It is often easy, when walking into a room, to notice, or guess, who the most important people are. If a newcomer walks into this room for the first time, who will they believe is most important to us?
They will be badly mistaken, but I suspect they’ll decide it’s the people up here in the altar area who are the most important. Here I stand on this little platform. I am raised above you primarily to make the most of good sight lines, but does this pulpit satisfy an all-too-human desire to put one person above the others? And all the people up front – we get to wear special clothes. We have copes, chasubles, dalmatics, and tunicles in our closets, grand names for grand garments. Priests wear the copes and chasubles, deacons wear the dalmatics, and the first lay Eucharistic minister wears the tunicle. We say that all four orders of ministry are equal – we insist that bishops, priests, deacons, and the laity are equal – but bishops wear shiny, pointy hats and hold splendid croziers. And even though the robe of Holy Baptism – the white alb – is something every baptized Christian can wear, only the up-front people actually wear them. Our fancy outfits belie our claims of equality. It seems as if the most important people are all up here.
But if Jesus of Nazareth walked into this room and looked around, I firmly believe that he would not identify us as the most important people in the room. He might look at the altar party, and speak to us, only after he has greeted nearly everyone else.
He would behave the same way in other rooms. In the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Jesus would not point to the members of Congress, naming them the most important people. In Vatican City, Jesus would not point to Pope Francis and his cardinals. The most important people in the White House are not Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, at least by the standards of Jesus of Nazareth. Are you a captain of your industry? If so, Jesus has bad news for you: you don’t come first. One of the members of St. Paul’s has what I believe is the most important job in his workplace, but lately I’ve noticed that he never features himself in his company’s promotions on social media. Ah! This person gets it. He’s at the top of the org chart, but he knows he is not the most important person.
This perspective of Jesus of Nazareth applies to family life, too. Would Jesus point to my father as the most important person in my family? Perhaps he would do so at this particular moment in my family’s life, but not because my father is our patriarch, and a great-grandfather, and the most senior living member of the family. No, Jesus might point to my father right now as the most important family member only because my father is gravely ill. His illness puts him in one of the categories Jesus of Nazareth has identified as markers of importance.
Jesus directs his favor to the people in his own time who were denied access to the Temple, because their problems or identities made them ritually “unclean.” And his followers discovered that just by following Jesus, they took on some of these “unclean” problems or identities themselves. And of course we still do this: it is all too easy for religious folks like us to identify who’s in and who’s out. So, here they are, the categories of outsiders who take first place with Jesus of Nazareth:
Are you hungry or thirsty? If so, Jesus points to you and says, “You’re more important than the well-nourished people.” Are you a newcomer here, who doesn’t know anyone? You’re more important than the rector. Are you wearing on your back all the clothes you own, and facing tonight’s weather without a jacket, and tomorrow’s job interview without a change of underwear and socks? If so, Jesus points to you and says, “You’re more important than someone with a full closet and a washing machine.”
Are you sick? If so, Jesus points to you and says, “You’re more important than the healthy people.” And if you’re sick, do you have the least number of visitors among the patients in the hospital? If so, Jesus is going to visit you first. (My father is further back in the line, in this respect: his ICU room overflows with visitors, most of them his many children.)
Are you in prison? If so, Jesus points to you, he utterly disregards whether you are guilty or innocent, and he says, “You are more important than people on the outside, than people who are free.” Look up “Sister Helen Prejean” to learn more about this. She ministers to death-row inmates, innocent and guilty alike, and she never fails to find Christ there.
Now, I wonder if this rankles you. You likely don’t have a problem with Jesus helping those in need, and teaching us to do the same, but we are well trained these days to pursue equality, always equality: “In the eye of God there is not one among us who is greater nor one who is less.” True enough. In fact, all of this beautiful vesture we wear in church is meant to symbolize how God has “wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature” – the dignity of all human beings, even if only a few of us wear the vibrant colors. And yet, despite the truth of our equality in God’s sight, Jesus borrows a page from the job description of an Emergency Medical Technician, who climbs aboard her ambulance to help not all the healthy people, but the one who collapsed, or the few who were injured. In short, Jesus does triage. Of course everyone is important! But Jesus is drawn first to the hungry and thirsty, first to the stranger and the unclothed, first to the sick, first to those in prison.
When Jesus visits the Gerasenes on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, he ministers first to the demoniac who is raving among the tombs. (The villagers are scandalized by this healing, and ask Jesus to leave their town: they are disturbed by the demoniac’s restoration, fully clothed and in his right mind; but maybe they’re also upset because Jesus put him before them.) Whenever Jesus enters any village or house, he begins his ministry there with acts of healing. Simon’s mother-in-law lay dying: nobody mattered more, at that moment. And when Jesus preaches to a crowd, he pressures his followers to focus first on the crowd’s need for something to eat. And finally Jesus was himself an incarcerated defendant, a victim of a sham trial, a dead man walking who was executed by the state: he doesn’t just visit prisoners, he is one of them.
And that’s the key to understanding how Jesus identifies who’s most important. He searches for the people who most resemble him. He sees himself in the hungry, in the impoverished, in the stranger, in the sick, in the prisoner. Their plight marks them as most important. Their hunger is their royal robe, their poverty a cope of crimson velvet edged in splendid ermine. Their illness is their scepter; their prison sentence is their crown. These are the royalty among us, the ones who reveal to us the face of Christ our Sovereign.
Today we hear about the Last Day, the Day of Judgment, a day of dreadful anxiety. If you visit the Sistine Chapel, you can view Michelangelo’s wondrous and unnerving fresco of the Last Day, and you can begin to appreciate the hold it has on the Christian imagination. And if you listen to Mozart’s Requiem, you’ll hear the unsettling text of the Requiem mass. Here’s a portion:
Day of wrath! … [dissolving] the earth in ashes … What dread there will be when the Judge comes to strictly judge all things … A trumpet, spreading a wondrous sound through the graves of all lands, will drive humankind before [God’s] throne … Sovereign of awful majesty, who freely saves the redeemed, save me, O Fount of Goodness … Place me among your sheep, and separate me from the goats, setting me at your right hand …
And on it goes. But the point of Matthew’s description of the Last Day is not to terrify us. That is incidental, a byproduct of the true mission of Jesus: He wants to get our attention. He wants to startle us so that he can radically reorient us. He wants to tell us something about the here and now, not about the end of time. He wants to give us new eyes to recognize those among us who most closely resemble Christ himself. It is all too easy for us to see a human being dressed in the robes of privilege and mistakenly revere them as the one God favors.
It is far more difficult for us to look up at the cross, and see hanging there all who are hungry, thirsty, unclothed, sick, or in prison. It is far more difficult for us to see them, recognize their ultimate importance, and bow to the presence of Christ that pulses through their bodies, the presence of Christ that claims our attention, that forms us to love, that forms us to serve, as the dominion of God begins to dawn upon this war-ravaged land.
These are our sovereigns; these are our royalty; these are those to whom we bow, in the splendid but upside-down reign of Christ.
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Preached on the Feast of the Reign of Christ (Year A), Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 26, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Psalm 100
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46