1 Corinthians 8:8-9:2
Psalm 23
Matthew 25:31-46

Behold, the Lamb!

We have now journeyed three weeks — day by day, night after night — entering ever more deeply into a mystery. For while we trek down the weeks toward the door of His tomb, our journey is an interior journey. Within each of us is constant change as we are confronted from hour to hour with thoughts and choices. Meantime, the door of our own tomb draws closer because we are dying. It is our own death that brings us finally into true proximity to His tomb. For finally death is no longer a concept, an abstraction. It is the happening now, which is impossible to resist or delay.

Through all of this, the state of our soul is constantly changing as our thought-streams range over all sorts of things. At each thought-moment is a crossroads, always a choice between two paths, the heavenly path and the unheavenly path. We can never remain in one, stable state though we may wish to remain on the mountain top, though we may long to stay on the spiritual "sweet spot." And as St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) has famously written, whatever we desire, that is what we become, always tending to morph in one of two directions, heavenly or unheavenly, always one-or-the-other, always opposed. For the world and the Kingdom of Heaven can never be reconciled.

St. Augustine's insight is obvious to anyone who has lived life. The woman who cannot stop thinking about food eventually morphs into a grotesque of her former self. How could this comely, little girl have become a 400-pound woman, we ask. Yet, the seemingly impossible is not impossible, so powerful is the tyranny of our desires and compulsions. The man who sees the world as a map of bar rooms eventually morphs into a muttering fool, a pathetic shell of his former self. How could this bright-eyed, inquisitive little boy morph into a brain-shattered ghost, who only vaguely resembles what he once was? Women and men who fall into the trap of lust eventually become craven monsters seeing the world in terms of sexual body parts, losing all capacity for love and relationship. To lose love and relationship?! Why, this is tantamount to losing God, for love and relationship are the divine attributes. God is Love. God is Relationship, a Relationship of Three. Yes, that is how powerful our thought-stream can be.

Our mind and heart and soul are ever active. And our spiritual temperature fluctuates as we journey through the world as surely as our blood pressure and pulse are ever-changing. Then, how do we take the soul's blood pressure? How can we monitor the spiritual pulse? That is the function of Lent .... and Advent and the Ember Seasons. For, without fail, during Lent we confront our ever-present desirings squarely. We cannot eat whenever the impulses drives us but one meal a day. We cannot drink alcohol, any alcohol. And illicit sex or pornography?! The thought of it! We are apt to cry out, "Have you no fear of God?!"

For some, more advanced in their spiritual development, Lent is a season when many notice that they have mastered their desires. They discover that life during Lent is not so different from every day life, for food and drink no longer predominate. And unworthy desires do not attract but rather repulse. Does this life of mastery seem important? I mean how many do you know who practice it? To be rid of worldly desires? 535 million Buddhists in the world think it is important, for this is the essence of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths, finally to be free of that cruel tyrant: impulse and unchecked desire. Buddhism is not a "God religion" as Judaism or Christianity is. It is a spiritual discipline or family of spiritual disciplines. It is about self-mastery. Or to put it more plainly, it is about the soul triumphing over that great bully we call "the body."

Oh, yes. Let us not forget the positive case: the ones who never began this wandering into the wilderness of carnal desires. We have all met them during our lifetimes ... though they may not be easy to notice. — that shining girl we first saw in elementary school whom everyone knew to be kind and thoughtful. She did not speak when she had nothing to say, yet all took note at her gracious words when she did. Over time, you notice a pattern. Has she ever said anything ugly or unattractive about anyone? And as she grew older, she only seemed to become more and more confirmed in this gracious life. You see, like every child born into the world, two needs were set in her soul at conception, the primary faculties of the soul: the need to give love and the need to receive the love of others. You know, the soul is the only divine organ in your body, and love is one of the only divine properties on earth. And in this primacy of pure love, she never descended into the things that would detract from good life, the life of charitable love, which includes the honoring of the body, which includes the honoring of other peoples' bodies.

Who was surprised when it became known that she had chosen for the convent? And who at the convent was surprised when she gave her life to those in the fourth world, that shattered place aching for love? And who in that world was surprised that she never veered from giving her love, so pure and chaste, never veering in her faithfulness to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience? Like all of us, she was born to be good, born without sin (St. Augustine was not right about everything!), and she simply stayed in it. We might think of the Roman Catholic saint, Therese of Lisieux. Her hallmark is the invitation, Just do it!. Just choose the simple path of godly love. which would become known to all as "the little way."

Everyone has known people like this ... though it is easy to miss them. For they do not call attention to themselves. They are not the "class clown" or "Miss Personality." They are not the most likely to .... anything (in the high school yearbook). They prefer quiet anonymity, helping people where they can, holding to a modest profile, going through the world seeing the beauty and goodness that surrounds all of us. This is the quiet life.

And their day-to-day choices? They were never curious about the unworthy and the worldly. They did not have to control themselves, for the world that diminishes us is not really attractive in the first place. Among those of you who have sinned, and I count myself first among them, we understand this, understood it from the start. I found that I had to push myself into that world, led by my curiosity. I had to risk .... with trepidation. And then, when I did risk and go through with it, I was left with a sick feeling, a kind of "food poisoning" of the soul. I wanted just to get in bed for days. Isn't that what happens at our first taste of evil? And must we not continue to ignore the alarms of conscience in order to taste it a second time and a third time? Perhaps we will tell ourselves, "It is an acquired taste?" But an appetite for what is tasteless? Who would want to acquire that?

You see the path of goodness is not "heroic life." It is simply what comes naturally for the ones who never surrender their inner purity. To reject the unworthy and choose the noble. Is this not one of the aims, not only of Buddhism, but of every world religion? Is this not the aspiration of humankind?

Today's Gospel is about this constant crossroads that is set before us at every moment: to the left, the path of the goat, to the right, the path of the sheep. It is a mysterious crossroads, one-sided in a way. For the more you choose the goatish path, the more opportunities for goatishness will open before you — a kind of crossroads gone mad dividing and dividing and dividing into ever more distractions, until you descend all the way to the bottom into depravity. But the path of the sheep is not like that. In fact, the longer you tread that path, the less likely you are to notice any other paths ... except the straight path, and the more likely you are hear the music of angels calling you forward.

The goatish mind overflows with the rationalizations that give rise to more goatish pathways: "God made me this way!" or "I have my needs!" or "Didn't God plan all this from foundations of time? I mean, it's happening!" In the end, a whole theology grows up around this benighted life, known as the Fundamental Option (very popular after Vatican II): "After all, don't I love God? And isn't that the main thing? And God loves me ... for this the Bible tells me so!" We fool ourselves into believing that God, though He loves us, is not filled with revulsion to see our transformation from a sheep into a goat. What mother or father can bear to watch their children descend into the grotesque? When it is willful, yes, the parent goes on loving — a cruel vocation! — but there is no blessing for this life, neither for the child or the parent.

For God, there is no "middle way," no compromises. Jesus is crystal clear about this: "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth" (Rev 3:16). Either you are in it, or you are not in it. You either seek Him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength — seeking to be like Him, seeking to please Him as your older brother and exemplar, seeking to be Him, in a mystery — or you do not. On our journey to God, there will be no polite, somewhat-interested, "nice people" who want to learn more. The time is always now, and lukewarm interest will not do, nor double-mindedness, which points to the Deuce, the Double, the Dissembler, the Enemy.

During my pilgrimage to the Holy Land fifteen years ago, I was disabused of many misconceptions, among them, my misconception about goats and sheep. I always thought, what could be more obvious? Who cannot tell the difference between a big, round, white, wooly sheep and a gangly black and brown goat with its short, oily hair? What could be simpler? But there I was outside Jericho. A Palestinian shepherd was approaching with his large herd, who were wandering to the left and right of the road, some straying very near to me. What were these long-eared, hairy beasts?! Well, it turns out they were all goats and sheep. But which were the goats and which were the sheep? I had no idea. How could anyone tell them apart? They seemed indistinguisable.

It is not easy to sort the goats from the sheep. Even the goats and sheep do not know. Consider the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee is certain that he is a sheep, and the tax collector is certain that he is a goat. But, as the parable teaches, the matter goes deeper than we thought. Then, how do we know? How can we "take" our spiritual temperature? What is the state of our souls? Would that we had a thermometer that we could insert into our interiors! But the soul is a spiritual organ, not subject to material measurement. The only safe path for us is clarity in our journey, especially our Lenten journey. Even if we go to church and say our prayers, if our values are not God's values, nor our ideals God's ideals, then we will miss the mark.

During my years of teaching theology at a Roman Catholic college, I saw a brilliant example of this. Over the course of a forty-year career, a professor I knew would begin the first day of each class asking a question, "How many of you love God?" Of course, every hand went up! Does not everyone in the world believe that he or she loves God? Then the professor would follow with a second question: "What evidence would you give for loving God?" The answers, he told me, were always the same. "I volunteer at a soup kitchen." or "I visit St. Ann's Home for retired nuns." or "I recycle bottles and paper." No doubt, these are commendable things. And they may even be distantly connected to loving God (insofar as the Second Great Commandment is like unto the First .... even there, indirectly connected). But they are certainly not instances of loving God.

What if our children believed that they were going to Heaven because they recycled bottles or visited retired nuns but had never begun their journey down the path of the sheep, the all-important transformation of becoming more and more and more like God? For this is the essence of salvation: we are born with a family resemblance, the Image of God set upon our faces; we grow into His fullness as God's adopted children; we are given a great exemplar, the Lord Jesus, the first-born of all Creation, and our eldest sibling. Becoming One with Him, Who is One with the Father, entering and completing this life transformation, is the sum and total of salvation. It is a horrific thought that so many young people should be so lost on the account of a faulty map.

I recall a professor at St. Anselm's, a Benedictine college in New Hampshire, being interviewed on NHPR. The tilt of the program was toward social justice and other secular questions, but to the host's surprise his famously liberal guest, a celebrated nun, said, in effect, "I do not want to talk about that. What is on my mind today is that not one of my students knows the prayers of the Church. They have not seen the treasures of the Church nor the depths in our spiritual traditions. And, by and large, they do not know God." As she recalled the high ideals of Vatican II, she said, "We have succeeded in advancing an ethical culture society, but not the Church. And we have failed our children."

Consider all the young people forty years ago who committed themselves to serve the Church on the basis of these same ethical ideals .... but who never began their spiritual journey. They saw religious life only in terms of service. And this was drummed into their minds by countless priests from the pulpit: "The real life of religion is the life of service!" No wonder so few ever began the process of loving God, even knowing God. And if my professor friend had stood before a vast assembly of vowed religious and priests asking for their evidence for loving God, the great majority would have given the same answers that the students had given. For these men and women were the source, this "vision of the Church" (to borrow their phrase), which had taught the students.

Tragically, religious I have ministered to and priests I have met, somewhere along the line entered into what I call the "Matthew 25 deal" — that if you feed and clothe the poor, then you will go to Heaven. I say tragic because they did give their lives to God, at least in the beginning, and then never became godly, never enjoyed the fruits of their oblations, which is to leave our worldly lives behind and mysteriously to become God.

Reading these moving lines from our Gospel today, it is easy to understand this trap:

May I confess some of my own sins this morning? As a pastoral minister twenty-five years ago, my only intention was to console, to reassure, and never to offend. Whatever it was I heard — and now I look back and hear cries for help — my impulse was always "radical forgiveness." "We cannot imagine the depths of God's forgiveness," I would say. And then, in later years, I watched many of these lives go to ruin. And I realized, along with the Reverend Sister Professor, that I had failed. In this I have gravely sinned .... with blood on my hands, lots of blood.

But doesn't it say right in our Gospel that if you care for the poor, then you will go to Heaven? Yes, it does. No question about it. And elsewhere in the New Testament, we read that if you simply believe, believe that Jesus is Lord, then your faith will have justified you. But justification is a very deep subject and does not equate to "salvation." More to the point, we also recall that the Scriptures teach that the demons believe that "Jesus is Lord," ... and tremble (James 2:19). Shall the demons then be saved account of their belief?

The Bible is not a cookbook, a workshop manual, or a compilation of contract law — if you do this, then you get that. You know, in contract law, the contract opens with certain general statements, say, "All heirs of Henry Q. Deeppockets will receive equal parts of his estate ..." But then you must continue reading: "Except in the case of .... Except in the condition that ... Except this person .... Except that person .... " The Scriptures are not a repository of stand-alone "Hallmark card" sentiments. Individual passages will not guarantee that you go to Heaven. And quoting individual Bible verses is not a form of spiritual development. The Sacred Scriptures are, to quote St. Paul, "the oracles of God" — mysterious and deep:

What is the true path to Heaven? Where is the true map? That is the subject of our journey of Great Lent. We now have completed three weeks since we set out together from Septuagesima Sunday. We trek through the days and the nights. The air is cold and bracing. It is God Whom we seek now. God. And we must not miss our goal!

I am no longer a new pastor .... or a hospital chaplain or a university chaplain or a theology professor. I am a religious hermit. And I am never far from calling St. Paul's words to mind: "the night is far spent." My vocation now is to speak plainly and to help, that not a lamb be lost .... or, more frightening, that no innocent lamb transform into a goat .... a hideous transformation so common among us as to reduce an old man to tears.

The Lord has not come to establish soup kitchens. He has not come to set up medical clinics in the Third World. He has not come to set up healing liturgies on Thursday evenings. The care and healing of others is a function of drawing near to the Lord of Life, but it is not the goal. No question, the act of one human soul engaging another in compassion is a drama. Two souls meet. Something special always is waiting — the possibility of the shared heart, the possibility of an eternal kinship that you begin to detect. What will happen next? The angels look on. Which paths will be chosen? Will we help each other come to life? Or will we drift along toward spiritual deadness, fearing that we not "judge" anyone?

No, Jesus does not come to give peace; He has come to cast fire upon the earth (Lu 12:51). His aim is neither healing ministries, nor blanket promises of open-ended "radical forgiveness." It is a broken spirit that He seeks, a contrite heart He will not despise (Ps 51:17). O Lord, pour fire over the earth! Burn away the brush and debris that have hidden my soul from my own eyes! I long for clarity and life, not a numb, drifting into the fog-unto-eternal-death!

At the end of the great and holy book we call the Bible, we encounter .... a Lamb. We find ourselves in a mysterious and morphing landscape. Creatures appear and disappear, some goatish, some not. Finally, One arises above the rest. All eyes are upon Him. It is .... a Lamb. And, then, before our eyes, the final transformation takes place: the completion of all our journeys for every human creature. What had begun in childhood, that essential innocence, that white-wooly purity, rejecting all goatish claims, arrives to the final change: from the Lamb to Jesus, our God and King.

The oldest and earliest depiction of Jesus Christ that we have on earth is an icon called the Pantocrator. Mysteriously, as we gaze upon it, we see .... really more a swirl of being than one clear depiction. On the right side of the icon, which is His left, His gaze is unflinching, scrutinizing. He lays us open with His eye-stretched-wide. He is peering into our joints and marrow. He sees our inner state, and in His left hand is the Book of the Lamb. Are our names listed there? Will we be among the sheep? And on the left side of the icon, His right side, we see a different eye and visage. In His hand is not a book but rather blessing. His face is the face of the compassionate Lord, and He is blessing each and everyone of us. For His dearest thought and constant prayer is that we appear in His book, right there with Him, the Book of the Lamb.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.