Grace and peace are yours from God our Father in the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

            Today is truly a festival day! And yet, the Gospel is like a dash of frigid water on our celebration. In this day of feasting and joy, a kind of “new year’s eve” for the liturgical calendar, we are presented with divine judgment. It’s not just that we don’t like our faults being pointed out to us. The disjuncture can feel more ominous. In the midst of our celebration of life comes this harrowing narrative reminding us all that death and accountability are inevitable. No one, in life or in death, escapes the Judgment of God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. And, looking at the goats on his left, the King of Kings will say “And these will go away into eternal punishment.”

            I will not try to provide tonic for our discomfort, because death and accountability are indeed inescapable realities; some of us need that reality check while others of us must wrestle with that reality on daily basis. And yet, the very point of the divine judgment for this festive Sunday is this: It is in the midst of, not in spite of, our discomfort at death and accountability that our Gospel reading today breaks in as joy and good news. The good news that we celebrate today is that Christ is King. Because Christ is King, sin and death are slaves. Because Christ is King, our old destructive habits must daily die to the grace of the Holy Spirit working within us. Because Christ is King, we each have been anointed into a Royal Priesthood. Because Christ is King, we know our place and our task in the world: to proclaim the Gospel, that the Kingdom of God has come near. Our task is not to bring people to Christ so much as it is to bring Christ to the people through our words and deeds.

            To make sense of these declarations – not only to understand them as concrete and actionable realities but also as good news, let us use our time together this morning to reflect briefly on the context and the consequences of the Gospel reading.

            To begin to understand the context, let us look at the Gospel reading in relation to the other readings appointed for today. Read in light of Ezekiel and Paul, the divine judgment is the result of a promise given and a promise kept. When God reigns, humans are redeemed. In our first reading, Ezekiel records God’s proclamation to a weary and wavering nation: “For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; I will set up over them one shepherd and he shall feed them and be their shepherd. I, the LORD, have spoken.”

            God’s righteousness – in that God fulfills the promises God has given – is the golden thread of Scripture, from Adam to Christ. Scripture defines the people of God as those who wait on the Lord; as those who understand that with God all good things are possible. Thus, Christians are a hopeful people; we anticipate the future – the future where God has gone already gone before us and beckons us to follow. We do not always see the path clearly but we are always asked to trust in the inexhaustible goodness of the God who guides us.

            Second, the context of our liturgical calendar also emphasizes the hope found in the Gospel reading today. We begin our year with Advent, where the Word and Wisdom of God becomes flesh and dwells among us, effectively erasing the separation between God and humanity. We conclude on the Feast of Christ the King. See how much the end is like the beginning: the Son of Man returns in glory, with all of the angels with him, and he declares himself the universal shepherd; likewise, the first noel was made to the lowly shepherds minding their flocks by a multitude of the heavenly Host. Arrayed in their military might, this Heavenly Host declares “peace upon the earth to all people of good will.” Likewise, the Son of Man returns in judgment to declare vindication for those who patiently wait upon the Lord by humbly serving others.

            Because of this context, we rightly celebrate this day, a day emphatic that God reigns. God’s rule is the fulfillment of our deepest hope – our hope not in our own power, righteousness, or glory – but hope in Christ alone, whom, as St. Paul declares this morning, “God has raised from the dead, seated at the right hand in the heavenly places, and has placed all things under his feet.” Anticipating the future – the future that God not only controls but the future that God has blessed – we celebrate today with hopeful anticipation, exuberant confidence. We celebrate today that the promise of Christ to all who would be his disciples was not in vain: that those who have become least for his sake will be great; that those who seek to serve instead of being served will be given a crown of glory; that all those who take up the cross of Christ and struggle against sin will be raised up as Christ who went before us and be transformed by divine grace. Christ is King! We are his servants.

            And yet, there is still that lingering threat of punishment: “and the Lord will say to those on his left ‘you that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” We find it hard to celebrate God’s reign alongside the prospect of God’s judgment of our sin. Fundamentally, we have trouble reconciling the idea that God is both unconditionally loving and uncompromisingly just. Our temptation is to choose one over the other. If we chose the unconditional love of God alone, then we risk turning God into a feeble and half-blind grandfather who can only smile and say sweet things to his grandchildren. When we exclude justice from love, we render love hollow and we eviscerate the biblical narrative, which clearly proclaims that God is decidedly, powerfully for some (the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sick, and oppressed) and without reservation against others (those who oppress the vulnerable and destroy the common good).

            I see the consequences of this first temptation every semester. In my introductory Theology class at Creighton University, I have my students begin with Herbert McCabe, who was to my mind one of the greatest Christian philosophers of this century. We explore an essay called Doubt Is Not Unbelief. Therein, McCabe writes “The Christian notion of God is based on a belief in a love which simply can never fail. God, for the Christian, is the lover who accepts us absolutely and unconditionally, quite regardless of whether we are nasty or nice. We put this simply by saying that God loves sinners. That is what the cross says, and that is why it is the center of the Christian faith. God cannot fail to love us, whatever we do. But, we can fail to believe this.”

            In asking my students to reflect on this beautiful summary of the Christian faith, there is always an awkward silence, then a student will ask the inevitable question: “if God loves us unconditionally, what is going to stop me from doing whatever I want then, on my deathbed, asking for forgiveness?” The short answer is: nothing, but why would you? The fundamental problem with the question itself is perhaps the clearest manifestation of a profound human flaw, something we call original sin: that is, instead of reflecting with gratitude upon the profound simplicity of the gospel, many of us (indeed, every single one of us at one time or another) have instead thought “how can I turn this to my benefit?”

            On the other hand, if we are zealous against this first temptation and over-compensate by choosing justice over love in order to protect the rule of God over evil, then we find ourselves all too easily climbing into the seat of judgment ourselves. Like a child playing dress up, the robes of authority do not fit us, for we often hold one standard for others and another for ourselves. In invoking justice without love we become blind to the transformative power of grace, of mercy, and patience and deny to others what has been given freely to us. Therefore, we become the accuser; and the Bible has but one name for the person who relishes that role: Satan – and today’s gospel makes clear what happens to him and his angels.

            Therefore, today’s gospel reminds us that for our hope to remain secure, for our trust to cling to something substantial, for us to accept God not on our own terms but on God’s terms alone, we must hold in tension the unconditional love and universal justice revealed in today’s reading. As Abraham Heschel writes in his magisterial work on the Prophets of sacred Scripture, “the secret to divine wrath is divine love.” How could we say that God loves if he is unmoved by the cry of those who suffer for his name’s sake? Because we have difficulty balancing righteous anger and out of control rage, because we have difficulty distinguishing the exercise of justice (an inherent good) with judgmentalism (an inherent evil), because we are tempted to use wrath to destroy the sinner instead of restoring the sinner, does not mean that God has these problems. Remember what we proclaim today: Christ is King! So it is God’s ways and God’s power that rules, not ours. It is for our sake that unconditional love and universal justice find their union in God alone.

            In closing, therefore, we may rightly ask: if this is true, what are we to do? How are we to lead God-pleasing lives? On this festival day when we look to the future with confidence in both the unconditional love and universal justice of God, we are meant to receive today’s gospel as an invitation to the godly life; to be willing and worthy stewards of God’s gifts. It is a pressing, urgent invitation. And yet, it is an invitation to all: whether you’ve heard it for the first or the millionth time. More to the point, it is an invitation to action; we are invited to imitate the life of Christ. We are invited into a life that seeks justice but warned that vengeance belongs to God alone.

Moreover, we are invited into a life of profound community. As Christians, we have legitimate debates about the will of God as it concerns abortion, contraception, the death penalty, and homosexuality; people of good faith will disagree. There can be, however, absolutely no ambiguity what the will of God is as it relates to caring for the hungry, the naked, the ill, the vulnerable, and those in prison. God does not distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy among those who are the least, and neither can we. Note too that Jesus does not ask those judged “Did you accept me as your personal savior?” Instead, we are judged according to our actions.
Now, let there be no mistake: we believe without confusion and ambiguity that the good work we do is all a result of divine grace, what God has done and continues to do for us in Christ. And yet, there also be no mistake: God’s word is transformative, God’s word demands action. When Christ finally returns, let us be found doing the work he left us to do, even if we are imperfect and unworthy servants; for it is better to struggle than to scoff and ignore. Because Christ is King, we have been fed, clothed, healed, nourished, and comforted. Let us then feed, clothe, heal, nourish, and comfort others, because Christ is King. Amen.