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 are a lot of things that keep me awake at night and this is one of them. Not so much because I suffer from an irrational fear of hell, but because it bothers me how sentimental this verse always sounds to me. I don’t like sentimental things. That’s probably one of the reasons I tend to be irrationally unpatriotic–not because I don’t love America (I do), but because so much patriotism feels like a sentimental white-washing of the true worth of America. Sometimes I feel like the verse at hand is a whitewashed way of challenging Christians to give to the poor or to do small deeds that have a big impact. Both of these are important, but it’s more the assumption behind this verse that dogs me. Why is it that what we do for the least of these, we do for the King (here, the King being the Son of Man, being Jesus)? This parable was told before the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus–before the giving the of Spirit–and in regard to all make and manner of persons, particularly those invisible to the rest of society (cf. the goats, “when did we see you…?”)
So what’s gone on that makes it so Jesus can identify himself with the hungry, the stranger, the unclothed, the sick, the imprisoned? Notice: not just relate to, but identify with? The incarnation. He is a human person. Yes, he’s got all the particularity and all the specificity that any of us have–male, Jewish, 1st century, Galilee, 5′9″ or whatever, dark eyes, dark hair, incisive personality, compelling communicator, outgoing, self-disciplined, responsible, caring, a get-it-done kind of guy. But he’s human–fleshly, embodied, real. The joining of the Logos, the Son, to the stuff of us means he relates to all of us, understands all of us, and identifies with all of us–each of us in our entirety and all of us in our numerity (see, I really am a patriot).
In this passage, he highlights the significance of our relationship to the invisible figures in our society by making explicit that it’s a direct parallel to our relationship with him. He took on their humanity too–not just ours. And where we draw false divides between who’s worth our effort and who’s not, who’s worth our sacrifice and who’s not, who’s worth our notice and who’s not, we ignore the full implications of the reality of his humanity. We forget (or fail to ever remember) the scope of his mission, the commission of his resurrection–that humanity might be made whole, and through humanity the whole cosmos.
And we communicate our failure to know Jesus in his humanity by failing to offer water to the thirsty, by forgetting to feed the hungry, by neglecting to clothe the unclothed, by quarantining the sick, by considering ourselves better than the prisoners. So what’s our confession that “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man” worth if it doesn’t elicit forth in caring for those for whom no one else cares?
He took on all of our humanity–he was fully man–and we are to take on all of humanity. He identifies himself with all of us, and as his people we are to identify with all of each other. In this way, Jesus’ taking on of our flesh, means my taking off of my flesh in a sense. He got into us so we could get out of ourselves. And how did he become incarnate? By the power of the Holy Spirit. So how do we, in a sense, excarnate from ourselves in order to recarnate with others? By the power of the Holy Spirit.
