They themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of you?’
Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’
In Matthew 25, Jesus warns his disciples that the true test of their faith will be in their relational commitment to see and serve their Saviour in the physical bodies of the most vulnerable among them. This is pure and undefiled religion, established by the God of All Love.
Within white Western Christian evangelicalism, one highly popular and enormously effective avoidance tactic to Jesus’s powerful words in Matthew 25 has been deflection. Instead of attending to the embodied presence of the crucified Jesus, many such Christians fixate on ‘freedom to preach the gospel’ and ‘freedom to attend public worship’ as measures of unwavering allegiance to Jesus Christ. On this theme, many of us will have heard this provocation from the pulpit:
If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough to convict you?
The examples that follow make clear what ‘proof’ they mean, and they have little to do with Jesus’s warning. Here are a few I’ve heard recently:
Have you forced the ‘good news’ in strangers’ faces enough times that they’d immediately name you for arrest if the occasion called for it?
If the State started demanding that Christians write their names on a public register in order to attend to attend weekly worship, would you volunteer your ID?
Oh how few of us faithful ones would be left in the pews, these preachers cry out.
In recent history, the coronavirus pandemic presented the perfect opportunity for Christians to ‘prove’ their loyalty along these lines. In one particularly horrific case, an OPC pastor (one who claimed to be an advocate for abused women, no less!) excommunicated a disabled woman for attending worship virtually rather than in-person.
This preacher man and many others like him struggle to see Jesus in the bodies of those around them because for them Jesus is not a fully embodied human being! The Jesus they want is the Jesus they see in themselves: a towering bastion of supreme, able-bodied masculinity whose butt is always found in a church pew, who is never bowled over by grief, whose children are well-behaved geniuses, and so on and so forth.
As we know, this deflection serves the status quo quite well, since silence and shame around vulnerability is one way greedy people seize and hoard power. Such is the story of the Empire of the United States and many other colonisers of the world. Such also is the story of many dysfunctional families and other unhealthy relationships.
Yet here is a point we may be missing:
that if a person fears and avoids vulnerability, truth-telling, justice and repair even with those they already claim to love – their parents, their siblings, their children, their friends, even themselves – they have yet to see Jesus truly. Calls to expand the boundaries of their love to the disabled, the immigrant, the refugee, the bodies broken by State violence, will be useless unless and until that love is founded on a Whole Christ, he who came from heaven to earth, was stripped, assaulted, abused, humiliated, isolated and abandoned. Seeing his innocence, partaking in his innocence, we see our own innocence. United to a Whole Christ, we are restored to a love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Such love never fails.
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