The sheep and the goats

Pastor Goh preached a sermon on Matthew 25:31-45 yesterday at the last service of the year.

As he was preaching, I was led to discover one thing about the verses that I had not noticed before. In these verses both the righteous and the unrighteous responded to Jesus "When did we see you..." and previously I thought the similarity was just a device to draw the parallel and never thought too much about it.

Reading it yesterday I noticed that the statement actually exquisitely expressed the respective attitudes of the righteous and the unrighteous.

For the righteous they were really puzzled. They are searching their memory and simply did not have an inkling of when they had served Jesus personally. Sure, they had served many people in their lives, but surely none of them could have been the Lord?

For the unrighteous the question betrays their false piety. The statement "when did we see you" really means "if we did see you we would have served you", revealing that they had a willingness to serve the Lord, but a willingness that was an abomination because it did not accompany a willingness to serve people in need.

And so Jesus interestingly concludes that whatever they did not do for the least of his brothers, they have not done it for him. If we do not serve the people around us, we do not serve the Lord.

This point came through saliently when Pastor Goh reminded us that God has no need for us to serve Him. If we think about it, most of what He has commanded us to do is to serve His people. Therefore, people who would "reserve" themselves to serve the Lord, abstaining from helping his neighbour so as to devote himself to his religious duties, such as the levite and the priest in the good Samaritan story, is actually not serving the Lord... you could say they were just serving themselves.