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End-Time and Judgment:
Christ the King

My son Sam is fifteen, and he's been a sports fan all his life.  In the summer, he follows baseball, and when he was a kid, I'd hear him shout, "The Red Sox rule!"  In the fall, because his father grew up in Wisconsin, Sam would announce with great satisfaction, "The Green Bay Packers rule!"  I always smiled when I heard the exuberance in his voice.  There is something in the human spirit that is set free when we proclaim what we love.

Today is the last Sunday of the church year, the grand finale.  The sweep of the liturgical year that begins in Advent and moves through the birth of Jesus, his baptism, ministry, passion, death, and resurrection, the coming of his Spirit and the birth of the Church - this whole narrative reaches its conclusion and climax today, the Feast Day of Christ the King.  To put it in terms that even a child would understand, today's the day when around the world the Church gathers to proclaim, "Christ rules!"  Today's the day when you and I get to say: we know where we're headed - we're headed toward God.  We know where we've come from - we came here from God.  God is our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end. 

It is the ending that we look at today, on this last day of the church year - the end of time, the moment of reckoning, the day when everyone will be gathered at last before the throne of God and everything will be sorted out.  Of all the biblical visions of the end-time, I can't think of any more beautiful than this morning's passage from the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was among the first deportees to be carried off into exile when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 597 B.C., and thereafter he lived among a frightened, helpless people who had lost everything - not only their homes and belongings, but their very homeland and their temple, their security and their hope.  Like the slaves brought to this country from Africa, they had, it seemed, no future at all.  Into this place of desolation and despair a vision came to Ezekiel, a vision of return from exile and restoration in the Promised Land. 

I have no idea if this passage has ever been set to music, but it ought to be, for its rhythm and repetition read like poetry - and, when it comes to describing what God is up to, just look at all the active verbs!  "For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…I will seek out my sheep.  I will rescue them…I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel… I will feed them with good pasture… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God." And then comes a long sentence where the pace quickens and the verbs almost tumble after each other: "I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak" - and then, listen!  The prophet sounds a note of judgment.  The fat sheep - or we might say, the fat cats - will be punished: "the fat and the strong I will destroy.  I will feed them with justice."  I wonder what justice tastes like?  To the hungry and poor its taste must be sweet, but to the unjust and unrighteous its taste is sharp.

These images are carried forward in our Gospel passage, which marks the end of Jesus' public instruction.  The apocalyptic vision of the last judgment in Matthew 25 is Jesus' last public word to his disciples.  At the end of time, says Jesus, "when the Son of Man comes in his glory" - or, as one translation puts it, when the Son of Man comes "blazing in beauty" [The Message, by Eugene H. Peterson] - he "will sit on the throne of his glory" and "all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats."

I wonder if this passage was once easier to shrug off than it is today.  In years past, we might have dismissed this image of the world coming to a sudden end as something fanciful, a quaint relic of Christian belief.  Life seemed likely to go on and on as it always had, one thing after another: "same old, same old."  We might likewise have shrugged off the notion of God's judgment by saying, "Why be judgmental?  I mean - heavens!  I'm from Amherst!  I'm not into this business of God sorting people into sheep and goats, the in-crowd and the out, the righteous and the damned. Aren't we supposed to be tolerant?"  So maybe we hesitated, or dropped our voices, when we got to the part of the Nicene Creed where it says that Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead."  No ending and no judgment - I think that's what many of us liked to believe. 

But this year we hear the Gospel with different ears.  We've begun to understand endings.  Endings are upon us.  Take, for instance, the end of cheap oil.  Experts are telling us that we've reached, or are soon to reach, the moment of "peak oil," the moment when the world's production of oil reaches its peak and then drops off for good.  Whether it comes quickly or slowly, we're looking at the end of the comfortable way of life that many Americans, along with the rest of the industrialized world, have taken for granted.  Or, as another example, take global warming.  If the so-called "developed" and "developing" nations don't make a swift transition to clean, renewable sources of energy, we're looking at the end of the relatively stable global climate that the human race has known for millennia.  Maybe you saw the pictures that circulated this week in newspapers and on the Internet: the polar ice caps are melting.  In two weeks political leaders from around the world will be gathering in Montreal for the first international summit on global warming to be held since the Kyoto Protocol went into effect.  I'll be heading to that city as part of a delegation of religious leaders from the United States invited to speak out about the moral urgency of caring for Creation and to press our own government to take leadership at last.  Along with our little group, thousands of others will be converging on Montreal, and the slogan we share is "Time is Running Out."

Endings can be disruptive, even scary, whether it is the end of oil or the end of empire, the end of a stable climate or the end of our lives.  We can feel anxious when we realize that time is running out.  But Christians have always lived in sight of endings.  Scripture is clear that we live here only temporarily: all flesh is grass; the grass withers and the flower fades [Isaiah 40:8; Psalm 103:15-16].  Christians always live on the edge.  As preacher Peter Gomes likes to put it, "We live in the world with our bags packed."

One way or another life does come to an end, and whenever it ends, we will be held accountable for the choices that we made.  There will be a moral reckoning, and today's Gospel couldn't be more straightforward and pragmatic in presenting how that judgment will be made.  Did we give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty?  Did we welcome the stranger and clothe the naked?  Did we care for the sick and visit the prisoner?   In short, did we reach out in love to those around us who were in need?  What we do (or fail to do) to those in need takes place not in secret but in sight of the King, who has authority to judge.  What we do (or fail to do) to those in need is done (or not done) to the King himself. 

How humble our King is, and how hidden!  The one who sits "blazing in beauty" on his glorious throne consents to be mysteriously concealed within the single mother on food stamps, the prisoner at Guantanamo, the frail elderly with Alzheimer's, the homeless African-American in New Orleans, and the citizen of Tuvalu whose island nation, because of global warming, is now subsiding beneath rising ocean waves.  Whether we know it or not, whether we see it or not, Christ humbly, stubbornly, and persistently makes his home within the very people that society would most like to ignore or cast aside. 

This is where the vision of the mystic becomes the vision of the prophet.  If Christ is in all things, but especially in the vulnerable and the poor, the naked and the needy, then it matters what we do as a nation.  It matters whether or not we choose to engage in the torture and coercive interrogation of prisoners.  It matters how we choose to structure our federal budget.  When we hurt the poor, we hurt more than the common good - we hurt Jesus himself.

And if Christ is in each person who is in need, then what we do as individuals matters, too.  When we take a step toward reconciliation or healing - when we give someone a word of courage or hope - when we reach out to take whatever action we can, however small it may be, to make the world a better place - then, as this morning's Collect tells us, we share in the life of the everlasting God "whose will it is to restore all things in [God's] well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of Lords."

Yes, we live in a turbulent, violent, and uncertain time - but we have everything we need. 

We have our marching orders. 

We have our moral compass. 

Like the slave down South making a break for freedom, we have our own North Star.  We know who we are and to whom we belong. 

Christ is King.

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Copyright ©2005 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas