I was hungry and you gave me food.
Category: Sundays after Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard
We have arrived at the final week of the church’s calendar, the final Sunday in the longest of church seasons, which we now call Pentecost season but once called Trinity season. In the Roman Catholic tradition this is the final Sunday of Ordinary time. Unlike the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany and Lent and Easter and Advent, this season is not marked by association with any particular moment in the narrative of Christ’s life. Rather we focus more broadly on Jesus Christ’s teaching.
That means that we have in some sense arrived at the last lecture. We are in the final verses of chapter 25 of Matthew. After this there will be little said of Jesus’ parables or his moral instruction; narration of the passion will take center stage: chapter 26 will tell the story of the Last Supper, chapter 27 of the crucifixion, and chapter 28 of the resurrection.
By last lecture here I don’t mean what Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon meant when he used the term back in 2007 for his last discourses before dying of a terminal illness. I mean that ordinary kind of lecture of a professor who approaches the end of a course and realizes that he or she has over emphasized some themes and left out others. The last lecture is the attempt at the end of the term to correct those things. In this case the professor is the evangelist Matthew, who senses at this point in story that there are a few more things that he wants to tell us.
When I was a college sophomore I took a course in Political Science called Power in America from a professor by the name of H. H. Wilson. He was a critic of American inequality who was best known at the time for being the mentor of a former student and consumer advocate by the name of Ralph Nadar. Week after week Wilson criticized the racial, economic, political, cultural, and medical inequalities of American life—until the last week. At his last lecture he handed out a set of statistics that showed us that, despite his constant criticism, he did understand that there were some good things about the American political and economic system. He knew about them, and wanted us to know that he knew.
I think that we catch Matthew in his exposition of the teaching of Jesus in just such a moment this morning. He has made some choices in the way in which he written about Jesus. That becomes particularly clear when you compare his account with that of Luke, the gospel that most closely resembles Matthew in structure and content. Matthew spiritualizes his story, while Luke is hard-nosed and concrete. So, for example, back in Matthew 5 at the beginning of his public teaching Jesus delivers his famous beatitudes: a set of blessings. In Luke’s version (Luke 6:20-26) they are blunt pronouncements with concrete economic implications--Blessed are you poor…Blessed are you who are hungry now—and they are linked with warnings to those who are affluent. Woe to you who are rich, woe to you who are full now. Not so in Matthew; he is more concerned about the internal quality of faith and so he says: Blessed are the poor ….. in spirit. Blessed are you who hunger and thirst … for righteousness. And he omits the woes for the rich and those who are filled. Matthew concentrates more on the interior spirit of the believer than on external action. He is the only evangelist who reports Jesus’ words about praying in secret and avoiding public displays of piety. (Matthew 6:5-6) You will not find that in Luke.
If you compare Jesus’ teaching in his home town of Nazareth in the two Gospels (Matthew 13:53-58; Luke 4:16-30) you will see a difference as well. Both Gospels explain that Jesus’ words stirred up opposition. Only Luke tells us what he read in the synagogue: a passage from Isaiah about being anointed to preach good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, sight to the blind, and liberty to the oppressed. Matthew tells us only that he said wise things, and was criticized for thinking too highly of himself. It is because of this difference between Matthew and Luke that Luke is the gospel favored by social action preachers and theologians of liberation. He gets down to the concrete.
Matthew knows, of course, that he concentrates on the interior character of faith. He may recognize that there is some danger that the message can be read in a way that so internalizes faith as to make concrete action irrelevant, and so he attempts to offer a correction in his last lecture on Jesus’ teaching. In it he will circle back to those who hunger and thirst that he mentioned in the Beatitudes, and to the captives and the ill that Luke included in his account of the preaching in Nazareth but which he omitted. And he sums them up in a zinger of a passage.
There is an old story about Abraham and Sarah that is found back in Genesis 18. Three strangers showed up at their tents in the heat of the day without apparent supplies with them. Abraham and Sarah act like good hosts. They shared their shade with them from the oak of Mamre and prepare a meal of water, bread, milk, curds, and roast lamb. And the strangers turn out to be messengers of God and bless them. The author of Hebrews knew that story and advised readers not to “neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entered angels without know it.” (Heb 13:2).
Matthew certainly knew the story as well as well, but goes a step further than the author of Hebrews. He suggests that the stranger in need in whose presence we find ourselves is more than an angel; it is the Son of God himself. And when we shut our eyes to the stranger in need, we bring judgment on ourselves.
My father grew up in a small town beside the railroad. While trains stopped there for water and coal, homeless persons who hitched rides on freight cars would knock on the doors of nearby houses and ask for food. My grandmother was trying to raise two children in the depths of the Depression and had very modest resources, but she often shared what she had with those who came asking. By the time he became a teenager my father became unhappy with that behavior. He announced that he would answer the door and send away the hobos. There first time that he heard a train pull up in town followed after an interval by a knock, he opened the door, ready to send whoever was there away, only to find someone who stared him in the face and said, “cousin Ed?” He could not say, ‘No.”
Despite his emphasis earlier in his Gospel, Matthew wants us to know that Faith is more than interior feelings. It issues forth in concrete action, feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoners, welcoming the stranger. But he is convinced that and when we take that action, we find new sisters and brothers in the family of Christ. Through them, we catch a glimpse of Christ himself.
It is no accident that we hear lessons about stewardship in the fall of each year. The editors of the lectionary knew what they were doing when they made their selections for Pentecost season. It may not be a bad thing, however, to have Matthew’s last lecture in our ears as we make decisions about stewardship. By all means, hunger and thirst after righteousness, lay aside arrogance and be poor in spirit, seek to be spiritual, but remember Matthew’s caution that all of that interior faith is not an excuse not to help those with real needs. And in so doing, we come to know the family of Christ even more deeply.
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.
Amen.
© Robert W. Prichard