Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
The reading today from Matthew’s gospel at first sounds good and then is rather unsettling. The idea that the Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea that catches every sort of fish sounds good! We’re all in!
But then Jesus goes on to say that once the net is brought to shore then the good fish are kept and the bad fish are thrown away. Not so good.
And then it just gets worse. Jesus talks about the end of the age at which time the angels will separate the good and the bad, with the bad getting thrown into a fiery furnace. Yikes!
So, my question is: who are the good and who are the bad? Who’s going to be thrown away or, worse, tossed into the fiery furnace?
Jesus doesn’t tell us who the good are and who the bad are in chapter 13, but he does make the distinction clear in chapter 25. In Matthew 25, beginning at verse 31, Jesus again talks about separating the good from the bad or, in the case of this passage, the sheep from the goats. The sheep are put to the king’s right hand (they’re the good ones) and the goats to his left (they are the bad ones).
What distinguishes the two? The sheep are the ones who fed Jesus when he was hungry, gave him something to drink when he was thirsty, welcomed him though he was a stranger, provided clothing for him when he was naked, took care of him when he was sick, visited him when he was in prison.
But his interlocutors are scratching their heads. When did we see you hungry or thirsty or as a stranger or naked or in prison or sick? And Jesus answers: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”
Oh. So that’s what separates the good fish from the bad, the sheep from the goats. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we have cared for the least of these. If we want to get into heaven, we must serve the least of these in these kinds of ways.
In these days of culture war rhetoric, we are constantly encouraged to demonize people who are different from us in one way or another. We are urged to cast them into the fiery furnace ourselves. Jesus is clear. The question isn’t whether someone is different from us and therefore needs to pay an eternal price for that difference. The question is whether we have served the least of them.
Immaculate Conception provides all sorts of ways for us to serve the least of them—our food pantry, financial gifts to our school, donations to St. Vincent de Paul, and a host of other ways. When we examine our conscience and think about how we might spend eternity, may we remember that helping the least of these is Jesus’ true test. Amen.
—Susan Trollinger