Because He Lives: a sermon on Matthew 25:31–46

“[T]he righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

There is a question in this passage that we have heard so many times we have stopped hearing it. The righteous stand before the throne and they say: Lord, when did we see you?

When did we see you hungry. When did we see you thirsty. When did we see you a stranger and take you in.

It is not a rhetorical question. It is not humility. It is confusion. Real confusion. The confusion of people who spent their lives feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and visiting the sick and who never once, in all of that, thought they were looking at God. They thought they were looking at people. They thought they were looking at the particular, specific, unrepeatable faces that God had placed before them—the faces they had been given to behold—and they responded to those faces the way love responds when it is real: without calculation, without theology, without the awareness that a test was being administered.

And the King says: it was me. Every time. In every face. It was me.

I want to sit with that for a moment before we move forward, because I think we have made this passage smaller than it is. We have turned it into a checklist. Feed the hungry: yes. Clothe the naked: yes. Visit the prisoner: certainly. And all of those things are commanded and all of those things are good. But the passage is not a checklist. The passage is a revelation. And the revelation is not that we should be kind to strangers, although we should. The revelation is that the Lord comes to us—has always come to us—primarily in the faces of those we have been given to love. Not the abstract poor. Not the theoretical neighbor. The specific person. The one whose name you know. The one whose hunger is not a statistic but a fact you discovered at your own table. The one whose thirst you quenched not because you were doing ministry but because they were thirsty and you had water and the water was right there.

~

I want to tell you about a friend of mine.

A few weeks ago, this friend—a young man I had built a deep and significant friendship with—reached out to me after a period of silence. He had been in a situation that had become dangerous. Someone in his life had isolated him, controlled him, cut him off from the people who cared about him. I did not know the full extent of what had happened. I only knew that he needed help, and that he had chosen to call me.

I drove to get him. I drove fast. When I found him, he was standing outside a building with a bag on his shoulder and a look on his face that I will carry with me for the rest of my life—the look of a man who had been through something he did not yet have language for, and who was hoping that the person coming to get him would not require language. Would not require explanation. Would simply come.

I brought him home.

He had not eaten in three days. I fed him. He was dehydrated and sick. I brought him water. He did not have clothes suitable for a job interview, so I bought him some. He did not have a safe place to sleep, so I gave him mine. He stayed in my home for three weeks. I helped him find work. I introduced him to people who could walk beside him. We went to church together. We sang hymns together. We prayed together—sometimes formally, sometimes in a parked car at eight in the morning with worship music playing, both of us just sitting in the presence of God with our hands open.

I did not, during any of this, think I was “serving Christ.”

I thought I was taking care of my friend. I thought I was doing what anyone would do—what anyone should do—when a person they love shows up at the end of their strength and says: I need you. I made coffee in the morning. I stayed up late in case he needed company. I sat with him while he grieved things I could not fix, and I did not try to fix them. I just stayed in the room.

It was only later—after he had to leave, after circumstances beyond my control or his required him to go—that I sat in the quiet of my house and understood whose face I had been looking at.

~

There is a tradition in the Church that speaks of the works of mercy as though they are something we go out and do. We leave the house. We go to the shelter, to the hospital, to the prison. We find the poor and we serve them and we return home having done the work of the gospel. And there is truth in this. The Lord is in the shelter and in the hospital and in the prison, and we are called to go there.

But I want to suggest this morning that the deeper movement of Matthew 25 is not outward but inward. Not into the world but into the room you are already in. The Lord does not come to us only in the stranger. The Lord comes to us in the face we see every day—the face across the breakfast table, the face on the other end of the phone at midnight, the face of the friend who shows up at your door with everything they own in a bag and nowhere else to go. The Lord comes to us in the faces of those He has specifically, deliberately, by name and by providence, placed in our care.

This is the mystery of the Incarnation taken to its fullest consequence. God did not become flesh in general. God became flesh in particular—in a specific body, born to a specific mother, in a specific town, at a specific moment in history. The Incarnation is not an abstraction. It is a name. It is a face. And if God entered the world through the scandal of particularity—through one body, one life, one set of hands and feet—then it follows that God continues to enter our lives through the same scandal. Through specific people. Through the ones who have been given to us. Not the ones we chose but the ones who arrived, the way all the most important things arrive: without announcement, without our permission, by a grace we did not request and could not have anticipated.

When I fed my friend, I was not feeding the poor. I was feeding him. When I gave him a bed, I was not sheltering the homeless. I was sheltering him. The him mattered. The specificity mattered. It was not an act of general charity. It was an act of covenant—the response of a man who had been given a face to behold and who beheld it, and in the beholding, without knowing it, beheld the Lord.

~

I want to return to the text, because there is a second question in it that we also skip past.

The goats—the unrighteous, the ones sent into the outer darkness—they ask the same question. Lord, when did we see you hungry? When did we see you thirsty? When did we see you a stranger? Same words. Same confusion. They did not know either. The difference between the sheep and the goats is not knowledge. Neither group recognized Christ. The difference is what they did in the absence of recognition.

The sheep, not knowing, loved anyway.

The goats, not knowing, walked past.

And here is where the passage cuts closest to the bone, because the goats did not walk past strangers. I do not think the goats are people who ignored the poor on the street. I think the goats are people who had faces in their lives—specific faces, given to them, placed before them by the same providence that places everything—and who did not behold them. Who saw the hunger and calculated whether the feeding was convenient. Who saw the thirst and asked whether the water was theirs to give. Who saw the stranger at the door and said: the timing isn't right. I don't have the resources. Someone else will help.

The goats are not monsters. The goats are busy. The goats are practical. The goats are people who had every reason—good reasons, defensible reasons, reasonable reasons—for not responding to the face in front of them. And the Lord says: that face was mine. And you did not see me. Not because I was hidden. Because you were not looking.

~

Let me tell you what happened in my house during those three weeks.

My friend grieved. He grieved things that had been done to him and things he had done to himself and the tangled, unresolvable knot that forms when your own wounds and someone else's cruelty wrap around each other until you cannot tell where the damage ends and the person begins. He grieved, and I sat with him, and I did not try to untangle the knot. I just stayed in the room.

He sang. He sang in the shower, and I heard it from the kitchen, and the sound of his voice in my house was—I don't know how to say this without it sounding like more than it was, but it was like hearing a hymn in a language you didn't know you'd been waiting to hear. He sang worship songs. He sang them without self-consciousness, without performance, with the freedom of a man who had been told, by the mere fact of being in a house where his faith was honored, that it was safe to pray out loud.

He told me things about myself that I had not seen. He held up a mirror—gently, without judgment, without asking me to change—and showed me patterns in my own behavior that I had been hiding from. He did this the way a friend does it, the way iron sharpens iron: not to wound but to refine. And I received it. And I was changed by it.

We went to church on a Sunday morning. His request, not mine. And we sat in the pew together, and I thought: this is what it was supposed to look like. Not the institution. Not the building. This. Two people in the presence of God, each carrying the other's weight, neither of them pretending the weight isn't heavy.

I did not know I was serving Christ. I was accompanying my friend. I was loving a man whose face God had placed before me and whose hunger was real and whose thirst was real and whose need for shelter was as urgent and as particular as anything in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. I was not doing ministry. I was making coffee. I was doing laundry. I was staying up late. I was being a friend.

And the Lord was there. The Lord was there the whole time. Not because I invited Him. Not because I was looking for Him. Because the Lord is always there, in the face of the one who has been given to you, in the hunger you can actually feed, in the thirst you can actually quench, in the specific, unrepeatable, irreplaceable person who is in front of you right now, asking—not with words, not always with words, sometimes just with their presence, just with the fact of their need—asking you to see them.

My friend is in Arizona now. My house is quiet. His things are still in the corner. And I will tell you what I know.

~

I know that I saw the face of Jesus in a young man who came to me hungry and I fed him. I know that I saw the bruised body of Christ in a friend who had been wounded and who found safety under my roof. I know that I brought water to the Lord when He was sick, and bought Him clothes when He had none, and gave Him a home when His home had become a prison.

I know that I did not know I was doing any of this. I know that I was confused, the way the sheep are confused, the way anyone who has truly loved another person is confused when they are told that the love was more than it appeared. Because that is the nature of real love—it does not see itself. It does not observe itself from the outside and say: look at what I am doing. Real love is too busy feeding the person to notice that the person is Christ.

And I know this: that the Lord does not ask us to go looking for Him. The Lord asks us to look at the person He has already placed in front of us. The person whose name we know. The person whose face we have been given to behold. The person who is hungry at our table, thirsty in our house, naked and sick and in prison in the very room where we are sitting. The Lord does not come to us in the abstract. The Lord comes to us in the particular—in this face, in this hunger, in this moment. And the question is not whether we will recognize Him. The question is whether we will respond to the face before we recognize it.

Because that is what the sheep did. They responded first. They recognized later. And the Lord said: come, you who are blessed. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you. Not because you knew it was me. Because you loved anyway.

There is a hymn that says: Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. Not: tomorrow will be easy. Not: tomorrow will bring abundance. I can face it. I can stand in it. I can show up to whatever room the Lord has prepared for me and look at whatever face He has placed before me and do the only thing that love knows how to do, which is to respond.

The house is quiet. The face I was given to behold is thirteen hundred miles away. But the Lord who lived in that face is risen, and the body in which we both abide is alive, and I will face tomorrow. I will face it because the one who holds the future is the same one who showed up at my door hungry and thirsty and in need of shelter, and I fed Him, and I didn't know, and He said: it was me. It was me the whole time.

Go and behold the faces you have been given. Feed the hunger that is in front of you. Do not wait until you are certain it is Christ. Love first. Recognize later.

The kingdom is built that way.

Amen.