The King will come for judgment

Sermon for the Second to Last Sunday of the Church Year

2 Peter 3:3-14  +  Matthew 25:31-46

The world is, to use a term from psychology, bipolar in its reaction to the times we live in. It goes back and forth from extreme catastrophism and anxiety on the one hand (“The sky is falling! COVID’s gonna get us, climate change is gonna get us, an asteroid is gonna get us!”), to extreme uniformitarianism and indifference on the other (“Everything in the world is the same as it’s always been. There is no coming judgment. Everything’s fine”). In a few weeks, we’ll hear Jesus talk about the world’s anxiety leading up to His second coming. Today we hear St. Peter in the Epistle talk about the world’s indifference or, really, disbelief about it. “Nothing has changed since the beginning of time. Everything goes on as it always has. The sun rises every morning and sets every night. We go through the cycle of seasons every year. Where is this coming he promised?” They laugh at Christians for believing we have a citizenship beyond this world, for holding onto a hope of things unseen, for scorning this life and for preparing for a day no scientific instrument can detect or predict: the day of the Lord’s coming.

That day is coming. Peter describes it as a day of burning and destruction. But before the burning up of the elements takes place, something else even more ominous will happen. The Lord whom the world rejected, the Lord whom the world crucified, the Lord whose Word the world has despised, the Lord whose people the world has been persecuting for some two thousand years, will appear in the clouds and take His seat on His glorious throne. And everything else will come to a screeching halt as the time of judgment will finally have arrived.

Jesus had spoken of that day earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, promising that at that time He will reward each one according to his works. That’s exactly what we see unfolding in the parable of the sheep and the goats. The sheep are rewarded with immeasurable good for all the good works they have done to the “brothers of Jesus.” The goats are rewarded with unending punishment for all the good works they failed to do for Jesus’ little brothers. (We’ll talk about who those brothers are in a moment.)

The first question we need to answer is, who are the sheep and who are the goats? Was it the lack of good works that made the goats into goats, or did they fail to show love to Jesus’ brothers because they were goats? Was it the good deeds that made the sheep into sheep, or were they made into sheep in some other way that led them to do the good deeds? Everything hinges on those questions.

In one sense, from God’s perspective in eternity, the sheep were always sheep and the goats were always goats. Notice what the King says to the sheep: Come, you who have been blessed by my Father! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. God knew in eternity those who would end up at the right hand of the Son of Man on this Judgment Day. More than that, He chose them for this day, and this gets into the doctrine of election or predestination. Very simply, God knew beforehand that Adam and Eve would sin against Him and plunge our race into sin and death. But in His mercy, He decreed that the whole human race should be redeemed and reconciled to Him. And He also decreed how He would accomplish that. His decree included the sending, suffering, and dying of His beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has made atonement for the sins of all people of all times. God’s decree included the manner in which sinners would be brought into Christ—through the Means of Grace, by the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. It included His decision for His Holy Spirit to work through those means, to call sinners to repentance and faith, to bring them to faith, to justify them by faith, to sanctify them in love and to produce good works in them and through them, and to keep providing all the help and strength they need to persevere in faith until the end, if they would continue to pray and hear His Word and use the strength He would provide by His Spirit. Those whom He foresaw being brought to faith and persevering in faith until the end, He chose, He elected to be standing on the right side of the King. He knew them as sheep from eternity.

The goats He knew, too. Not that He chose them to be goats. Not that He wanted them to disbelieve the Gospel, or to live in sin, or to end up on His left. He sent Christ to die for them, too. As Jesus said, For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Or as Jesus says right here in our Gospel, Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. Not prepared originally for you! But the goats are those who stubbornly resisted the Holy Spirit working in the Means of Grace. They didn’t believe in the Lord Jesus to be saved. Or, if they believed for a time, they didn’t continue to use the gifts God provided to keep them in the faith, and so they fell away and refused to be called back to repentance. And so they ended up among the goats, as God knew in eternity they would.

But in another sense, from our perspective in time, all people start out as goats, as living under God’s condemnation, dead in sins and trespasses, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, by nature children of wrath. But then the Law is preached, warning us of the coming judgment and of our impending doom because of our sins, causing us to grieve over them and to fear God’s wrath. Then the Gospel is preached, that God loved us and sent His Son to live among us, to be righteous for us, to suffer and die for our sins, and to be raised to life for our justification. And when lost and condemned sinners hear that, some of them are converted and made into sheep.

When the Lord Jesus comes, He will first raise all the dead, and then He will immediately separate the sheep from the goats, the sheep on His right, the goats on His left. There will be only two groups: sheep and goats; believers and unbelievers; the genuine members of Christ’s holy Church and the rest of the humanity. As we learn earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, the sheep will be a relatively small group compared to the goats, because wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Now, of all the thoughts, words, and deeds the King could bring out into the open on Judgment Day, He focuses in this parable on one very specific set of deeds: the difference in how the sheep and the goats behaved toward His “brothers.” Who are His brothers? In a sense, all men, as human beings, are His brothers. In a sense, those who are Israelites by birth are His brothers. And in a sense, the other children of Mary and Joseph were His brothers. But in most of the New Testament, Jesus’ brothers are those who have been made children of God by faith, who have been born again of water and the Spirit, adopted into God’s family by Holy Baptism, and made members of His body, the Holy Christian Church. He’s exposing the works of the sheep and the goats toward His precious Christians.

He praises the sheep for the acts of kindness and love they showed to His brothers, that is, to one another, giving help and comfort to one another, providing for the needs of their fellow Christians, in hunger, in sickness, in prison, in need of clothing, in need of shelter. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus had said this: Whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward. Here He reveals something even more astonishing: Whatever you did for one of the least of these My brothers, you did for Me.

On the other hand, Jesus accuses the goats for the acts of kindness and love they failed to show to His dear people. He could have brought up all the evil deeds unbelievers have done in the world. There’s plenty of wickedness to expose. But here He shows that even the lack of help and comfort given to Christians is sufficient grounds for the unbelieving to be eternally condemned. If they’re condemned for not helping, how great will their condemnation be for all the hurting they’ve done?

So today’s Gospel is a stern warning to unbelievers and to the impenitent. Judgment is coming, and if they wish to escape the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, they had better listen to His calls to repent and to flee for refuge to the arms of the Good Shepherd, who will gladly receive them and make them into sheep by forgiving them their sins.

It’s also a great comfort to believers, that God knows those who are His, that He is pleased with their good works, and that He is not blind to the unbelievers’ hatred and mistreatment of His people. He will not allow it to go on forever, nor will He let it go unpunished.

But there is also a warning to believers here, not to grow complacent about loving one another. Jesus shows us how important it is to Him. To fail to give help and comfort to Jesus’ little brothers is to fail to give it to Him. To speak meanly to His little brothers is to speak meanly to Him. To hurt any of His little brothers is to hurt Him. And to fail to repent of those sins is to leave the sheepfold and rejoin the goats.

But with repentance there is forgiveness again. And with forgiveness comes the inspiration to love as you have been loved by God, to be all the more zealous at serving one another in love, because with every deed of kindness to our fellow believers, we are serving Christ Himself. And the reward He promises to His sheep is His own word of praise, at the end if not before, and a glorious, eternal kingdom if we remain faithful until the end.

“What sort of people ought you to be?” St. Peter asked his readers in today’s Epistle, knowing that Judgment Day is coming, knowing that all this, all you see here, will soon be burned up and removed? You ought to practice holy living and godliness, awaiting and yearning for the coming of the day of God, when the heavens will be destroyed with fire and the elements will burn up and melt. But we, according to his promise, await new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, make every effort to be found spotless and blameless before him in peace. Amen.