The Parable of the Last Judgment

Matthew 25:31-46

Introduction

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If this is your first time here, welcome! Here’s some background on this newsletter. Ernesto Cardenal was a Nicaraguan priest, poet, politician, and liberation theologian. One of his projects was to collaboratively read the gospels with the campesinos of Nicaragua. If the Jesus ministered, taught, healed, and living among the poor people of first century Judea, then perhaps the least of these today can help us better understand Jesus’s message. We participate in this by reading The Gospel in Solentiname, Cardenal’s collection of their discussions. If you would like to learn more about the context of these conversations, there’s nothing better than reading Cardenal’s introduction to the book here.

A Quick Question:

Next week’s lectionary passage isn’t in The Gospel in Solentiname. In fact, the next two weeks aren’t. I know people are bummed when they don’t get this every week, so let me know what I should do.

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Last week, we read about the parable of the talents. You can read that here. This week, following the Revised Common Lectionary, lets read about the Parable of the Last Judgment.

Lectionary Reading

Matthew 25:14-30

[Jesus said], “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.”

Solentiname Reading

When the Son of Man comes as king, surrounded by all his angels, he will sit on his throne of glory. People from all nations will gather before him, and he will separate them some from others, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

I: “I've just come from Managua, where I was summoned, as you know, to be interrogated by the Military Court that is investigating the activities of the FSLN [Sandinista National Liberation Front], and there I quoted to the judges this very passage, telling them that in the end God was going to judge everyone. But now that we have read the text I realize that Jesus doesn't say that God is going to judge but that he himself is going to judge.”

FELIPE: “He says it will be when he comes as king, that is, when the kingdom is established, and since we know that the kingdom will be here on earth, the judgment will then be here on earth.”

WILLIAM: “And it's not that he's going to come on a cloud; you mustn't take this literally; it's society itself that he's going to judge.”

ALEJANDRO: “And the judgment consists in a selection from society, a separation of the good and the evil.”

WILLIAM: “It's a selection that in fact is already going on, whenever a people becomes free. The evil ones leave and the ones that want to work for others and build the new society, they stay there.”

I told them what I heard in Cuba from my friend the Catholic writer, Fina Garcia Marruz: when the Revolution triumphed it was like being at the Last Judgment, for everything that had been secret came out into the light and you found out who had been with the people and who had been against the people and you rewarded some and punished others. And I said that the Judgment begins right now, as the Resurrection also, according to Christ, begins right now. But the complete Judgment, of “all the nations” as it says here, will not come until the kingdom is established on all the earth. And it seems to me that the Son of Man will not come as an individual, as he did the first time; he will be a collective Christ, he will come as a society, or rather a new species, the New Person. Father Chardin says that just as for the first coming of Christ it was necessary for the individual human being to have reached a certain degree of evolution, for his second coming it's going to be necessary for all of society to have reached a certain special degree of evolution.

FELIPE: “Let's say the people will be king.”

Then the king will say to those on his right hand: “Come, you blessed by my Father; receive the kingdom prepared for you since God made the world. For I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I wandered as a foreigner and you sheltered me. I lacked clothing and you gave it to me; I was ill and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to see me.”

WILLIAM: “Those who are on his right are the left for us. Those who are on his left, that he later curses, are the right.”

ALEJANDRO: “There's the danger that the things that Christ names here will be understood as simple traditional charity, and I don't think that's the meaning.”

GIGI, our friend from Peru: “At times in an unjust system there's been no alternative to that traditional charity. It's clear that authentic Christian charity is collectivized charity: a whole system where injustice no longer exists. Both of them are charity, but the latter is already the beginning of the kingdom.”

I: “I also believe that we can't distinguish between charity and revolution, for they're the same thing. Camilo Torres used to say that revolution is effective charity. And he explained it by saying that only with it could there be effective carrying out of works of mercy in society as a whole: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, teach the ignorant, etc. In the past the saints, when a just society wasn't possible because of the means of production that were then in force (slavery, feudalism, or capitalism), what they did was to practice charity individually or through a small group: a religious society that they founded. But now Camilo Torres’ effective charity is possible.”

WILLIAM: “In Cuba everybody's been fed and given clothing, adequate housing, medical care, education. I think that when Christ spoke of these things, which are a person's basic necessities and the first ones that have to be considered, he was thinking, more than of traditional charity, of revolutionary charity: effective charity.”

GIGI: “Yes, maybe he was talking for history and for the present instead of for people of his own time. Before, you couldn't do anything except what Francis of Assisi did. That was the maximum effectiveness; now there are other possibilities. One very important thing that I find in this Gospel is that it's an announcement of the definitive triumph of love, of justice, of the new society, and the defeat of capitalism.”

FRANCISCO: “Its elimination.”

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.”

WILLIAM: “Christ speaks of visiting the sick; that's the only thing you could do at that time. Now he would have talked of clinics, free medical service, hygienic conditions, preventive medicine.”

OLIVIA: “And being in prison? He just says ‘I was in prison.’ To be in prison is very wretched; being tortured in jail, the way they torture those Christs now, is much worse.”

Someone from the opposite shore: “But somebody said that prayers are bad.”

I: “What Felipe said was that in this Last Judgment no attention is paid to whether they prayed.”

FELIPE: “They don't even pay attention to whether they had faith.”

I: “More than that: those who are saved appear here as though they had no faith in Christ.”

Then those who turned out to be righteous will say: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?” And the king will answer them: “I tell you truly that everything you did for one of these my brothers, however humble they may be, you did it for me.”

The man from the opposite shore: “So religion is good for nothing?”

ELVIS: “If religion helps me to help my neighbor, then it's useful. If it makes me ignore my neighbor's needs, it's of no use.”

OLIVIA: “When you go and see to it that a sick person doesn't die, that's prayer.”

ALEJANDRO: “Going back to that final part: the identification is very clear. ‘What you did with these…these are me.’ We're always believing that Jesus Christ is a distant person, different from the people. And it seems to me very important, as it's been important to me for a long time: that even if a person is a snob, that person is God, no matter who. God identifies himself with human beings; God makes no distinction. And that's what makes revolutionary love spring up.”

NATALIA: “God identifies with the needy. With the poor. With the humble.”

ALEJANDRO: “With everybody that's screwed.”

I: “With everybody that's screwed, as Alejandro says. I was saying before that that Son of Man would be a collective Christ, a society; and now I'm surer of it because of what Alejandro has said: Christ is the society of the poor, the proletariat, as we say today. And this people is the one that's going to judge.”

ALEJANDRO: “That's right; he's going to judge those who were good to him and those who were evil.”

OLIVIA: “So we're not going to have Christ coming from heaven to sit on a throne surrounded by his angels. It's the people that are going to do justice. The people are going to say: we were undernourished, barefoot, sick, landless, in the Model Prison.”

FELIPE: “The people's angels, I think, are all the ones that have helped liberation.”

I: “In the Bible, angels are God's messengers, or God's employees, and it seems to me that Felipe has given a good biblical interpretation. When Christ says he will come surrounded by angels he is presenting himself as God, for in the Bible only God is surrounded by angels; but he is also presenting himself as the people, for when he speaks in the first person (‘I was hungry…I was in prison’) it is the people that's speaking. So he's trying to tell us that the people is God. And so when I told them in the Military Court that God was going to judge everyone, I could have said that the people was going to judge everyone.”

ALEJANDRO: “The tortured ones, the starving, the ones from the wretched districts like Acahualinca, they're the ones who can best understand injustices. The ones who are suffering them, who are God. That's very simple, isn't it?”

JULIO: “That means that here it's up to the exploited ones to put themselves in God's place, who they really are, and say to the rich: I was thirsty and you did not give me water. And so the exploited ones will have to say those words.”

ALEJANDRO: “And who else is going to say them?”

GIGI: “But now it's the people in the new society who are going to be the judge. When the people have power.”

I: “When the Revolution spreads to the whole planet. ‘People of all nations’ means all of humanity. Right now we can't, right now we're being judged by them. There is that Military Court. And with that Court they're putting a lot of people in jail: to be able to go on keeping the people hungry, without clothes, without medicine, without houses.”

WILLIAM: “In Christianity there's been a lot of preaching that Jesus ‘is hidden’ in the poor, and this has helped to maintain the difference between Jesus and the poor.”

I: “And it's curious: those who were good to Jesus, he says they didn't do it for religious motives, and they didn't do it for him; they did it just to help their neighbor. It seems to me that this applies to all revolutions: none of them has been religious or Christian (at times they've been anti-religious and anti-Christian instead) and the revolutionaries didn't know they were doing it for God. I think that here Jesus is keeping the revolutionaries in mind. And foreseeing that all revolutions would be atheistic.”

ALEJANDRO: “That's uncomfortable.”

I: “Why?”

ALEJANDRO: “As we'd said before the people as a whole is Jesus. And now it's turning out that what they did for the people they did for Jesus. So in the long run is there a distinction between the people and Jesus?”

I: “He doesn't make the distinction; it's the others that make it. From the first he says, ‘they fed me…they gave me clothing’; he's saying that he is the poor. But he's surrounded by angels, and he's also God. This reminds me of a parable that Mao tells, the one of the ‘Old Madman who Moved a Mountain.’ It's an old Chinese parable, of an old man that insisted stubbornly on moving a mountain, and he succeeded: because God rewarded his effort and moved it for him. And Mao says: ‘The same thing will happen with us if we persist obstinately, but in reality, for us, God is the masses.’ This seems to be pure atheism. But I think that Christ is doing something similar, when he tells us about the Last Judgment and puts the people in God's place; for in the whole biblical tradition God was going to make the Last Judgment.”

GIGI: “And the oppressors didn't know either that it was Christ they were oppressing. They thought Christ was one thing and the people was another.”

MANUEL: “That's what people have always thought.”

GIGI: “Some didn't believe in him and yet they were good to him in their neighbors. Others believed in him and they weren't good to him in their neighbors.”

WILLIAM: “And it seems to me he's showing that the damned were people who fulfilled their religious duties. But they were making a distinction between Christ and the neighbors.”

GIGI (smiling): “This is a kind of atheistic parable.”

Then the king will say to those on his left: “Get away from me, you damned ones; go to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you did not feed me.”

LAUREANO: “They're probably cursing those bastards that are dead there: ‘Son of a bitch!’ But they're not going to be resurrected.”

I: “And isn't there going to be any punishment for those who lived only among riches and pleasures, just having a good life, without any punishment here?”

ALEJANDRO: “The fact is that the life of the rich isn't at all a pleasant life; the life of the rich, shit! It's miserable. The worst part is that with their money they're making poor people miserable too.”

WILLIAM: “There are rich people's lives that are delightful. I don't envy them, but I recognize it; why kid ourselves, why say they live bad if they live well?”

ALEJANDRO: “All those rich families in the movies. What goes on between father and daughter, son and mother; they have horrible lives. Yes, those have been damned all their lives.”

I: “But here we're talking about an eternal punishment.”

LAUREANO: “It means that they're going to be suffering.”

MANUEL: “Their punishment, a punishment forever, is having been what they were.”

OSCAR: “The eternal fire, it seems to me, is the torture of selfishness.”

I: “If saved humanity will be eternally united, those who separate from it will be eternally separated. The first ones Jesus calls ‘the blessed of my Father.’ The second ones he just calls ‘cursed.’ He doesn't call them ‘the cursed of my Father’; it's because God doesn't curse anyone. They have cursed themselves.”

OSCAR: “Those of us who believe ourselves to be religious can be under a curse. Maybe somebody came to me hungry and I didn't help that person at that moment; and maybe I say, I'm religious. For me religion is worthless! What's worthwhile is loving. And it's not just because I'm religious that I'm going to be saved.”

I: “And those who are saved, Christ is telling them they'll receive the kingdom that God prepared for them. On the other hand those who are damned, he doesn't tell them they'll go to the eternal fire that God prepared for them but that God prepared for the devil and his angels. And it's also interesting that Christ says the kingdom was prepared from ‘the beginning of the world.’ The fact is that evolution has had an aim from the beginning: the establishment of that kingdom of love, on this planet and on all the millions of inhabited planets that there must be in the universe.”

GIGI: “I believe we'll survive as a collective consciousness of humanity, if we've been good. If not, we can't be part of that consciousness.”

“And do you think there's a heaven?”

GIGI: “Heaven is this earth.”

I: “And it can also be the heaven above, that we all see: the starry sky. This can even be explained with Marxist philosophy, called dialectical materialism, which says that matter is eternal. It has existed and it will exist forever; not the slightest particle can ever be destroyed. And I say: if material is eternal, there is also an eternal life, and an eternal consciousness. And when we die, we can go to form part of that universal consciousness, depending on the degree of evolution that we have reached; or else we can remain eternally separated. And it seems to me that we can understand the resurrection of our bodies this way: that since we're part of the consciousness of the universe, our bodies will be the whole universe.”

GIGI: “And it's very clear what Jesus says here: that it's those who love (‘I was hungry and you fed me’) who are going to have eternal life. Those who have loved him, which is the people. Or have loved the people, which is him. (It's all the same.)”

WILLIAM: “Those who establish justice on earth. That's why he finished by saying that ‘The just will go to eternal life.’”

I: “Those who are saved he twice calls ‘the just.’ In the Bible the ‘unjust’ are those who rob orphans and widows, those who are responsible for there being poor, who get rich at the expense of others, take away lands, commit fraud, are bloody and cruel, in short, they are the oppressors. The ‘just’ are the opposite of all that. ‘Just’ is equal to revolutionaries. And ‘Judgment’ in the Bible, as Jose Porfirio Miranda explains very well, means liberation or the establishment of revolutionary justice. The Book of ‘Judges’ deals with liberating chieftains of Israel, none of whom performed a judicial function in the modern sense. In the Bible it says that God ‘judges the orphans and the indigent,’ and that means that he saves them, not that he takes them to a Military Court. And Yahweh the ‘Judge’ in the Bible is not a neutral judge who's going to judge rich and poor equally; he's the avenger of the poor. All the liberating actions of God in the history of Israel were called ‘God's justices.’ But the people were again oppressed, and they were hoping for a final, definitive liberation, a judgment after which there would be no need for any other judgment, a Last Judgment. And that's the one that Jesus has described for us.”

Next Week

Next week is the first Sunday of Advent! Unfortunately, the lectionary passage is a bit of Markan apocalypticism that isn’t discussed in the Gospel in Solentiname. Make sure to answer the poll at the top of this post as to what you would like to cover during these few weeks without direct parallaels between the lectionary and the text.

What was the most interesting part of this week’s discussion? Let me know your opinions in the comments. Thanks for subscribing and sharing. I’ll see you next soon.