Readings:
Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24
Psalm 95: 1-7
Ephesians 1: 15-end
Matthew 25: 31-end

Collect:
God the Father,
help us to hear the call of Christ the King
and to follow in his service,
whose kingdom has no end;
for he reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, one glory.  Amen.

Reflection 

The world we are living in is full of division; whether because of politics, beliefs, colour, ethnicity, or sexuality, people find themselves in one camp or another.  This divisiveness hurts and breaks my heart.  It seems to go against what I believe God desires for the world and all people, created in the image of God.  

You can therefore understand some of my struggles with today’s Gospel reading about the separation of the goats from the sheep.  It jars with my image of God and if I’m honest makes me want to run away from this passage and focus on the ‘nice’ bits of the gospel.  However, I also realise that it’s important for us to grapple with the challenges that God throws at us through the bible and it is through this grappling that our relationship with God and our faith are deepened.  So here goes…

For me it is the act of separation that I find troubling, if not frightening, and yet for a farming community the need to separate goats from sheep is important.  Having grown up in such a community, we would often separate the sheep out, whether that was lambs from their mothers, the ewes from the rams, the younger ewes from the older ones.  It is all part of that natural rhythm of the farm.  For those who were listening to Jesus, this imagery would have been a normal course of events.  But they would also know that it is not always easy to tell the difference between a goat and a sheep, especially if the sheep has been shorn.  So what’s important is how the separation happens.

If you look at the text carefully you will find that the separation doesn’t occur because of looks or beliefs.  It’s not even based on recognition of the king for neither the goats or the sheep recognised the king.  Instead, the judgement and therefore the division is the based on what the people did or didn’t do.  This is so different to how we categorise people – where looks or beliefs are often at the forefront.  The king placed people on the left or the right de pending solely on what they did.  It was through their actions of showing kindness to strangers, compassion for those who were struggling and offering love to those in need. 

For me this understanding transforms this passage for the king seems to be praising the instinctive response people have to need.  It’s not about any sense of ‘Christian Duty’ but what is in our hearts, what is our natural instinct when we see people suffering.  As children of God, I believe that we are instinctively compassionate beings.  This compassion is at the heart of Jesus’ ministry and he encourages us to be compassionate beings.

So let us take comfort from this reading.  Not because we are guaranteed to be on the side of the sheep but because at our heart we are compassionate people and that is what drives our response to those in need.  So let us live out the gospel, love our neighbour and show compassion to those in need.  All that we do, we do because we care and not in the hope of earning our place in heaven. 

May God enable us to have courage to reach out and care for those in need and the humility not to judge people and divide them into different categories.

Mike Morris