Jesus, the Judge Hidden Amidst the Least (Nov 19)

Readings, Judges 2:16-19 and Matthew 25: 31-46
Image, Yalim Yildirim, Inside Outside. Ecoline on paper 25 x 25 cm

The book of Judges takes a pattern, foreshadowed in the reading from today. A judge arises, reforms Israel and leads them in battle, bringing victory and deliverance. Then the judge dies, and Israel would relapse and behave worse than their ancestors, doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord, which usually leads to them being made captive or overrun in battle, until a new judge is raised up by God to reform and deliver the people once more.
 
The difficulty to maintain the integrity and ethics of a community across the generations is perhaps a fairly typical pattern across much of human history. People are forgetful and distractible. Increasingly so after the loss of a central figure who kept a community, movement, or institution focused on a common goal.
 
We can understand this at a micro-level. Following a conference, a scare, or a testimonial, many of us have had the experience of being motivated to make a change (a new fitness regime, a creative endeavour, or a desire to live out our faith with renewed rigour). We start strong, only to miss a day, a day which turns into a week, which turns into changing the goal, which turns into life as we knew it before. This is not to shame any of us, but to acknowledge that what was occurring in Israel following the death of each judge, while not laudable, was something we as humans and humans in religious communities are prone to.
 
Jesus speaks to his disciples as he draws ever closer to his death. And while his death will be unlike the judges of the past (for Jesus’ death will be met with resurrection and ascension), the question remains: will his followers simply repeat the same mistakes as the people of God in the age of judges? Will the lack of the immediate presence of the judge as compass and leader of the people, lead to a relapse?
 
And so Jesus speaks of the judgment the Son of Man will mediate when he comes in glory. Here the judge – raised up by God from the people to be their reformer and deliverer – returns to the people; hidden in their midst, as the least and last. Jesus, the judge, does not depart upon his death, but will be found (or ignored) within the people as they seek to maintain their integrity and ethics across the generations to come. Christ – the church’s final judge – is hidden amongst the hungry, the stranger, and the imprisoned, as the living litmus test, as to whether we shall relapse, or rise to meet the day.
 
Now the anonymous expansion of Christ into the least of these is not akin to an elf on the shelf… watching over us all from the hidden corners, filling out Santa’s naughty or nice list. This is not some undercover boss situation aimed to ascertain how the workers act when unsupervised. Christ does not come to us in the presence of the least to catch us out, or to perform some great ironic reversal where we get our poetic just-desserts.
 
For the judgment of Christ is never punitive or carceral; it is restorative. Christ’s justice emerges from his grace and love, an extension of God’s steadfast mercy and kindness. Christ tells us up front that he shall be found in the least of these, and thus the lesson serves to do three things: centre our ethics and compassion in the margins of society, remind us that our fidelity to Christ is better indicated by the love and welcome of people than saying all the right things about God, and serves as a continued and intimate source of motivation and accountability as we seek to live in the way of God, from generation to generation. Were Christ encountered only in monuments (or even only in Scripture) the forgetfulness and distraction that can come upon us in the wake of his death would be far greater. Instead, Christ comes to us as neighbours and strangers in need, an ever-present reminder that the greatest of these is love, an ever-present reminder that the world is too full of woes and inequity for us to relapse in our commission to love others as Christ first loved us.  
 
Christ is the great judge of the church: raised up by God to deliver the people, to draw us from idolatry and stubborn ways, and lead us back to the way of life. And yet Christ is the judge who is found not in halls of power, but in the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner. And as such he becomes the judge who reveals our own judgment. As the judge who comes to us hidden amongst the least, Christ exposes who we judge as worthy of attention, worthy of care, worthy of understanding, and worthy of love. From below, from powerlessness and vulnerability, Christ exposes our false equivalencies, exposes the hypocrisy in our systems of compassion, the stereotypes that weasel into our minds and harden our hearts, exposes the easy comfort of factionalism and favouritism, exposes how readily we accept the reasonableness of violence and dispossession, exposes how quickly we can blame the least for their own hunger, sickness, isolation, or incarceration. Christ exposes this, not so that we might be condemned, but so that we might be saved. So that our hearts may be softened, our lives transformed, and our communities redeemed. Christ, the judge, hidden in the world, draws near to us time and again so that we might be stripped of our false judgments and be made ready for the Kingdom of God. So that that we might come to know that the last is not only first, but the site where what it means to be a Christian is truly judged.