Many good reads come to us
by way of recommendation, and that is the case for me this week. One of the
members of our roundtable talked about a lovely story called The
Trouble with Goats and Sheep. So enthusiastically did she speak of it, and
so apt it seemed to be this week, with our text, that I decided to move it to
the top of my reading list.
It’s a story about two
little girls in a small English village who decide to spend their summer break
searching for Jesus. Their village has been going through some difficult times,
and the girls are at an age where they understand enough of the grownup conversations
to be troubled by it, but not enough to really comprehend it. A woman has gone
missing. The girls gather that there is a story behind it, something all the
adults in their street are in on, but they don’t know what it is.
One of the girls, Grace, is
mulling it over one day outside the local church. When the priest approaches
her, she asks point blank: why do people get lost. She means it quite
literally, but he hears it as a metaphorical question so he tells her people
are lost when they don’t have God in their lives. They are in need of God, who
is a shepherd to all lost sheep. Grace takes his words to heart and sees only
one thing she must do: find God. She and her friend Tilly will go out in search
of God, in the form of Jesus, so he can save their little community, finding
the lost and bringing them back into the fold.
Uncertain how to go about
this, they start their search at the home of the most pious family in town – it
seems a natural place to find God. But once inside the door they begin to see
things they would not have seen from the outside of this immaculately tended
house and garden. Inside they see the hidden unhappiness, the subtle
abusiveness, the old unforgotten secrets.
And this becomes the
pattern of their journey this summer. In search of God they find all varieties
of unhappiness, old grudges, and unconfessed sins. They discover that there is
a little bit of goat in us all, even the whitest sheep among us.
It was quite a dramatic
lesson for these young girls, the beginning of an understanding that the world
is not all clearly outlined black and white, well-defined lines between the
sheep and the goats of the world, but rather that crime and punishment and
forgiveness are smeared over everything.
The parable that we call
the separation of the sheep and the goats, is one the girls heard in church. It
has made a strong impression on them – not surprisingly. The parable is at the
same time both a strong, clear directive and an unanswerable question. We like
to think about the clarity in the words of the king: Whenever you did as much
for the least of these who are members of my family, you did it for me.
Whenever you fed or clothed or comforted the neediest among us, you did as much
for Jesus himself.
Therefore, the message we
have drawn from this is clear, if not easy: do not fail to pass by some poor,
weak, neglected person. If you do, you might be passing by Jesus. The lesson
for us is to seek always to see Jesus in the eyes of anyone you encounter.
Wouldn’t it be a much better world if we all did that?
The more complicated
aspect, though, is the question of who Jesus is actually talking about in this
parable. When he refers to all the nations is he meaning everyone in all the
world or just the Christians? When he speaks of the least of these is he
referring to all the needy in the world or just the Christians? The words he
uses suggest that he might be talking about his followers alone. But if that
were the case, wouldn’t it be fairly easy to know when you were serving Jesus?
Wouldn’t it be relatively easy if we just had to concern ourselves with taking
care of the Christians?
Well, I imagine you might be
thinking, look around at the state of the world. See how we care for one
another, or fail to care for one another. Even limiting it to Christians we
would quite likely have a hard time of it. But at the very least, we probably
wouldn’t have to say on the day of judgment, “when and where did I do that,
Lord? Or, conversely, when and where did
I fail to do that, Lord?
In the story, The Trouble
with Goats and Sheep, the girls continue their search for Jesus until one day they
find him. They find the image of Jesus on a drainpipe. Yes, in the great
tradition of Jesus’ face appearing in unlikely places – a cheese pizza, a piece
of stained plaster, or a Walmart receipt – the Lord appears in a stain on a
drainpipe.
The people of the village
flock to the site, filled with excitement and hope. When they see the image of
Christ’s face on the drainpipe they all make the same observation: He doesn’t
look very happy, does he? Should anyone be surprised? If he has come to judge
between the sheep and the goats, perhaps there is little for him to be happy
about. Nonetheless, the people want to be in his presence. Every day they pull
up their lawn chairs or sit on the grass, making a little congregation. Those
who don’t have jobs to go to, sit there all day. What they are waiting for, I
don’t know. I don’t think they know. But, inevitably, after a while they begin
bickering with one another.
Two of the women get into a
heated argument about which one of them is more worthy to sit close to Jesus.
They begin slinging bible verses each other like spitballs. They criticize each
other for their apparent sins. Each of them feels more sheep-like than the other;
each of them believes that the other is really just a goat. Each of them sets
herself up as judge over the other.
In fact, everyone on the
street is doing that – setting him or herself up as judge.
The real trouble with sheep
and goats is that we really don’t know which category we, or anyone else, falls
into. Grace and Tilly begin by assuming
that the people who live in their neighborhood are all sheep – you know, the
good ones. But the more they explore, the more goat-like qualities they find:
people who care more about covering their assets than caring for others, who
are often angry when they should be sympathetic. And it isn’t that Grace and
Tilly were wrong about their neighbors; it isn’t that they aren’t sheep. It is
only that they are human beings and, like all human beings, affected by sin.
If we say we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So says the writer of the first
letter of John. There is not one among us free from sin, but strangely enough,
we have a tendency to think we can separate ourselves into the good guys and
the bad guys, the sinners and the sin-free.
One of the underlying
themes of Matthew’s gospel is that we simply cannot do this. At every
opportunity, Matthew reminds us that the judging is God’s to do, not ours. John
the Baptist, early on, said to his followers that he came to offer them a
baptism of repentance, but one who would come after him with more power, the
power to separate the wheat from the chaff with his winnowing fork.
We see this image used
again in Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows good seed in
his field but sometime later weeds are found among the wheat. Rather than try
to clear out the weeds from the wheat, Jesus says, let them grow up together
and they will be separated at harvest time, or, the time of judgment. Leave it
to the Lord to judge between them. “Judge not, lest you be judged,” Jesus says
to his followers in his sermon on the mount.
It is simply not ours to
say who is worthy and who is not. The story of the sheep and the goats suggests
that we do well when we seek to treat every person we encounter, particularly
the least, the last, and the lost, as an opportunity to serve Jesus. And why
not? As lovers of Christ, why would we not embrace every opportunity to serve
him?
Yet, we will never get it
fully right, because we are, alas, a little bit sheep and a little bit goat. We
will make errors in judgment on a routine basis. We will be guilty of failing
Jesus and faulting others, and bringing more pain into the world. But still,
every day we are presented with opportunities to bring a bit more light into
the world, to serve Jesus with our acts, small or large, of compassion and
generosity. The question is, will we do it?
Will we?
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