Saving the best until last

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 25:31-46) dramatizes for us the scene of the Last Judgement. The Son of Man separates the just from the unjust, sifting them according to their works in the world before dismissing the latter into eternal fire and welcoming the former into His eternal bliss. This was a scene often emblazoned on the walls and the tympana of medieval cathedrals, reminding human beings, whether they were at worship or passing in or out of the door, that judgement was coming and that right soon. The damnation of the latter is a subject for meditation in the first week of the Exercises of St Ignatius, one of the tools of spirituality that transformed the troops of the Counter Reformation into a vast company of holy men like St John Ogilvie whose feast falls today. Damnation is not the invention of some hellfire preacher bent on stoking the fears of his listeners, but a revelation of the merciful Son of Man, the Good Shepherd, the one who is meek and humble of heart, whose task as the voice of the Father is to initiate us into the mysteries of His Divinity: the mystery of how He is both pure mercy and pure justice, just as He is three and one and yet entirely simple in Himself.

One thing that strikes us now about this judgement scene is how both the just and the unjust had not understood the drama in which they took part in their lives. Yet, surely, this similarity in them arises from different sources.

The just ask the Judge when they saw Him sick, or hungry or thirsty, and gave Him help. In other words, they did not know what they were doing. It is as if the Son is saying: reward them Father for they do not know what they have done. Yet this is no praise of ignorance. The lack of knowledge in the case of the just comes from decisions they made not to deny those who asked for their help. If this means they lacked discernment in life, they have lacked it in the right direction. They erred on the side of generosity. It is not that they did not allow their right hand to know what their left hand was doing; it was that both hands of the just were too busy about the needs they saw before them to count the cost. In this sense, they reflected the nature of God who is all good, for it is in the nature of goodness to share itself. Elsewhere in today’s liturgy, we are reminded of this cascade of goodness that is God and the call that is upon every one of us to imitate it; to make ourselves the children of our Father in heaven. The secret is not to be minded about who we are as we do such an act of generosity, but rather to mind the goodness we mean to achieve. This is not an invitation to be mindless in our giving, as if there were some good in putting change in the pocket of a someone likely to use it to harm themselves; it is one thing to help the undeserving (aren't we all undeserving?) and it is quite another to facilitate a person’s self-destruction. Nevertheless, Jesus’ words are an invitation not to calculate, not to trade on a person’s distress to benefit ourselves; not to pass on the other side of the road because crossing the road to help has nothing in it for us.

The unjust are like the just only in this point of similarity: that they do not exactly know what they have done. Jesus condemns them for actions that they do not recognise as their own. This is not because the Judge is unjust and His victims innocent; rather, it is because they ignored their call as human beings to imitate their Father who is in heaven, pouring forth His goodness on all. They saw the distress of others and either ignored it, or possibly calculated that there was a quick dollar to be made in squeezing the needy into a relationship of dependence.

But why in their case is ignorance no defence? Again, did not Jesus ask the Father to forgive his executioners precisely because they did not know what they were doing? So He did, but in the case of the unjust, their ignorance does not proceed from the thoughtless brutality of men tasked with society’s dirtiest jobs. Rather, it comes from one indubitable source: a lack of love. Love does not calculate; love is a poor merchant but a good donor; love does not serve the self but the other; love turns the barren mountain of isolated faith into an open ocean of connected benevolence and the tinkling cymbals of self-pursuit into a magnificent symphony of goodness: first towards God and then towards others.

Some people drive this principle to an extreme, even to the point of making faith irrelevant. In contrast, there are those who push the importance of faith so far that they excuse their own cruelty in the name of truth. The balance, as so often, lies in holding both sides of the equation together, the paradox of doing the truth in love. This is how the just pass the test and, alas, its neglect is how the unjust fail it. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Who will save us, we ask again, from the body of this death? With man it is impossible, replies the Lord, but with God, all things are possible.

Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ, who came to call sinners and rescue us from the night of death.