WITH the last Sunday before Advent, Christ the King, we come finally to the parable for which previous weeks have been preparing us: the separation of the sheep and the goats.
I actually have often used Matthew 25.31-40 as a funeral reading for individuals who have lived lives of selfless service outside the Church. But it is simply comfortable to achieve this once we omit verses 41-46, which link the salvation of the righteous to the damnation of the unrighteous. For some Christians, this very act of division is a key a part of the parable’s attraction.
From the Gospel, I turned to the reading from Ezekiel, looking to search out help there. I didn’t discover a solution to make Matthew’s message more palatable. What I did find was a special form of help, as I absorbed the prophetic voice. Instead of analysing the content, I responded to the shape. Formal textual evaluation could be an arid exercise, but not on this case; for I don’t think that I actually have ever seen a reading so full of verbs.
Going by the NRSV (relatively than the Hebrew original), the passage incorporates 24 verbs, by which God describes his own actions. The most outstanding are “seek” (4 times), “bring” (3 times), and “feed” (six times). They give the impression that Ezekiel’s God is an intervening God, powerful and energetic. Of all of the verbs utilized in this passage, though, the last one appeared to me to be richest in meaning, and most replete with hope. It is a verb which, in lots of languages, seems to be old, complex, and really meaning-full: the verb “to be”.
The torrent of action-verbs (“I’ll search/seek/rescue/bring/shepherd. . .” etc.) involves a sudden stop in verse 24: “I, the LORD, shall be their God, and my servant David shall be prince amongst them.” God stops being a direct participant. He shifts from doing to being, from motion to existence. By raising up a prince amongst humankind, within the person of King David, God discloses his design for his creation. He calls this human being to tackle the a part of shepherd, binder-up, feeder, strengthener of his people.
Through the succession of human rulers, God reveals to us the impossibility of human rule embodying the divine will completely — even David and Solomon fall short. But David and his successors, set over God’s people Israel to rule them, are usually not a failed “plan A”, obliging God to dream up a plan B. They are a stage within the progressive unfolding of a single divine purpose.
Thus the “fullness” which had at all times been the target is inaugurated through the incarnation. God’s Son will rule his Kingdom, and his body shall be the Church. This is revealed in that fullness for which Paul longed, and we still pray: the birth of Christ, which ushers within the “Kingdom of the heavens” (Matthew’s distinctive expression). God shifts from doing to being, as Ezekiel prophesied so way back, to make possible the binding together of divinity and humanity, which otherwise could be entirely disparate, incapable of integrous communication. So got here the revealing of God’s own Son because the Good Shepherd, the Prince of Peace.
The commemoration of Christ the King celebrates an ultimate end, which is one way or the other the start of a recent dawn, too. God makes Jesus Christ his way of drawing humankind to himself for ever. What was initiated in Ezekiel is accomplished within the Gospel, because Jesus and all who follow him as their Lord begin doing and fulfilling the desire of God, whose being is now known to them. The sheep from the Gospel are each the doers of God’s will, and its embodiment.
So, we must always not underestimate the verb “to be”. Its noun-form, “being”, shouldn’t be a wishy-washy, weedy word, lurking within the background but devoid of substance. It is the term we turn to, Sunday by Sunday, to precise the muse of Christ’s kingship, once we proclaim that he’s “of 1 being” with the Father. The Nicene Creed turned to that word “being” to precise the final word reality of God, each Father and Son (and eventually Spirit, too).
Christ’s kingship is just this: God’s ultimate reality, his purpose fulfilled, a disclosure of the entire meaning not only of salvation history but all history, from “at first” to the “ages of ages, Amen” (Ephesians 3.21).
