their expectations of this eventual conquest in the future. And then he flips it and says, "no, I was there all the time." It's interesting, none of the folks know. The good guys, neither the good guys nor the bad guys, no, that they're serving Jesus. "Whenever you do this to the least, you do it to me. So stay awake, stay alert." It's hard not to overstate the weight and power of this message in the context it was given. Jesus lived and said these things in the late twenties or early thirties of the common era. But the Gospel of Matthew was written maybe in the year 80, maybe a little bit later. And that means that all the things that Jesus is predicting have already happened.
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The temple has already been destroyed. Jerusalem has already been flattened. Tens of thousands of Judeans have been slaughtered or enslaved. Hundreds and hundreds have been crucified by the Romans in the destruction of Jerusalem. All this stuff is already happening. And so for the reader of this gospel, in the first century when they're reading this and they hear Jesus describing things that they are living through, this apocalyptic time that they are living through, they see their temple flattened. They see their city flattened, they see their people scattered, and Jesus turns to them and says, "in the midst of all this ruin, you can still find God. In the midst of all this ruin that you see around you, I am still with you and here is where you will find me. In kindness, in goodness, in dignity and in decency."
This is a crucial teaching, absolutely central. But there's another part of this passage beyond just Jesus's kindliness, beyond just this promise that Jesus will be with us, that God will be with us, in the least among us. There's also this judgment. Jesus comes as judge to judge all the peoples, all the nations, we're told. And the stakes here are cosmological. They could not be bigger. Eternal life, eternal punishment, this is what Jesus says, eternal life and eternal punishment. And as I read this parable, this passage on Friday and Saturday, these were the lines, especially the eternal punishment part. These were the lines that I wanted to avoid, that I wanted to read past. And so they're also the lines I knew I had to try to preach on. Because I'm ambivalent about these terms. I'm ambivalent about this idea of eternal punishment, if I'm honest, because I believe what we say at the beginning of the service, what Paul tells us in the epistle to the Romans, that neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.
And so punishment is hard, especially eternal punishment. It's hard for me to wrap my little head around. But even eternity, that's hard for me too. Of course it is. I'm time bound, I'm finite like anybody else. But to be perfectly honest, I don't have any strong picture of the afterlife. I feel deeply bound to people who I love, who have died. I believe they're bound to me. I don't think death can overcome theirs or mine can overcome the bind that we share. But I don't have any idea of angels with wings or clouds in the sky or anything else like that.
So what am I to do with eternal punishment here? In fact, I think Jesus is making a similar kind of switcheroo. In the same way that he says, "don't expect a general king riding on clouds from heaven, but look for me in the present, in the world around you." I think Jesus is doing the same thing with the way he is talking about eternal life and eternal punishment. And let me try to explain why I think that. The word for eternal here in the Greek is "aionios." It's related to the word eon. We have this word in English eon. An eon is just a huge span of time. And aionios is the adjective form of the word eon. It just means like eon like.
But the thing is that eons were not understood to be like there were lots of eons. It was just a huge span of time. They didn't stretch forever into the future. We live within an eon. Time surrounds us in this eon. There is not a sense of going into the future limitlessly, stretching into the future forever. Rather, the sense is more like sinking into the present fully. It's not otherworldly, it's this worldly. Another way to think about this word, aionios, is it means like having the quality of time itself, not moving through time forever, but just being fully present in the moment maybe like God is.
I know this is very abstract, but it's really important I think, because we tend to think about eternal as just day after day, after day after day, into some future that maybe we can or can't imagine. But aionios actually says something more about how we are in the here and now. The quality of it for us and of us in this moment. So that's the first thing, aionios. Not limitless stretching into the future, but something about the fullness of the present.
So how about this other word that's translated as punishment? The Greek word here is "kolasis." And as much as Jesus talks about the repercussions of not following God's commandments, or whatever, this word, kolasis, is only used twice in the whole New Testament. Here and in one other place. I'll talk about the other place in a second, but kolasis means to be tormented, but it's a particular kind of torment. It's the torment that comes when you are deprived of something, when something you want or need is taken from you. That's the particular kind of punishment referred to here. So when is the other time in the New Testament that this word kolasis arises? It's actually far away. It's in the first letter of John, and it's in this really beautiful passage where the author of the first letter of John is meditating upon the nature of God as love.
And the author says that God is love, and the one who abides in love, abides therefore in God. And then he says, "so we don't fear judgment because fear is about punishment, about kolasis, and there is no fear in love." He says, "we live in the world, in this world as God lives in this world in love. And so you don't have to fear being deprived of him as long as we live in love." This person too, writing in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem, seeing the ruins around him says, "God is love. And if we love, God is with us."In the midst of a ruinous world, a ruined world, God is love. What is your reward in the midst of this world? Love itself is your reward because God is there. What are you deprived of? If you fail to love in this ruinous world, you're deprived of love, which is the comfort we are promised in this ruined world.
Again, I think Jesus is toying with our notions, playing with our ideas about the afterlife, about a kind of sweet hereafter or a bitter hereafter. This parable is not perspective, it's about the present. And it's not metaphorical really, it's not even that metaphysical. It's about the here and now, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, visiting the prisoner. Here and now in this world, not some other world in the future. In this world, love is the reward because in the ruins of this world, God is love.
And it tracks. I have to tell you, at least as much as I know. The reason I start my sermons with kids' stories a lot of the time is not just because I think they're cute or funny, although they often are. It's because I love them and my love for them and their love for me and for my family teaches me more about the nature of God than all the philosophy and theology books I read at the Divinity School and when I start there, I feel like I won't go far wrong. And it works in reverse as well. The reason why Danny's heart was broken for days and days after we failed to give $2 to that guy on the street, because as he was deprived of the chance to just love somebody a little bit. And I don't want to overly sentimentalize it because it's true in these sweet, loving family examples, but we're talking about eternal damnation and all these things. We know what hell looks like. It looks like Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. It looks like Gaza today. We don't need to imagine a future place which is hellish in some mythological or legendary or some other kind of way.
We know what it looks like in these places and countless other places in our world, countless other moments in our world, places where kindness and goodness and decency and dignity are so hard to come by and so desperately needed. Our world is ruined, but in the ruins of the world, God is love. Jesus tells us this story about him riding in on clouds and sitting in a throne and serving as judge. But this isn't some pie eyed fantasy. It's actually quite practical. He's giving us the plan. Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit the prisoner. We have a to-do list for our ruined world. He tells us what to do. He shows us throughout these gospels how to do it. No wonder then that the first word to every disciple, including us, is follow me.