Matthew 25:31-46
Reflecting on Matthew 25 during Reign of Christ Sunday gives us the opportunity to envision the kind of kingdom Jesus proclaims for the future while also seeking to understand his calling for us to live out that kingdom now. And as abolitionists we examine this text through the particular lens of ending imprisonment. Therefore, we get to wrestle with the question: what does it mean that Christ the King declares himself Jesus the prisoner?
This passage opens with the proclamation of Christ’s coming reign and judgment. He will gather all nations – all of creation – as he sits on his throne of glory. Thomas Stegman notes, “Matthew draws on imagery from Daniel 7:13–14—where the Ancient of Days, enthroned in glory, bestows on ‘one like a son of man’ (RSV) dominion and glory—to set forth the full manifestation of God’s reign.”1 Many of us are uncomfortable with this language of dominion and judgment so the preacher may want to take care here. Perhaps it would be helpful to emphasize that the reign of God means the end of the unjust rule of present, oppressive powers. If Christ is king, then oppressors are not. And if Jesus is judge, then our systems of judgment and punishment will be replaced by something else altogether. This new kingdom will be marked instead by compassion and justice.
Care for the “least of these” (v. 40), the people Howard Thurman described as the disinherited, is central to this passage. Compassion for people who are hungry, poor, sick, and incarcerated is so important to Jesus that he says how people have treated them is how they have treated him. When Christ returns and reigns, the question of compassion will be a (the?) primary concern. Our calling, then, as Jesus’s followers is to serve people in need with works of mercy, here and now, trusting that God’s coming kingdom will bring about complete liberation for the “least of these.”
And so, with compassion and care, we visit the prisoner knowing that we are somehow visiting Jesus. This is what it looks like to live into God’s kingdom now. But I tend to believe that, in addition to compassion, Jesus is also calling us to the work of justice as well, which includes the abolition of prisons. After all, if the Son of Man, Christ the King who will one day come in glory, has chosen to be enfleshed as the prisoner, then shouldn’t we have hope that he will, in time, set the prisoner free and end incarceration itself? And as his followers, as people living into the reign of Christ right now, don’t we have a calling to participate in the building of the prison-less Kingdom? What if we built houses and hospitals and community centers and even churches with the bricks of the prisons we dismantled all because we knew that Jesus was behind those walls?
I think any preacher would do well to highlight themes of compassion in a sermon on Matthew 25; however, I believe there is also a declaration of justice. Jesus is proclaiming the good news of the coming kingdom, and inviting us to participate in its construction through the work of mercy for the oppressed. How might we, as preachers who are abolitionists, inspire wonder and spark imaginations about what it might look like to follow Christ the king who is Jesus the prisoner?
Jed Tate is a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina.
- Thomas D. Stegman, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 25:31–46,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 4 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 333. ↩︎