Burning Goats

Propers: Christ the King, AD 2020 A

Homily: 

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We are all of us seeking truth—which is a remarkable thing to say, given how difficult it is to define. Nevertheless, all great human endeavors, philosophy, poetry, science, art, religion, exploration, all have as their goal and end the discovery of truth. What’s real and what isn’t? What has value and what doesn’t? What are good and evil, right and wrong, justice and mercy? These are the questions that make us human, which set us apart from beasts.

For better or for worse, animals seek survival, while people seek truth—or we seek out goodness or beauty, which are all the same thing in the end.

At this close of our year, on the Sunday of Christ the King, we look forward to the End of the Age, to the promised culmination of Creation. Long ago, a world made good fell into disobedience and rebellion—not rebellion against tyranny, but against truth. Evil, in the Bible, has no substance, is no thing. Rather, evil is the result of an abuse of freedom. It arises when beings made good fall short of our intended mark.

This is why we are always of two worlds: of the world as it is, and of the world as it ought to be. Every human knows that something has gone wrong, that the world should be better than it is: more merciful, more just, more true. This is the Problem of Evil, from which all religion arises. If there were no evil there would be no religion, for we wouldn’t even know that there was something wrong to be set right. We would be like the beasts, just happy to eat and sleep and live.

God’s solution to the problem of evil, to bring His wayward children home, is not to snap His almighty fingers and force us to be good, but to enter fully into our brokenness; to take upon Himself, within Himself, our wickedness and our sin. And then, through those wounds, He drowns sin and death and hell, filling them up to bursting with the light and life and love of God, the fire and the blood of God, so that the chasm torn through reality by our sin is sealed up by the truth of Christ.

This is the core of our faith. God became one of us, that we might all be one in Him. God saves His beloved Creation by entering it, by unifying us to Him. That’s what the Resurrection is all about: God conquering sin, bridging the gap, coming down to pull us up when we could not save ourselves. And this Resurrection will continue, with Christ as firstfruits, until the harvest comes in full, when all of Creation, all of reality, is suffused in the fire that is our God. The universe itself will be His Temple, and God at the last shall be All in All.

For Him this has already happened, out in His eternity, in His eternal now. And we as Christians have a foretaste of the feast to come, a moment of eternity breaking into time, here and now, in God’s own Word and in the holy Sacraments of His grace. The eternal wedding of God and Creation, of Christ and the Church, is what Communion is—what Christianity is. We are the priests of eternal salvation.

Our Gospel reading this morning is the stuff of nightmares for small children. Jesus tells us a parable, a vision, of the End of the Age, when Christ is enthroned in glory before the heavenly Temple, separating people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. That’s harder than you might think, by the bye. The hardy sheep and goats of the Ancient Near East look a lot alike. The main difference, from what I understand, is that the sheep generally follow the shepherd, whereas the goats do whatever they please.

The sheep in the story are sorted to Jesus’ right, and the goats to His left. And He tells the sheep that they were kind to Him, good to Him, when they fed the poor and clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned. For when they did these simple, faithful acts of love to the least of these, they did so unto Him. But the goats He similarly convicts for not having fed the poor, clothed the naked, or visited the sick and imprisoned. For as they did not do these things to the least, so they did not do them for Christ the King.

So off go the goats to eternal punishment in eternal fire, but the sheep to eternal life.

At first glance, this picture of judgment seems so absolute and so recognizable. The good get rewarded while the bad get punished. Isn’t that what we all want, and all fear? I could tell you similar stories, similar images, from every religion I’ve ever studied: Egyptian, Chinese, Tibetan Buddhist, Greek. The truth of justice, of judgment, wins out in the end. And the terror of it is that neither group knows who they are. The sheep don’t know the good they’ve done; the goats don’t know the bad (or at least don’t want to know). Only in the end is all revealed for what it truly is. And so we are left to wonder—have I done enough?

Of course not. Of course you haven’t. That’s why it’s scary.

But now let’s throw a little nuance in here. Because Jesus welcomes the sheep unto an inheritance prepared for them from the foundation of the world. And an inheritance is not something you earn, is it? It is a gift. It is given. We’re talking here about an act of grace, of mercy. The sheep did their good works so automatically that they didn’t even notice they were doing them. Do you think that merits them more credit, or less? And does grace here make God arbitrary?

Here’s another twist. Unlike all those other images of judgment from various religions, here the pronouncement of truth, of punishment and reward, falls not from above but rises up from below. The assessment of our lives, the truth of who we are, comes to us from the humble, the vulnerable, the unwanted and the poor. They tell us who we are. They reflect our truth upon us. God doesn’t judge; He simply reveals.

And it gets weirder. Because remember, Jesus in the parable is enthroned before the heavenly Temple; the Temple which we know, from Revelation and the Prophets, is to be filled with God’s own fire. God is the fire. And in the earthly Temple—which is both a microcosm of the world and a shadowy sketch of Heaven—goats were used for sin offerings, and lambs for burnt offerings. Both enter the same sacrificial fire. Both arise unto the same Temple.

The fires of God’s mercy for the sheep, and the fires of God’s justice for the goats, are one and the same. They are both the flames of God the Holy Spirit, as at Pentecost, as at the Burning Bush. And the Spirit is the life-giving fire of Truth. The sheep and the goats have the same fate: union with God, entry to His Temple, immersion in His flames. How they experience God—with no more shadows, nowhere left to hide—depends entirely on how they know His grace.

The fires of God, the fires of Truth, will burn out of us everything that is not properly us, everything that separates our world from His, everything we think we are apart from Jesus Christ. Who we truly are, is the Image of God within, no matter how deeply obscured by our sins. Christ is humanity and God made one. If we trust who God is in Jesus, then the fires of God’s truth will be for us an infinite ocean of love, forging us, purifying us, making us at last who we were always meant to be. Union with God in Jesus Christ is everlasting life.

But if we think we are our sins—if the false self of ego and pride, the self to which Christ bids us die, is who we think we truly are—then those fires will be experienced as horror and pain, as burning away the core of who we imagine ourselves to be. Lies cannot survive truth any more than night survives the dawn. Out Satan must come, every hair and feather, until finally the darkness is purged, the scales fall from our eyes, and with our soul enlightened we freely choose the love and grace of God.

Our Lord does not punish without end. And I mean “end” in both senses of the term: without cessation, and without purpose. It is true that when truth hits us, it will be a great and final judgment, laying bare everything we think we’ve hid away. But that judgment will give way to a greater mercy, a great Restoration, when every tear shall be dried, every loss restored, and every wrong impossibly set right somehow in the End. That is the power of God: not destruction but Resurrection, for all that He loves, all He has made.

And judgment gives way to mercy not because God’s truth changes—perfect justice and perfect mercy are both alike perfect truth—but because we change, we are purged, we die and rise again in Christ. The goats burned up in eternal flames are shocked to find themselves sheep at the last.

This is the Good News of Christ the King. And no matter how bad things get, no matter how the world may burn, Jesus is the Truth, who shall save us all in the End.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.