s with all parables, the parable of the sheep and the goats offers many different interpretations depending on your perspective. Some argue that this parable is about the nations, or the gentiles, and Jesus is saying that those Gentiles who care for the followers of Christ will find salvation and those who don’t will be judged harshly. Others argue this is a parable about Christian ethics. Those who care for those in need–the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the imprisoned, the naked, the stranger—will find eternal life and those who don’t, well they will know eternal judgment.
Those who interpret this as a parable directed to “the nations” say that while it is always a good thing to take care of those in need, this is not what the parable is about. There is one interpretation I read that argued this text is really about how we treat our fellow Christians, especially itinerant preachers and those seeking to spread the Gospel. Here is a quote from a commentary on this Gospel passage from the Gospel Coalition: “And in this case, Jesus says we are big trouble if we are too embarrassed, too lazy, or too cowardly to support fellow Christians who depend on our assistance and suffer for the sake of the gospel.”[1] It is not an interpretation that really resonates with me. If feels like this answer is too easy, especially as parables are meant to shake us up and turn our world on its head.
I am more comfortable and familiar with the second interpretation—the idea that this is a warning to all of us who call ourselves followers of Christ. We need to understand and act on the idea that Jesus is most likely to be found where we least expect him, with the poor, the outcast, the stranger, the prisoner, the sick. This is probably the interpretation you are also most familiar with. But I wonder if it goes far enough. It doesn’t really turn our world upside down. It doesn’t really shake up our understanding of ourselves and Jesus. It is true, but we already knew this truth, didn’t we?
This time as I was preparing to write this sermon, it was a third interpretation by Stanley Saunders that caught my attention. Saunders argues that traditional interpretations, such as the two I have already presented, seek to discover who Jesus has in mind when he speaks of “the least of these who are members of my family” (Matthew 25:40, 45). A quest that Saunders finds rather “goatlike.” Saunders writes, “Contrary to first impressions, Matthew does not intend by means of this story to provide the righteous with the means to distinguish themselves from the unrighteous, but affirms those who serve the least ones without any distinction or expectation of reward.”[2] In other words it is about an attitude or a mindset.
Look again at the parable. We have an eschatological setting, an end-time setting. All the nations of the world are standing before the Son of Man who divides them into two groups, the sheep and the goats. He turns first to the sheep and commends them for caring for those in need: the poor, the sick, the unclothed, the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the prisoner. And he adds that when they did these things, they were caring for him. The sheep are perplexed. They ask, “When did we see you?” And the Son of Man assures them, that he was present exactly in the place they did not expect to see him.
Then the Son of Man turns to the goats. He tells them that they will receive eternal punishment for not caring for him when he was in need. And they are equally perplexed. “When did we see you in need?” they ask the Son of Man. Basically they are saying, if we had seen you, we would have cared for you, but we did not see you. The goats are unrighteous not because they are godless and unethical but because they are motivated by self-interest, by what the Son of Man can ultimately do for them.
For the sheep it seems not to matter whether or not Jesus, the Son of Man, God is around when they take care of those in need. They do what they do because they care about those in need. They respond to the need they see without counting cost or looking for a reward. The goats on the other hand will only respond if there is some gain for them. They would have been happy to help those in need if they had only known that they were actually helping Jesus. Saunders argues, and I would agree, that if we use this parable to try and figure out the identity of “the least of these,” we will find ourselves in the place of the goats. We want to know because we want to make sure we will also earn our eternal reward.
This is difficult stuff. We are used to finding motivation through punishment and reward. In very primitive ways our brains are wired to work this way. You feel hungry, so you seek the reward of food. You feel cold, so you seek the reward of warmth. We touch a hot stove and get burned, so we are more cautious in the future around hot stoves. These are good instincts to have, as these instincts keep us alive. But we are more than our primitive brains. We humans are human because we have these very complex brains that are capable of more than instinctual behavior. That is what makes us human. That is why scripture says we are made in the image of God. We are capable of the most complex and highest form of action. We are capable of the ultimate power held and given by God, love. And to love as God loves, we must be humble.
When I look at the sheep in this parable, I see great humility. Again, it is so very hard. Humility is necessary for true love, for true relationship, but so often when we seek to grab humility, we find it just out of our reach. We have all known people who sought to be humble and simply became unbearable to be around. Maybe we have been this person ourselves. Kind of like the goats of Jesus’ parable. If you are seeking to become humble in order to receive some kind of reward, humility will always be outside of your grasp.
Then how are we to cultivate this kind of motivation? How are we to cultivate humility? How are we to do this without becoming goats? Well, I have some ideas. These are not original to me, but are inspired by the Rev. Sam Wells, a priest in the church of England and recent leader of a Diocese of Maine clergy day.
Sam is greatly motivated by the idea of humility. For Sam this is the basis of his faith life and comes from his awareness that there is an essence (otherwise known as God) beyond existence, and he (Sam) is existence and not essence. It is his awareness that he is not essence that has helped him to become aware that he is not the center, the heart, or the purpose of all things. As he says, “We are not essential. We are simply existential. There is without us. Take us away and there still is. We are contingent—our being depends on the existence of others. We crave independence, but it is an illusion, a fantasy: we never could be, never shall be, independent, and there would be no joy in being so. The longing for independence is the aspiration to be an essence: the secret of happiness is to learn instead to exist. Once we relax, and cease trying to be an essence—the essence—only then can we enjoy the fact that we exist. The question is not, “How can we not depend?” The real question is, “How can we depend on the right things?” . . . . There could have been nothing beyond essence. . . . this is where humility begins. . . Yet here we are.”[3]
Humility begins when we understand that we do not have to be and yet we are. And from this humility springs gratitude. We recognize that we can take no credit for existing, we are because others are, we are because God is, and we begin to see dependence as not a burden but a gift, because dependence creates relationship. If we needed no one else, then we could live our lives in complete isolation, but where is the joy in that? In needing others, we must forge relationships, and in forging relationships we find joy.
Maybe a concrete example will help. When I was 19 years old, I worked for a summer as a nurse’s aide at Gray Birch nursing home in Augusta, Maine. My job was to change and make all the beds in the facility in the morning (all 77 of them), help take those residents who could go, to the dining room at lunch time, and after lunch to clean out closets and such. I frequently ran out of things to do about an hour before my shift ended, so my charge nurse gave me permission to visit residents when that happened. As with all such facilities, there were some residents who received a lot of visitors, and some who received none. I decided to focus on those who received few visitors.
My motivation at first came from some sort of pious righteousness. I felt good that I was doing such a “Christian thing.” In other words, it was all about what I was doing for or bestowing on those I was visiting. I was the center of my story. I had something to bestow on those I was visiting, and I felt like a good Christian because of what I was doing. What I soon discovered though, was that those who I was visiting had just as much to offer me as I them. I was not the center of this story. The relationship the residents and I formed together were the center of the story because it was precisely in these relationships that God was present, and God, essence, is always the center of the story.
There were two ladies in particular that I remember. They shared a room and had not known each other before moving into Gray Birch. Today they would probably be in an assisted living facility, but those were only just coming into existence in 1992. They never had any visitors. They were living in very close quarters with someone who had previously been a stranger. And yet they were always full of joy. They had created a life together in that small sterile room. One lady had taught the other to crochet. They would sit and crochet all day long, chatting and watching tv. Their room was full of crocheted doodads, and they gave much of what they made away. I always felt happier after visiting them, and I learned what it means to make the best of what you are given and not to endlessly strive for what cannot be. I entered their room to give them something I thought I had that they needed, and I left with two new relationships that I didn’t know I needed but was so glad I had.
Learning to live as sheep takes an entire lifetime. Most of the time we will probably find ourselves somewhere between living as sheep and living as goats. But it is in the learning that we will find our moments of greatest joy. I leave you with some final words from Sam Wells:
In humility we accept that we are tiny, pointless, transient specks in the inconceivable enormity of space-time existence. But in grace we discover that the personal quality of essence, which we call God, has chosen to enter existence, and to become one of us, because of a primordial desire to be with us, in tender, understanding, gentle, humble relationship with us–and that that was the reason for existence in the first place. And God doesn’t want to just share existence with us. God wants to finally draw us into essence and dwell with us forever. And we are humble because we realize how easily it could not have been so. We remain deeply humble and thus become a blessing.[4]
We become the sheep we were created to be. Amen.
[1] Keven Deyoung, retrieved on 11/25/2023. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/who-are-the-least-of-these/
[2] Saunders, Stanley P. Preaching the Gospel of Matthew: Proclaiming God’s Presence. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky. 2010, p. 257.
[3] Wells, Samuel. Walk Humbly: Encouragement for Living Working, and Being, p. 1.
[4] Wells, p. 87.
