The Third Sacrament

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 26, 2023 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Matthew 25: 31-46

In 1901, a New Yorker called Louis Klopsch came up with the idea of a Red-Letter Bible, in which the words of Jesus are highlighted to ensure readers treat them with special reverence. But the truth is, we all have our own red-letter Bible. It’s been said that to be a fundamentalist is to believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible except where Jesus says, ‘This is my body.’ And when we hear a passage like today’s gospel, the parable of the last judgement, the progressive end of the church takes a quick look and says, ‘Ok guys, relax – this is one of our bits.’ I want today to check that claim and to allow this story to challenge some significant things we may think this parable is about.

I’m hardly breaking surprising news to you if I say there’s a lot wrong with the world. I want now to run through five responses to that unstartling statement and explain not just why they’re all problematic, but in each case what this parable proposes we put in their place. Because this is a story that turns our notions of justice and of mission on their head, and changes our self-righteousness about our social and political convictions into humility before the face of the living God.

Ok, let’s look at the first common response to the woes of the world. I’m going to call this despair – otherwise known as ‘Isn’t it awful?’ I’m describing the paralysis exacerbated by watching ghastly news reports that horrify without empowering, and thus lead to depressed inactivity. See how this parable transforms that despair with what we might call simplicity. ‘You gave me food… you gave me something to drink … you gave me clothing … you visited me.’ No one here is convening the General Assembly of the United Nations; no one is inventing a new vaccine; no one is setting up an international refugee agency: worthy as those endeavours surely are, focusing on such huge projects can take attention away from humble actions that respond directly and that anyone can do. There’s always something you can do. You can’t bring peace to Gaza, but you can tell a traumatised Jewish or Palestinian neighbour or colleague that you cherish them and appreciate the vulnerability they feel. You can’t turf the invaders out of Ukraine, but you can make a relationship of mutuality and respect with a Ukrainian refugee. That, rather than anguished inactivity, is what the parable indicates God requires of us.

So to the second response. I’m calling this delegation – otherwise known as, ‘The government should sort all this out.’ We seem to have sacralised a habit, enhanced by social media, of calling on people to do things. If we wanted to use a stronger word for this than delegation, we could call it infantilisation, because it denies the power we ourselves have. This parable doesn’t call on anyone to end world hunger, provide irrigation in dry lands, multiply clothes production, or transform prisons. Worthy as all those initiatives doubtless are, the parable alerts us to how such campaigns can take away our own agency. When, at his autumn lecture last month, Rory Stewart was asked by a combative attendee, ‘Why, if you have such good ideas, don’t you re-enter parliament and implement them?’ his unflinching response was, ‘Why don’t you?’ This parable is about making straightforward gestures, showing up; more than anything else, expressing solidarity. When St Martin met a beggar at the gates of Amiens in 337, the most important thing he did is not turn away. He didn’t petition Rome for a better policy on poverty and social exclusion. He divided his cloak. This is a parable about solidarity that says ‘Yes, there may sometimes be things only government can do, but there are always things only I can do.’

So to the third response. I’m going to call this practical atheism – otherwise known as, ‘The Bible gives no clear guidance on this.’ In its extreme form it says, ‘The church should be concerned with guiding people into heaven, not changing social realities on earth.’ You get versions of these two responses as much inside the church as outside. This parable shows how wrong those responses are. What does this parable say? It shows that the gospel is fundamentally about relationship. No one in this parable is criticised at the pearly gates for the fact that their response was inadequate or ineffective; only for having no response at all. The parable isn’t pretending that a drink or a welcome or a visit are all the thirsty, the stranger or the sick person needs. It’s saying visiting the sick or the prisoner, welcoming the stranger or giving food to a person who’s hungry are all ways of initiating or sustaining relationship. The Bible is interested in rectifying injustice and addressing suffering, but those are both, along with everything else, to be understood in the context of making, deepening and restoring relationship. In the end, justice is right relationship. The whole scriptural story is about God creating the universe so as to be in relationship with us in Christ: all our efforts to bring succour to those in need or inhibit the aggressor from inflicting harm on the innocent are precursors to our ultimate goal of forming, growing and restoring relationship with creation, with one another and with God.

The fourth common response in the face of the world’s many ills, and one that’s very fashionable at the moment, is to understand everything that’s wrong through the lens of power imbalance. Karl Marx might be long dead, and most of his influential ideas largely discredited, but this has been his most abiding legacy: to render every social problem as a battle between the weak and the strong, most often in terms of who has the money and influence, but very often in relation to who experiences gender privilege, racial advantage, or one of several other such indicators of inequality. Yet again, the point is not that such analysis isn’t often illuminating or that we shouldn’t strive for enormously greater equality across many kinds of social difference. The point is that such evaluation leads too often to armchair cynicism rather than empowered engagement. This parable is all about empowered engagement. It doesn’t say, ‘I suspected I might be complicit in unequal food distribution,’ ‘I realised the clothes I was giving you had been generated by unjust systems of global trade,’ ‘I didn’t come and see you because that would have been wasting time more strategically spent on analysing the postcode lottery of healthcare investment in government spending.’ Such accounts may not be wrong. But the parable is elegant and unequivocal in saying, ‘You gave me food. You gave me clothing. You visited me.’

This parable is absolutely about enhancing perception. But it’s about a perception deeper than the analysis of power imbalances and an insight more profound than the detection of unjust social relations. The parable tells us that every single encounter we have with a person in distress is an encounter with Jesus. In his classic book A Theology of Liberation, the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez describes a lottery vendor who touts tickets for ‘the big one,’ pointing out that there’s always a chance your lottery ticket may be the one that makes you a millionaire. Gutiérrez says every person in profound distress is like those lottery tickets: any single one could be Jesus. But the parable goes further than Gutiérrez’ image: it says every single person in profound distress is Jesus. The parable transforms our walking down the Strand or watching the evening news from an exercise in cultivating despair to a multifaceted invitation to meet Jesus, today. No longer do you see footage of a bomb crater and the grotesque images of those maimed and bereaved and mutter, ‘I sometimes wonder, where is God?’ Now, because of this parable, you see that footage and realise, ‘There is God: right in that bomb crater, right in the agony of the maimed and the grief of the bereaved.’

And finally, the fifth common response to the woes of the world is significantly different from the previous four. The foregoing responses are all ones that disable engagement, through despair, delegation, practical atheism and armchair cynicism. The final one is problematic in a different way. It says, ‘I’m going to pile into this situation; I’ve got the skills to address it and the resources to handle it; and I’m going to fix it.’ I’ll call this last one overconfidence, often based on an assumption of cultural superiority. Think about the expressions ‘regime change’ and ‘nation building’ as they were applied by the Western powers in Afghanistan and Iraq. On a grand scale they epitomise what any of us do when we seek to relate to a person in distress, but insist on doing so entirely on our own terms. Notice how this parable doesn’t even refer to outcomes. It doesn’t discuss economies of scale, systemic change or structural transformation. All of those have an important place; but they’re not in the parable. They’re not in the parable because this parable is telling us if we’re relating to people in profound distress because we’re wanting to change the world, we’re actually instrumentalising those people in the service of a cause beyond them that doesn’t centre them. Instead, the parable is calling us to see our engagement with people facing crisis as a form of worship. This is a moment when we come face to face with Jesus. At which instant our only appropriate response is worship.

Which is why the group of activities outlined in this parable, being with the hungry and thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and the prisoner, are collectively sometimes described as the third sacrament. The conventional and undisputed sacraments, baptism and Eucharist, together with such activities as preaching and prayer, are moments when we encounter God in precious and transformative ways. This parable is saying that these six activities together constitute a sacrament. And thus that, much to our surprise, and greatly to the disappointment no doubt of those for whom this passage is in the progressive red-letter Bible, we relate to those in profound distress not for their sake, nor to transform society, but to come face to face with God. See how ultimately the distinctions between discipleship, where we humbly follow Christ’s commands, ministry, where we serve the faithful, and mission, where we reach out to the world, all collapse, and it turns out there is only worship – only meeting God, whether direct, or through Christ’s coming among us in the neighbour, the needy, the oppressed, and the stranger. The distinction between acts of devotion to God and to one another fall away.

So we discover Jesus didn’t give us this parable so progressive Christians could feel superior to conservative ones. He didn’t give us this parable to motivate Christians to change other people or even the whole world. He gave us this parable to show us where and how to meet him; and thus to allow him to change us.