The Trouble with Goats

The Trouble with Goats

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 26, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The passage we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew is known as the “judgment of the nations.” Notice that it says that the “nations” appear before the risen, returned Christ. Hence the “judgment of the nations. “ It’s always been one of my favorite Bible passages. True, I don’t much care for the way it ends where it says that “then they will go away to eternal punishment….” That doesn’t sound like Jesus to me. It sounds like Matthew but not like Jesus. But that’s not what I want to spend our time talking about this morning. Rather, I want to talk about something I’ve always joked about in this passage. I used to say “I wonder what Jesus, or at least Matthew, has against goats?” I mean, this passage starts with the risen and returned Christ separating the nations “as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” He puts the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. That, by the way, is a clue that the goats are in big trouble. In the ancient Jewish world of this story the left hand was considered unclean. That the goats are on Christ’s left side means this isn’t going to turn out well for them, and indeed it doesn’t. The sheep, on Christ’s good side, turn out to be the ones he blesses for having done what is right. They took care of people in need, people Jesus here calls “the least of these brothers of mine.” We have to add “the least of these sisters of mine too,” but the text makes the point. We are all called to care for people in need. The goats on his left, unclean side, turn out to be the ones he condemns for not having done what is right. They did not care for the least of these who are in need. The goats turn out to be the villains of the piece, which has always made me wonder what Jesus, or at least Matthew, has against goats.

I mean, I quite like goats, not that I’ve ever really known one. But they’re cute. They act silly. They eat blackberry bushes. More importantly, in the agrarian economy of Jesus’ time and place and in many parts of the world today goats are valuable animals. Some car dealer around here is even running a promotion that goes “Buy a car, get a goat.” Not that you’ll really get the goat, but if you buy a car from this outfit they’ll give money to Heifer Project so a needy family somewhere in the world gets a goat. A goat could really help out a family in need. Goats give milk. When they die they can give meat and leather. There really is nothing wrong with goats. So why in this story do the bad people get equated with goats? I’ve always thought that was kind of funny, but I’d never really thought about it having an important meaning before this last week when I began to prepare this service. I think I have idea about a lesson for us in the way in this story good, useful goats turn out to be the villains, and that’s what I want to share with you now.

The goats in this passage are creatures that appear to be good, useful, beneficial animals but turn out not to be that at all. They turn out to be bad, neglectful at best and perhaps worse then that. And I think there’s a lesson there for us. The way the superficially good goats turn out to the bad points to a profound truth about human life. Evil is never a problem when it is apparent that it is evil. But evil is immensely creative in finding ways to make itself not look evil at all but to look good, to appear to be the opposite of what it really is. I’ll start with an obvious example. I’m sure we all agree that German Nazism was one of the most evil political ideologies the world has ever known. It killed tens of millions of people in its wars and its death camps. It was an ideology that dehumanized people who weren’t pure German and made them disposable. The symbols of Nazism are for us symbols of unmitigated evil.

Yet Hitler did not take power by force. The German people chose him and his Nazi parties to lead the country. Do you think all those Germans who voted for Hitler and the Nazis in 1933 and made Hitler Chancellor of their country thought they were voting for evil? No. They didn’t think that. They thought they were voting for something good. Something noble. Something true. Something that would make life better not worse. Were they blind to the reality of Nazism? Sure they were, but that’s because the Nazis were geniuses at making their evil appear as a good. You can say the same thing about Soviet Communism. It was pure evil, but there are lots and lots of Russians today who long to return to it because they see it has having been good. Evil can and does do harm when it is obviously evil. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t deranged ever thought Charles Manson was good. But evil does far, far more harm when it presents itself as good, which it nearly always does.

So a lesson that I take from Matthew’s judgment of the nations passage is that we must always be careful not to fall for what may look like a good thing when in fact it is an evil thing. We need to learn to see through the slick looking exterior of a thing and see what the thing really is underneath. Jesus does that with the goats in our passage. Sure, he knew that goats are good, useful animals, especially in an agrarian economy like the one he lived in. But he saw beneath the surface. He saw who his goats really were, not useful, decent people who cared for neighbors in need but people failed in that primary duty of the life of faith, failed to care for those in need.

Which of course raises a serious question for us Christians. Jesus could see beneath the surface of people and institutions, but none of us is Jesus. Jesus was at the very least a man with extraordinary powers of discernment. We say he had divine powers of discernment, which none of us does. So how do we undertake the task of telling the sheep from the goats? How do we get beneath the surface of things the way Jesus did with the goats in this story?

Well, we start by being aware of the issue, of how surfaces may not be telling the truth about what’ underneath. We start by never being satisfied with the superficial appearance of any person or any thing. Here’s another example. When a politician, any politician of whatever political party, makes a promise, don’t take that promise at face value. Look at the realities of the context in which the promise is made. All politicians who are running for President from either major political party, for example, promise that they will revise the federal tax code. That’s the superficial promise. When we look below the surface we see, however, that the President doesn’t make tax law. Congress does. The most any President can do is make proposals about the tax code to Congress, which may or may not accept the President’s proposal. So look below the surface of any political promise. See what the realities are. Only then make a decision about how to vote.

Yet there is another issue here, isn’t there. When we see beneath the surface of a thing and discern the realities around it we still have to evaluate it. We still have to make a judgment about it. How are we to do that? Well, we do it the way Christians are called to make any decision. We are called to ask: What does this thing look like in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ? What light to the values Jesus taught, lived, and died for shed on this thing we’re trying to evaluate? Is the thing good for “the least of these”? Is it grounded in love for the lonely and the lost? Does it work toward a world of peace and justice for all people? If it does, accept it. Vote for it. Work for it. But although a thing may look on the surface like it does those things, when we see below the surface we may see that it does not do those things. If it doesn’t, reject it the way Jesus rejects the goats in our passage from Matthew.

When we do that work of discernment we won’t all arrive at the same answer. That’s OK. Jesus rarely if ever dictates answers to us. What he calls us to do is the work of discernment. The work of looking below the surface of things. And the work of making decisions about those things in the light of his teachings. He calls is to see if a goat is really a goat or a wolf in goat’s clothing. That work isn’t easy. Evil is immensely creative in finding ways to make itself look good. It is immensely clever in playing to our fears and weaknesses to get us to do something we really oughtn’t do. It is really easy to fall into evil’s trap. We all do it from time to time. But Matthew’s great story of the judgment of the nations gives us a warning: Make sure that goat you want to buy is really a goat and not something else masquerading as a goat. We’ll all make mistakes when we try to do that, and Jesus always forgives our mistakes. Still, look beneath the surface of things. Make sure a goat really is a goat. Amen.