The day before yesterday I was somewhere else in the world. It was very hot, and I had just bought a bottle of ice cold water to see me through the next hour when I saw the woman fall. She was about my age; in appearance she could be my cousin. She had been leaning on the wall looking out over the ocean, and as she turned away she tripped on an ancient piece of stone. For a moment too brief to enjoy, she flew, and then she fell to the flagstones. I recognized the action, having completed it far too many times myself. I recognized the aftermath, too: the pride, the pain, the walk-it-off bravado, the bitten-back tears. I was too far away to do it, but I wanted to reach out and offer her an ice cold water bottle to roll against her bruised knee and between her scraped hands. I was too far away, so I will never know if kindness would have beaten down the social barrier between strangers, but the thing is, I saw her. I saw her because she was the image of me. Would I still have seen her in the same light otherwise?

Do you know, or remember, the tagline that the Diocese of Ohio launched several years ago now: Love God, love your neighbor, change the world? That is what this is about, this parable that Jesus tells his disciples at the hinge of Holy Week, halfway between the hosannas of Palm Sunday and the horror of Good Friday. 

The Son of Man, the king of kings, summons the nations of the world and mirrors back to them the ways that they have treated the image of God in their own people and in one another’s people; in all people made in the image of God. I find it striking that the question both groups ask, sheep and goats, is, When did we see you?

The obvious answer that we take from the text is that when we see the image of God in the least, the last, the most unlovely of our neighbours, even the egregious, even in our enemies; when we can love God even in the most unlovable, the stranger, the criminal, the dirty, and the ravenous; when we see God in the least like us, then we enter into the work of Jesus, which was and is to redeem the world with love, with mercy, and with humility.

I heard a woman once say – I think she was a nun, preaching on this passage – that she doesn’t like it as a parable coming out of Jesus’ mouth because she doesn’t think that Jesus would call anyone “the least”; less than, lower than. But I think that’s the point that Jesus is making in the parable: that no one is made less in the image of God than another, and that everyone: the prisoner, guilty or not, the impoverished; the dispossessed, the diseased, the down and out, the least like us; all are made equally in God’s image, and all deserve equal respect and dignity and treatment as persons who breathe by the good graces of the Holy Spirit.

The problem arises when we fail to see that image, whether through prejudice or enmity, embarrassment or simple ignorance, because we are too far away or too close for comfort. We ask along with the goats, When did we see you? And sometimes we mean it, because we do not know what we cannot see. We do not recognize what we do not know. And sometimes we are disingenuous, because we know when we have averted our gaze from the needs of the world and its children, too overwhelmed or angry or grief-stricken or self-righteous to do anything about it.

Too self-righteous: why should I help the likes of them, we ask; or, pride goes before a fall, we sneer; or, what goes around comes around, we nod along to the violent vengeances of the world that pose as justice. 

But judgement, says the parable, belongs to the king, and justice, says the prophet Ezekiel, to the Lord God, who knows God’s sheep and their ways, and who rescues the weak, the poor, and the oppressed from their oppressors, and who restores them in green pastures beside still waters. Because, as we rely on every time we make our confession, the justice of God is mercy.

The parable is told about the nations, not individuals, and it would be a mistake, I think, to read this simply as a call to each of us to take the high road in treating others we encounter along the way, although that is certainly a good part of it. But it also speaks to our collective endeavours: the ways in which we protect or fail to protect our population from gun violence; the degree to which we commit of the hard and dangerous work of peacemaking in lieu of waging war; the ways in which we challenge our justice system to reform itself into a tool for the healing of the human spirit instead of the suppression of it, its extinguishment, its execution. The parable as presented addresses the extent to which we share the blessings for which we give thanks as a nation to ensure that everyone has access to the oh-so-basic resources of food, shelter, security. How we take care of the interests of others rather than butting with horns or hoarding strength and fatness for ourselves. We each have our part to play. When I was ordained a deacon, Bishop Hollingsworth preached that every Christian is a bellwether, a sheep that leads others toward green pasture, fresh water, who knows the good shepherd and has a responsibility to their flock, the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of God’s hand  (Psalm 95:7).

Oh, how impossible it is to live into that perfection of love when the world makes us mad with every turn of its axis, and people can be such goats! How difficult to know what is within our reach to help, or to convert. How humbling to know how little we can redeem. How hard it is to see what we are missing.

That, too, is where mercy comes in. I do believe that the God who goes out seeking the lost and scattered sheep gives credit to us for at least trying to love God back, and to love God’s image in our neighbors as in ourselves. That doesn’t mean we ease up on doing whatever we can to serve the stranger and soothe the suffering in body or in spirit and save the lives of those condemned by the world. It does mean that even knowing we will miss too many opportunities to kneel at Christ’s feet and wash them with our tears, he hears our confession with compassion, and promises to help us to our feet to try again. It means that we live out of love, not out of fear. Love God, love your neighbor, change the world.

To love God, to love our neighbors, thereby to change the world: that is the call of the Son of Man.

In each of these parables that have brought us to the cusp of Advent, Jesus has advised his disciples to pay attention, to be awake and alert to the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Now he tells us that when we see him coming, the king of kings born into a manger and crucified as a criminal; when we see him it may not be with clouds and great glory. He may come to us first in a skinned knee, an awkward need, an importunate stranger, an impossible moral dilemma, a condemned man on his way to the cross. I pray that even so, I will see him. And it is with the measure of mercy that I seek from him that I pray that I will meet him in that moment.

And when I fail, whenever I fall down on that promise, may God the merciful forgive me.

Texts for Christ the King Sunday in Year A: Ezekiel 34:11-24; Matthew 25:31-46