Ezekiel 34.11-16, 20-24; Ephesians 1.15-23; Matthew 25.31-46

Zamtan is a poor community in Zambia. This is what one Christian wrote after visiting it in 2004.

“In Zamtan there were no Exodus-type miracles going on. No flocks of quail dropping from the sky, or manna raining down from heaven. Most people were hungry for much of the time. As far as we could see there were no dramatic healings happening in this community either.

“The people who suffered from AIDS, for instance, continued to suffer from that dread disease. They will suffer even more, and die sooner, without the provision of expensive, complex drugs. It was the same when we visited the slums of Dhaka in Bangladesh.

“The love of God was only being expressed in those endless acres of desolation to the extent that people were willing to practically serve those who were in need.

“Do not misunderstand me. I believe in miracles. I really do. And I know that they can happen anywhere and at any time, but when you are standing in those places, when you walk up and down the dusty trails of poverty-stricken, disease-ridden communities, you know – you just know – that the first call of God on those who claim to care is the same call that as received by Mother Teresa. It is the call to be his hands and feet. God with skin on, as someone once put it.

“Whether it is by going or by giving or by getting practically involved in some other way, we can be part of the sacrificial, generous love of the risen Jesus reaching out to a  fallen, hurting world through his body on earth. Perhaps that will turn out to be the greatest miracle of all.”
“We can be part of the sacrificial, generous love of the risen Jesus reaching out to a fallen, hurting world through his body on earth.”  (Adrian Plass The Son of God is Dancing)

Set alongside the parable of the sheep and the goats, I think these two readings shed light on one another. What the visitor to Zambia and Bangladesh found was God’s love being poured out through human hands.

The sheep and the goats are being judged on their actions towards their brothers and sisters. Today is Christ the King Sunday, when the Church focuses on the kingship of our Lord.

In this parable we see the Son of Man, that is, Jesus, sitting on a throne with the nations before him, dividing people up. We often forget in all the talk about Christ’s love for us, he also has a role as God’s judge.
Granted, that judgement will always be carried out in love, but we and all creation will not escape the judgement.

This parable comes in a series of parables about being prepared. We hear of the thief catching the house’s owner asleep, the unfaithful not ready for his master’s return, the wise and foolish bridesmaids, the parable of the talents, and then today’s story.

In the time of Jesus, sheep and goats often grazed together in the same pastures, and it was hard sometime to tell them apart other than by looking at their tails: goats’ tails go upwards and sheep’s tails downwards. So just by looking no one could tell easily on which side of the dividing line others were going to fall.

The people represented by the sheep and goats were clearly surprised about the judgement Jesus was making. All they could think of was that they had never seen Jesus hungry, thirsty, naked, sick or in prison. And interestingly both sides of the divide were thinking the same thing. But one lot had acted and the others hadn’t.

Jesus taught that we are all part of his body, so if one suffers then he suffers, and we all suffer. By caring or not caring for someone else, we are also responding to Jesus.

Judgement was a key Christian theme in times past. We, of a more sensitive nature, like to pretend that it won’t happen to us. How we view judgement depends on a number of issues.

I’m sure some of you will have been following the John Sergeant saga on Strictly Come Dancing, even if, like me, you don’t actually watch the programme. It’s been hard to avoid it in the papers.
It has raised some interesting questions about what was being judged. Was it the ability of the celebrities to master the cha-cha-cha or quickstep, or was it the entertainment value they were providing? The judges on the show had one idea; clearly the public has had a different opinion.

Judgement can look very different for different people involved in the same episode – the defendant and the prosecutor: one will win, the other won’t; the winner of the WI cake competition and the disappointed loser; the one who gets the new job and the applicant who doesn’t, and so on.

And I suspect that the people before the Son of Man in this story had very different views from Jesus as to what they would be judged for. On both sides of the divide, people hadn’t realised that judgement would depend on how they treated the sick, lonely, imprisoned, hungry, and so on.
And yet, there had been a whole lot of hints in their Scriptures about what was acceptable behaviour and what wasn’t. Look at our reading from Ezekiel this morning. The fat sheep were going to be judged because they had not cared for God’s people. God would be their shepherd because those given that task were failing. So that the lost are found, the strayed brought back, the injured bound up, the weak strengthened, God acts directly.

In the verses omitted from today’s reading there is even a suggestion that the rams and goats will be divided. We don’t connect the two, but many of Jesus’s hearers would have been familiar with the Ezekiel passage. And there are, of course, many instances in the prophets where God speaks out against those who fail the vulnerable while feathering their own nests.

Jesus’s judgement always surprises us, because our values often become so skewed. But the message of this, and of the other parables in this section of Matthew’s Gospel, is that we always need to be prepared, for judgement will come, but we will be judged by Jesus’s standards and not our own.

Since we are to be judged by the king himself, we need to be aware of the criteria on which will be judged. I think we will be surprised in many ways. I think the ultimate judgement by the Son of Man will probably include different people from what we might like to think. Who will we meet in heaven? We might be surprised.

The parable does raise questions. Who are the nations? Is it, as usually in the Bible, those who are not Christians or does it include all of us? What is the role of faith in salvation if we are to be judged on our actions?

And these are important questions we can look at. But we must not allow them to distract us from the main point of this set of parables in Matthew – that we shall all be judged and be prepared for that judgement.

Yes – it is faith that brings salvation, but faith, as James says in his epistle, without works is dead. A real faith is acted upon; it is not using the name of Jesus as a lucky charm – Oh, I’m all right, I believe in Jesus. Faith demands a response. Someone once said that we are saved by our faith but judged on our works.

God’s acceptance of us comes from love. Our acceptance of God is a response to that love. We respond by living out that love. Our loving God and our loving our neighbour cannot be separated.

The story of Blondin, the tight-rope walker, illustrates this well. He was carrying out a daring feat one day – walking across the Niagara Falls. His rope was stretched out, and he began his perilous journey. Step by careful step he traversed the wire. The crowd held their breaths as he edged his way along the tight-rope. He exuded confidence; the fear was in the crowd. When he made it to the other side, they exploded with congratulations and adulation.

Blondin then asked the crowd whether, having seen what he had done, they believed that he could walk back again with carrying someone on his back. Swept up by the emotion of the occasion, the crowd with one accord, shouted their belief that he could. But when he asked for a volunteer, there was silence.

It is easy to proclaim our faith, it can be much harder to live it out.

Jesus said:
“I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,
I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
I was naked and you gave me clothing,
I was in prison and you visited me.”

Then the righteous will answer him: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?

“And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?

“And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?”

And the king will answer them: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Nehemiah 8.1-4a, 8-12; Psalm 119.9-16; Colossians 3.12-17; Matthew 24.30-35

I wonder how often you have watched the Antiques Roadshow. I sometimes catch it when I’m doing the ironing on a Sunday evening. It’s one of those programmes that I find interesting if I’m watching it, but don’t make a special effort to catch, and I wouldn’t bother to record it to watch at a later date if I knew I was going to miss it.

But when I do see it, I find it strangely compelling. People bring out curios and family heirlooms, small pieces of jewellery or large pieces of furniture, paintings or china, things of no worth and things of great value, and so on. The last time I saw it the presenter Fiona Bruce even showed off her childhood collection of dolls.

I’m not particularly interested in antiques, but I think that there are two things about the programme that I find intriguing.
 
First the variety of things that people have knocking around their homes, about which they often know very little, sometimes not even what the object is, and the snippets of information they give about themselves and their families – perhaps grandfather had been a sea-captain or auntie had enjoyed going round jumble sales or picking things out of skips.

The other reason – and I suspect that it is these moments that many of us find fascinating – is the reaction of people when they find out that what they thought was a worthless trinket is in fact worth rather a lot of money. The astonishment on their faces is wonderful to behold, and people react in different ways.

Some are keen then to sell what they have, many feel they need to increase their insurance cover; however some continue to view the object not as something to sell with a large monetary price, but as being precious because of its family history or the person who gave it to them, and who say they would never sell in a million years because of that. It has infinite value because of its associations.

Worth and value can have two very different meanings. A family heirloom could be sold for £20,000 and valued only in financial terms, but it can also be seen primarily as part of someone’s history, of emotional value, of worth too great to sell.

When the Queen was crowned, these words were said to her: “We present you with this  [    ], the most valuable thing this world affords.” I’ve missed out one word, because I don’t want to give the answer away without asking if anyone can guess or knows with what the Queen was presented.

The missing word was “book”, and, of course, the book in question was the Bible. That’s quite a designation – the most valuable thing this world affords.

To buy a Bible does not cost that much – it’s possible to buy one for around £10, or even less in a second-hand bookshop. But the book’s value is far more than that.

Today’s Psalm was an extract from the longest Psalm in the Bible – number 119, which has 176 verses. The whole thing is a reflection on how important God’s law is. Psalm 119 is divided into 22 parts, each of 8 verses long.

Each section begins with a different letter, in order, of the Hebrew alphabet. This is not a developing argument in form, but a continuous meditation.

Each section contains 8 different words for God’s law. Most likely at the time that the Psalm was written, this would have meant the Pentateuch, that is the first five books of our Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Some of the word plays do not come out in the English translations, but even if we look at today’s passage, we see there are attempts made to use different words – your word, your commandments, your statutes, judgements, and testimonies.

It may seem odd to us to extol a law in such glowing terms. Laws for us tend to mean things we can and can’t do; commands and boundaries to behaviour. But the Psalmist’s view of God’s law would have been as much about God’s promises and relationship with God and with fellow believers than about rules and regulations.

God’s law was at heart about his relationship with his people and their relationship with each other – that’s why much of the law is concerned with religious ritual and social justice.

The psalmist has recognised the true value of God’s law.

Jesus was clear that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it. This might seem strange because much of what Jesus did and much of the early Church did seemed opposed to strict legal regulations. But, if we view law in a different way, we can see that this makes more sense, and how Jesus himself can take the place of the law.

Dr David Spriggs, the Bible Society’s Bible and Church Consultant, puts it like this – the law is “divine insight for living joyfully as people in relationship to God”. Viewed in this way it is not hard to see Jesus as the new law of God, the one who shows us how to live in relationship to God.

It is sad that, although the Bible is one of the world’s best selling books, many Bibles remain unopened, even by those who profess to be practising Christians.

One way of developing and growing our faith is by familiarising ourselves with the promises of God, with the stories of God’s dealings in times past, with the ministry of Jesus.

The Bible can encourage us in hard times and in good.

The Bible is a book whose reading is never done. It may have a finite number of pages, but the wisdom it contains is infinite. Those who study it in details often say that however much they learn, there is always more to discover. In that sense it is a book with no boundaries.

But how many of us are familiar with it? How many of us read it each week, let alone each day?

Today is Bible Sunday – in some ways every Sunday should be Bible Sunday and every day a Bible day. The psalmist recognised how important God’s law was. He talks of it being hidden in his heart. What he means is that it has become a part of his being; it is a treasure to him, a way of living, a source of guidance in his life, a way of having a growing relationship with God.

One thing that stops people reading the Bible is that the way in which it is written is not familiar to us – it, of course, originated in a different culture and in a very different age. Another problem people have is that some of it is hard to understand at first reading. And many people think that they know enough of the stories of Jesus not to have to bother to read it any more.

But the Bible is a lot more than just the stories of Jesus, important as they are.

The Psalmist talks about having God’s words hidden in his heart. Paul in his letter to the Colossians from which we read this morning talk said: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” It reminds us that the Bible is not a dry, dusty book written hundreds of years ago for a now dead people. The Bible is a living book, the Word of God.

We have to remember that Christians worship Jesus, that we follow Christ, a person, not a code written in a book. But Jesus himself took Scripture seriously, and, if we are to know about the one whom we follow, our direct experience of Jesus needs to go hand-in-hand with our reading of the Bible, and our sharing of the experiences of others.

There are many things to help us read the Bible more easily – bible-reading notes, study groups, sermons, books, commentaries, and so on. But I suspect that the thing above all that prevents people reading the Bible is the idea that, while it’s an important book, it’s just not given a high priority.

I’m sure there are people in church today who do read the Bible each day. I suspect there are also those who pick it up occasionally not frequently or only hear it read in church on a Sunday.

People are, of course, all at different stages of faith development. I don’t want to knock your current position. But I do want to encourage you to open up the Bible regularly, to find the treasure within.

The Bible is a living book; it is a key source in our meeting Jesus and learning about the ways of God. It is a precious book, but not precious in the way that it should be protected from being read, treasured so much as an object that its pages are never read.

The word of God is an essential resource for transformed lives. But it will only transform us, if we take action and commit ourselves to allowing it to do its work. As David Spriggs says: “It is not a magic charm. . . For the law to change us, there needs to be a positive and dynamic relationship between the law and the person. The psalmist’s language tells us we need to be emotionally involved, intellectually engaged; to have a dedicated will and to be practically committed.”

Our faith is at heart about our relationship with God. If we want to live a more fulfilled life of faith, the Bible can help us in three ways:

a) it shows us how to live life in God’s way

b) it acts as a light to help us see where danger and temptations lie

c) it gives us the help and support so that we can live God’s way

It is a living treasure. It doesn’t replace the relationship with Christ that our faith is all about, but it enables us to deepen that relationship.

I’d like to challenge everyone here today to take a look, to open the book more this week than normal, to read its pages and to discover its treasure, a treasure that is more long-lasting than any precious jewel, that. In the words of the coronation service is: “the most valuable thing this earth affords”.