Liberation – Christ the King: Year A Proper 29

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 100; Psalm 95:1-7a; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25: 31-46

Matthew’s Jesus once again has contradicted himself. With his parable of the vineyard laborers, Matthew’s Jesus illustrated the nature of the Covenant offered by God. The parable was not about the reversal of fortune for the greedy or the self-righteous (“the last will be first and the first last”). Jesus was illustrating how in God’s realm the reward is bestowed whenever the program is joined. That is the nature of God’s Covenant. But by the time the writer of Matthew got around to chapter 25, he was more interested in maintaining law and order in his early Christian community. Anyone who does not provide food, drink, hospitality, and healing for the poor (or, as the Jesus Seminar Scholars put it, “the most inconspicuous” in the community) will be separated forever from God’s realm. The writer has forgotten how in God’s realm the rain falls on the just and the unjust. He has forgotten Jesus’s prime directive: Love Your Enemies. He does not understand (authentic) Paul’s break-through concept of grace.

Nevertheless, among the most beloved phrases in Christianity (in addition to John 3:16), is the last judgment by Matthew’s Jesus: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a foreigner and you showed me hospitality; I was naked and you clothed me; I was ill and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to see me.” The astounded followers were told that whenever they did any of these things for the “least of these” (NRSV) they had done them for Jesus; they had participated with Jesus in God’s great work of distributive justice-compassion. These words are words of empowerment as well as challenge, inspiration as well as admonition. These words are the catalyst for countless church programs from soup kitchens to homeless shelters, and for institutions such as World Vision, Church World Service, and Habitat for Humanity, without which, the Planet would be in worse shape than it is.

Unfortunately, these words have become easy piety, evoking guilt among the faithful of a Sunday morning. Who has time to volunteer at the soup kitchen, or start a thrift shop, or join a hospital or prison ministry? So we dig into our wallets and give a little extra to support the church’s “outreach” programs, especially in hard economic times. But deep down, we know it’s not enough. “Cheap Grace” is exactly that. We know we are really part of the goat troop that will be sent over the cliff into “eternal punishment.”

The portion selected from Ephesians is not much help in this regard. By the time this letter was written, in the last third of the 1st Century, the Apostle Paul was long gone, and a cosmic view of the Church of Jesus Christ was well underway. “Paul’s Prayer,” as the reading is named in the NRSV, has little to do with either final judgment, as preached by the writer of Matthew, or justice, as called for by the prophet Ezekiel. Instead, the pious “saints of the Church” are called to realize some future hope in a glorious inheritance yet to come to those who believe. For people oppressed by various forms of Empire, there is no way out. There is only the uncertain hope for a better life after death. The Church itself is caught in the seemingly inevitable march into the normalcy of retributive systems.

In 1987, I went to Esteli, Nicaragua, with a group called “Escuela Nica.” The purpose was to bring North Americans to the heart of the Sandinista movement, to see the other side of the Contra War being waged by the United States in an effort to restore the Samoza regime to power. For five weeks we were to study Spanish, get to know the Nicaraguan culture, history, and people, and along with that, study liberation theology as expressed in Ernesto Cardenal’s The Gospel in Solentiname. What an opportunity for direct action, for making a difference in people’s lives, for learning how the poor and disenfranchised live, and doing something about changing it.

I very nearly was not accepted to the program because of my answer to one question, discussed in a preliminary interview. The question was, What do you hope to gain from this experience? What is in it for you? The question confused me. It’s not about me, I explained. It’s what my particular expertise can bring to the people there. I listed my qualifications: leadership, education, music, organizational skills. But that is not what was wanted.

Terms like “poor and disenfranchised” “victims,” “the least of these,” or as the Jesus Seminar Scholars put it, the “inconspicuous,” denigrate and disempower the people they describe. What the interviewer wanted me to realize was that the people I was going to visit had a tremendous gift for me. My job was to discover that gift and bring it back.

Here it is: Forget grandiose ideas about saving the poor, transforming their lives, making a difference, winning the Nobel Prize for Peace. The way to empower people is to work in partnership with them to improve their lot – whatever it is. The concept is as old as time: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a woman to fish and you feed her for a lifetime. Behind the saying is the realization of a profound equality that overturns oppressive thought forms about “power-over” others. The mission is to recognize the inherent power of oppressed people. When people are empowered, they can pull themselves out of the worst kind of oppression.

In El Salvador, in 1991 (this time on a trip sponsored by CISPES), we visited a village of returnees from exile who had created a neighborhood in the heart of San Salvador on top of a waste dump site. They had tapped into the city water supply (illegally), and built houses literally in the midst of mud and garbage, which ran down the middle of the mud-packed streets. Inside the tin-roofed cinderblock houses, the packed earth floors were spotless. Behind the houses, flying in the sunlit breezes, was bright-colored laundry: jeans, dresses, jackets, shirts. In front of the houses, within mere feet of the open sewer, were flower and herb gardens. Little girls with dirty bare feet chased each other around the yards in immaculate dresses.

The Great Work of restoring Covenant, non-violence, distributive justice and peace to the Planet begins, as Dorothy said, right in our own back yard. My backyard in West Virginia looks out over some of the worst poverty in the country. West Virginia is near the bottom of the scale on income, affordable housing, education, and health when compared to other states. The following story may be apocryphal – but a friend who is the wife of a dentist swears it is true: One day a 21-year old man came to the office and said it was time to get his false teeth. Even though his teeth were in fairly good shape, it was a right of passage to have them all pulled and replaced because they would all rot anyway. The level of West Virginia’s participation in the most potentially transformational election in the history of the United States was a dismal 56% of registered voters. Mistrust of “the government,” “liberals,” and outsiders is so great that the people believe that government guidelines for a healthy diet are a socialist plot whose purpose is to control their lives. Daddy ate hotdogs, Granddaddy ate hot dogs, and no government is going to tell us what to eat – let alone force us into anti-smoking programs, drug addiction counseling, AA, and other “liberal, socialist schemes” (such as mandatory seatbelts) that threaten individual freedom and property rights.

The struggle for liberation is a struggle because it is so much easier to disregard people with less education, less money, less opportunity. It is so much easier to stay away from neighborhood meetings that bog down in petty arguments between people who seem incapable of seeing the bigger, sustainable, picture that could transform their lives if only they would open their minds. Liberation is a struggle because the would-be liberators’ minds are just as closed by attitudes that are determined by the labels we use, which keep oppression firmly in place.

Nothing opens minds more than respect for who one is, and the realization that we hold the keys to our own empowerment. But that kind of leadership ends all too often in death: Mahatmas Ghandi was murdered by one of his own. Martin Luther King was shot down by a previously nameless drifter. Jesus himself, according to profound Christian myth, was betrayed into the hands of the Roman Empire by a follower who could not imagine a realm of distributive justice-compassion.

Look now at the reading from Ezekiel. Strip away the implied references to Jesus, the savior of the world. Imagine Ezekiel in his own milieu – exiled from Jerusalem, cut off from religious and cultural grounding. Yes, the situation is much like Matthew’s Jerusalem community. Matthew may have been thinking of Ezekiel’s prophetic call for judgment when he penned his own story about Christ the King, the Good Shepherd. After all, Ezekiel points out that God “will set up . . . one shepherd, my servant David, . . . and I will make with [the people] a covenant of peace . . .” (Ezekiel 34:23-25).

But what is Ezekiel really saying? The “day of the Lord” (dies irae) has already happened. The people have been forcibly removed from Judah to Babylon. To those survivors, Ezekiel says, the reason you are exiled is because your leaders, your shepherds, paid no attention to God’s justice: “Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! . . . You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them” (Ezekiel 34: 2b-5). This portion is (of course) not part of the readings for proper 29. Ezekiel’s point is that if the leaders abandon their responsibilities, then God himself will lead the people, and will feed them with justice. The people are held accountable, and are therefore empowered. Likewise, Psalm 95 tells us that it is not only the leaders that God holds accountable, but the people as well. “O that today you would listen to [God]’s voice! Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work” (see Exodus 17:1-7; Proper 21 Commentary). “For forty years [God] loathed that generation and said ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways. Therefore in my anger I swore, they shall not enter my rest.’”

Are we and the Psalmist blaming the victims here? Of course not. But the consequences of injustice apply to everyone. God’s judgment (wrath) must be understood to be the proper response to injustice. We don’t have to wait for some kind of “afterlife” to see what that wrath brings. It includes failing schools, overwhelmed medical systems, bankrupt industries, collapsed markets, political apathy, fear, violence, dysfunctional families, and a degraded biosphere.

Felipe: I see that when Christ spoke of the Last Judgment he didn’t speak of religion, prayers, ritual; he spoke only of social needs.
Alejandro: Let’s make no mistake about that; there are religious people who think they are good people because they give aid, alms, old shoes. That’s not what Christ demands in this Gospel; it’s a total change in the social system.

Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname
Volume 4, p. 52

That is the liberation struggle.

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