Crime and Punishment and Forgiveness

Matthew 25:31-46      

There is a story about two little girls in a small English village who decide to spend their summer searching for Jesus. The book is called The Trouble with Sheep and Goats. It’s a little bit of a mystery, but it’s a lot more than that.

Something has happened in the village: a neighbor woman has gone missing. The girls are at an age where they can understand some of the adult conversation, but not enough to really know what’s going on. They gather that there is a story behind this disappearance, 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 church. When the priest approaches her, she asks: 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 need God, who is a shepherd to all lost sheep. Grace takes his words to heart and decides that she must find God. She and her friend Tilly will go out in search of Jesus, God in the flesh, so he can save their little community, find the lost, and bring them back into the fold.

They decide to start 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 tidy house and garden. Inside they see the unhappiness that resides there. They see abusiveness and old unforgotten secrets. These girls see it all.

This becomes the pattern of their journey that summer. In search of God they find every kind of unhappiness, old grudges, and unconfessed sins. Grace and Tilly learn that there is a little bit of goat in us all, even the whitest sheep among us.

The parable, called 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 gives a strong, clear directive: 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 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 someone you encounter. Clearly, this would be a much better world if we all did that, right?

But what is not so clear is who Jesus is speaking about. When he says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,” who does he mean? Even these “sheep” he praises do not seem to know.

In the story, Grace and Tilly continue their search for Jesus until one day they find him. They see 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.

As soon as they hear, the people of the village flock to the site, full of 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? 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. They spend all their free time at the drainpipe. Those who don’t have jobs to go to, sit there all day. What they are waiting for, no one seems to 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’re slinging bible verses at each other like spitballs. They throw accusations back and forth. 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 themselves 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 – 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, troubled 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, and like the people of this village we might find that our more goat-like tendencies come out when we are unhappy, when we are stressed. When we are not where we want to be, not with the ones we love, not doing the things that give our lives meaning. Like this year.

It has been a hard year, and it is getting even harder as we approach the holidays, knowing that the celebrations we so look forward to are off-limits this year. Maybe we get cranky and start sniping at others, just like the people of the village do. Maybe we get angry and start blaming others for the miserable way we feel. It must be somebody’s fault we feel this way. Maybe we even start sorting people into the good ones and the bad ones, the sheep and the goats.

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 said to his followers that he came to offer them a baptism of repentance, but another would come after him with more power, the power to separate the wheat from the weeds with his winnowing fork.

The image is seen 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, the time of judgment. Leave it to the Lord to judge between them. “Judge not, lest you be judged.”

It is simply not ours to say who is worthy and who is not. The parable of the sheep and the goats suggests that we don’t even know how to judge ourselves, let alone others. The parable strongly implies that we would do well to greet every person we encounter, particularly the least of these, 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 of compassion and generosity. The question is, will we do it?

Will we?