We were driving through Des Moines, IA recently when I read
the following on a billboard, “I was a stranger immigrant,
and you invited me in. –Matthew 25:35”
I caught that it was a church that paid to put that billboard up, but I
can’t remember which church it was, nor does that matter to me. What they have done is taken an often
forgotten bit of Scripture and flagged our attention to it with a perfect
contemporary example of what this passage is getting at. I like it.
Look at the passage with me (Matthew 25:35-40):
For I was
hungry, and you gave Me something
to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something
to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you
visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when
did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? And when did we see You a stranger, and invite
You in, or naked, and clothe You? When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come
to You?’ The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the
extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’
Actually you should read the whole of Matthew 25:31-46, but what I
want to share today is clear in the five verses I copied above.
If Jesus walked through your town, what would you do? Pull out all the stops and treat him
like a king right? If he needed
anything, you wouldn’t ignore him.
We would all want to let him know how cool we think he is, and how much
we appreciate him, and if there was time, we might even share a favor we want
to ask of him. Considering who
Jesus is, and the power he has, we would all want to get close to him to see
what he’s going to do next. He’s got
so much to offer; it would be kind of nice to have him pop out a personal
miracle for us, wouldn’t it? Is it
starting to sound like relating to Jesus would be like relating to a
celebrity? You know, someone that
you think you know because you’ve read the tabloids, and if you ever saw them
on the sidewalk you’d try to act as cool as possible to try to grab an
autograph?
Then along comes Jesus’ words to us in Matthew 25, and we have a
sudden reminder that Jesus seems to identify more with the losers than with the
celebs.
Why does Jesus identify with “the least of these”? Who are “the least of these”? I could be wrong, but I think “the
least of these” must include the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked,
the sick, and the imprisoned. I
would say the immigrant fits right in on this list. What I find in common on this list is that these are all
people that will get in our way of our busy, important lives. They will slow us down, and cost us
something they probably won’t be able to repay. It’s easy to begrudge that, and avoid people like this,
because it’s a lot nicer to have a well-ordered life, the life that we feel we
have earned… that we deserve.
If Jesus walked through my town, I admit that I would first be
thinking along the lines, “what could he do for me?” Nevermind that my needs are nothing in comparison with the
needs around me, I would think first about my own situation, and what I would
love to gain from an encounter with that guy that can do it all. I am assured that Jesus loves me, so
naturally I would expect that he wants to do something nice for me. The last thing I would expect is for him
to come to me and say, “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m cold, I’m sick, and I’m in
trouble with the law, help me! Can
you see yourself being rocked back on your heels if this happened to you? It would be a shocker if Jesus came and
personally identified with desperate human needs like this, wouldn’t it?
‘Truly I tell
you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of
mine, you did for me.’
‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not
do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
