I once found myself in a toy store in the mall on a Saturday afternoon, late in November, on a day like today, and a strange kind of claustrophobia came over me. I suddenly felt trapped inside of tainted wrappings that needed to be ripped away. Weighing on my soul was the sight of rows of plastic guns thicker than a child’s arm, piles of hideous toy monsters lumbering through their own apocalypse, ranks of half-dressed Barbies trapped behind their plastic windows, and shelves of rigid baby-dolls with shocked mouths and jaded eyes. Glaring colors on cheap cardboard screamed from overburdened shelves, “Buy me, want me, need me now!” Tired music seemed forced out of loudspeakers against its will, sucking the very air from the room, while fluorescent light streamed down from the ceiling like yellowed curtains that I longed to part. My eyes searched the store desperately for an opening, for a tear in this gaudy, unwanted, and premature Christmas wrap. Scanning with judging eyes the ceiling and walls of this prison, I remember thinking frantically, “There has to be a corner somewhere that they forgot to tape up, an edge where I can start ripping, a tab that I can pull to yank away the world’s wrappings with a flourish of my hand.”
Sometimes, we just feel as if the world stands in our way. We want to cast off what is broken and smash what is sinful in order to make room for God. Sometimes it feels as if there is such dissonance between the way things are and they way that they should be, and we want God to rip away what is false, to act in some powerful way to restore peace and joy and right relationship in the world. When Pope Pius the eleventh first established the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, it was in reaction to a world gone awry with war and hatred; it was a proclamation that God is in control and will bring justice in the face of chaos. Both the prophet Ezekiel and Jesus in our Gospel reading also describe for us today, in the language of sheep and shepherds, a vision of God acting to set things right in the world. In both readings, a powerful God swoops down to gather the nations and the peoples together and then sorts out good and evil once and for all, upholding the good and tossing away the bad.
We Episcopalians shy away from picturing God as judge, and I certainly wince and cringe internally as I hold up the Gospel Book today and proclaim to you Matthew’s words about the “accursed” departing into eternal fire. Threats of hell and images of a stern and judging God have done much damage in the hands of preachers over the centuries. But I also realize that, when I was in that toy store, my prayer would certainly have been to see Christ breaking through the ceiling with power and great glory, sweeping up all the tired children into his arms and casting those toys into the outer darkness. Like God does with the sheep in our lesson from Ezekiel, I can see God gently feeding the children, rocking them to sleep, and tenderly singing them angelic lullabies. I can picture God soothing the harried mothers and fathers, binding up the sore feet of the underpaid store clerks, and yes, tossing out anyone who is there to overcharge, sell dangerous merchandise, or otherwise harm the innocent. I can picture God tossing out all of those plastic guns and ripping the fangs and claws from the plastic figurines. I can see God bashing out the walls to let in sunshine and fresh air and hurling the harmful toys into a heap of broken plastic. “I will save my flock,” God says to Ezekiel, “and they shall no longer be ravaged …. I will feed them with justice.” Come, O King, with your justice and fix this broken world.
Justice is an important word throughout the entire Bible. As a people in covenant with a just God, our job, too, is to act with justice, treating all people with benevolence, caring for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—all those on the margins of society—treating them with the same love that God has for all human beings. In Ezekiel, it is the bullying sheep who push the weak ones around and who trample and despoil the pasture that all must share, who will face God’s displeasure. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that Jesus moves from divine judgment straight into his expectations for us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, care for the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner. Such concrete acts of compassion--of “suffering with” the suffering children of God until they suffer no longer--are clearly what our scriptures demand of us, no matter how desperately we try to focus on other things.
The real shocker in our Gospel lesson, however, is neither Jesus’ expectation of us, nor the scene of majestic judgment that he describes …. but it is his assertion that, in caring for the outcast, we are caring for him. As usual, Jesus takes the biblical call for justice and moves the expectations up a notch! We squirm and question in response. The majestic King of Glory, the One who has the power to judge and create and destroy—how can he abide quietly in the hearts of the hungry and naked ones, the persecuted and the prisoners? How can the Son of Man with all his angels be identified with the emaciated beggar slumped on the Temple
At Diocesan Convention this week, we all watched an amazing video about just the kind of compassion that Jesus is asking of us in today’s Gospel. A harried business woman in her twenties is rushing through downtown streets on her way to a job interview, when she comes across a dirty, thin, unsmiling man carrying a sign saying, “Help me—I am dying of AIDS.” We see the woman stop in front of this man, disgust on her face. “What is she going to do?” we wonder. “What would I do in her place?” Then the film flashes forward, and we see her telling her friends about the encounter later, at a party. Her friends are generally dismissive of the dying man, even cruel, talking about how gross he must have been and how they would have ignored or even tortured him. Some friends talk about feeling guilty when they meet homeless people like that, but then throw up their hands in helplessness. The woman is clearly uncomfortable with their crass reactions, as are we. Finally, they ask her, “Well, what did you do?” When watching the movie, I expected the film to show her either running away or giving the man some money. But much to my surprise, the film did neither. It ended as the woman slowly reached out and took the dirty, dying stranger in her arms for a huge, long hug. It even took the man awhile to comprehend what was happening to him, but he finally put his arms around the woman and let himself be loved, as if the woman’s arms were God’s arms, as if the dying man were Jesus Christ. At Convention, as the film ended, you could have heard a pin drop. Clergy and lay deputies sat in tear-filled silence, awe-stuck in the presence of Truth and ashamed, in our hardness of heart, that we did not even see that hug coming.
In proclaiming Christ as our King, we receive a King who abides in the lowly, a King who is welcomed and cared for as we welcome the outcast and feed the poor. Come to think of it, why are we so surprised to find the risen Christ abiding in the needy and forlorn? After all, the only kind of crown put on Jesus’ head during his lifetime is a crown of thorns, and his only earthly throne is a Roman cross. He is a King surrounded by condemned criminals, rather than by emperors and empresses. He is a King who is shamed, scorned, and put to death by the powers of the world, rather than enthroned by them. He is a King who saves others, but not himself. He is a King who rejects the power that forces and controls others and embraces only the power of self-giving love.
With such a king as our judge, I’m actually not so sure that the images of hellfire, gnashing of teeth, and the wicked being thrown into outer darkness, need to fill our imaginations. As Rowan Williams says, reproach, fear, and condemnation are not the tools that our crucified King would use to shove us into his Kingdom.[1] Instead, he invites us to love. In that toy store, where consumerism and greed were strangling the life around me, what if, instead of begging for judgment, I had just bought some toys and walked out of that store with them and taken them over to Wayside Christian Mission or to the Home of the Innocents? What if I had put aside my schedule and spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the children there, hugging them, showering upon them God’s generous love? There, and only there, the children and I would have entered into “the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
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