By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
- Friday
- Where have you been, Lord?
Matthew 25: 31-46
This parable of the Last Judgement is recorded in Matthew's Gospel only. The evangelist locates it, along with two other well-known parables, following a collection of Jesus' teaching about the last things. Many of us who read this were raised in a Christian tradition that ignored matters such as the second coming. We left it to the literalists and the adventists to pay attention to such teaching. I can remember how surprised I was when critical biblical studies first revealed to me that the one thing you could be sure about was that Jesus paid significant attention to such things.
Once you stop closing your eyes to that material, you see it everywhere in the New Testament. It was a distinctive and essential part of the faith of the first Christians. The Christ had come in Jesus and was about to come again. The Kingdom of God was in their midst and was about to break in. Christ was reigning Lord but they prayed to him as if he were absent. "Come, Lord Jesus!"
These three parables in the 25th chapter of Matthew can be seen as parables of the absent king. There is the parable of the wise and foolish virgins which calls for the state of watchfulness on the part of the faithfull. It is not that you possess God fully, but that you live as though God were about to appear. There is the parable of the man who left his servants with various responsibilities.
Though absent, he was very present in the tasks he left behind. Finally there is the parable of the last judgement, which we love to tell but don't hear very well. This absent king, what has he been doing all this time? He has been hiding, identified with the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned.
We have heard something like this before. We looked at a passage from Isaiah during the second week of the study, where God is made out to have particular interest in such people. Indeed, the whole prophetic tradition makes that point. But this is a little stronger, this is identification.
All these are characteristics of the life in Christ: Watchfulness for the sudden appearing of the reigning Lord, responsibilities we are left with on our own, and the reigning Lord hidden in our midst, identified with the least.
We live in a hurting world. Suffering, injustice and violence abound. But depression and paralysis need not be the only result of confronting these face to face, for when we comfort and embrace the people who endure them, we comfort and embrace the Saviour of the world.
- Speak Lord
- Everlasting God,
- at whose almighty word creation dawned, we need your word to speak to us, we stop our noise and our flight, to listen.
- God, give us ears to hear the word you have for our hearts.
- Call us to our true being.
Put our chaos and darkness to flight. - Order our lives in the way they should go.
Lighten our darkness with the true light.
Keep our faithfulness green with your living water.
Nourish our loving with the bread of life.
Reach our hearts with your reconciling word, O God for it is in our estrangement from you that all our evil and pain is rooted.
Speak the word that gives us to each other and to the world you love.
Witness in our hearts to your glory and power in Jesus your Christ,
the Word made flesh.
God, speak, your servants are listening.
Amen