Tired holiday music seemed forced out of loudspeakers against its will, sucking the very air from the room. Fluorescent light streamed down from the ceiling like yellowed curtains that I longed to part. My eyes desperately searched the store for an opening, for a tear in this gaudy, early Christmas wrap. Scanning with judging eyes the ceiling and walls of my 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.”
These days, with all the turmoil and suffering around the world, we can feel trapped by evil. We want to cast off all that is broken. We long to smash what is sinful in order to make room for goodness. There’s such dissonance between the way things are and the way they should be. 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. Such feelings are nothing new, however. When Pope Pius XI first established the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, it was in reaction to a post-war world gone awry with violence 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 yet loving 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. Now, we Episcopalians shy away from picturing God as judge, don’t we? I certainly winced and cringed internally as Deacon Jan read Matthew’s words about the “accursed” departing into eternal fire. Threats of hell and images of a stern and judging God have done so much damage in the hands of preachers over the centuries.
But when I think about my experience in that toy store, I have to admit that my prayer would certainly have been to see Christ breaking through the ceiling with power and great glory. I would have cheered as Jesus swept up all the tired children into his arms and cast those toys into the outer darkness. As God does with the sheep in our lesson from Ezekiel, I can picture Jesus gently feeding all the children in that store, rocking them to sleep, tenderly singing them angelic lullabies. I can picture him soothing the harried mothers and fathers, too, and binding up the sore feet of the underpaid store clerks. And of course, I can see him tossing out anyone who is there to overcharge, to sell dangerous merchandise, or otherwise harm the innocent.
Yes, I take pleasure in imagining an angry Jesus in that store, turning over the money-changers tables. I rejoice as he energetically tosses out all of those plastic guns and rips the fangs and claws from the monsters. How satisfying it feels to picture Jesus 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.” So often these days my heart, too, cries out: “Hurry, O King! Come with your mighty justice and fix this broken world.”
A careful look at our Gospel lesson, however, turns my cries for speedy and retributive justice to ashes in my mouth. Jesus takes the biblical call for justice and moves the expectations up a notch. Jesus, our King, clearly identifies himself with the outcast. He’s a King who abides in the lowly, a King who is welcomed and cared for when we welcome the outcast and feed the poor. The majestic King of Glory, the One who has the power to judge and create and destroy—this King abides quietly in the hearts of the hungry and naked ones. He dwells in the bodies of the persecuted and the prisoners. The Son of Man with all his angels is to be identified with an emaciated beggar slumped on the Temple steps. In Jesus’ story in our Gospel, the righteous don’t understand this paradox any more than the unrighteous do. They both stutter in bewilderment: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry … or thirsty … or naked …?”
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. His only earthly throne is a Roman cross. Jesus 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’s a King who saves others, but won’t save himself. He’s a King who rejects the power that forces and controls others. He embraces only the power of self-giving love.
There’s only one way to serve such a king, isn’t there? To love and serve him, we must love and serve the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—all those on the margins of society. In Ezekiel, it’s the bullying sheep who face God’s displeasure--the ones who push around the weak and who trample the pasture that all must share. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that Jesus moves from divine judgment straight into his expectation that we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, care for the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner. Such concrete acts of compassion-- “suffering with” the suffering children of God until they suffer no longer--are clearly what Jesus demands of us, no matter how desperately we try to focus on other things. As one preacher writes, “We care for the poor not out of guilt, [nor] ascetic renunciation … [nor] some communist ideal …nor because the poor are virtuous. Rather, in serving the poor we care for our own souls by imitating the character of God himself. Only in heaven, said Mother Teresa, will we understand how much we owe the poor for helping us to love God like we should.”[1]
How quick we are to leave the loving to God, but to take on the judging role for ourselves. Jesus, however, expects the opposite: we’re to engage in acts of compassion, and leave the judging to God. Those images of hellfire, gnashing of teeth, and the wicked being thrown into outer darkness don’t need to fill our imaginations. Reproach, fear, and condemnation aren’t the tools that a crucified King would use to shove us into his Kingdom.[2] Instead, our King invites us to love as he does.
In that toy store, where consumerism and greed were strangling the life around me, what if, instead of begging for God to step up and judge, I had bought some toys and walked purposefully out of that store with them. What if I’d taken them over to A Precious Child? Or to Lutheran Family Services in Denver? What if I had put aside my schedule and started volunteering at EFAA, or serving as a CASA volunteer? What if we asked, along with the composer Scott Soper, in “Child of the Poor:”
"Who is the stranger, here in our midst,
looking for shelter among us?
Who is the outcast?
… This is Christ revealed
to the world in the eyes of a child,
a child of the poor.
Bring all the thirsty, all who seek peace;
bring those with nothing to offer;
strengthen the feeble, say to the frightened heart,
“Fear not:
here is your God.”[3]
[1] Dan Clendenin, “The Sheep and the Goats,” November 19, 2023. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=3636.
[2] Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness, 103.
[3] Scott Soper, “Child of the Poor,” 1994. Found at https://authorchristinachase.com/2013/12/30/child-of-the-poor.
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