Today is a busy day for us. It is Christ the King Sunday, the day that we think about Christ as our leader, guide and master and we are meant to reflect on what kind of king he is. How he compares with other kings, presidents, and leaders. It is also the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a time when we are called to give great thanks to God who provides for us. It is also the last day of the church year. The day before we begin advent and start looking forward to the coming of Christ among us at Christmas. And it is a day when our gospel lesson has this refrain: When did we see you? This is a lot to fit in, lets see how we do, you guys can keep score. I'll start with a story.
Some of you might not realize this about me but I am rather short in stature. In fact, I often end up on my tip-toes at some point during my sermons because I'm not quite tall enough for most pulpits. And like most other people who are short, this shortness is not new to me. I have always been on the smaller side of things. I remember as a child having a very hard time with it. Adults, you might know, tend to overlook children as it is. Turn a blind eye to them, filter them out, whatever. And I think the smaller the child the easier this is to do.
So as I became a pre-teen with an allowance and was old enough to do some things for myself, buy items, ask questions and the like, I was often frustrated and hurt by the way I would be overlooked or flat out ignored by people in authority, shop keepers, librarians, whomever. It was like they didn't even see me. I think this is the experience of most children short or tall but I felt like I must have been even easier to dismiss, because of my size.
But every once in a while there was some remarkable grown-up who could pick me out of the fray. Who would look past all of the big tall, important adults around. Who would look past business suits and credit cards down to me with my 50 cents for a candy bar or two dollars for some little treasure. This magical adult who could see me when no one else could, would reach out to me with kindness and I would feel like the most important person in the world even if I was only a 4' 9" little girl in the midst of a bunch of grown ups.
Looking back I remember very clearly a few of these people who saw me when no one else did. I think my parents, watching from a distance might remember one or two as well, being moved by my excitement to take notice. But I doubt seriously that any of them remember me, I doubt that most of them realized, even in the moment, that they were reaching out to someone that no one else could see. Their eyes were so trained with love or compassion or fairness or respect that they didn't even know how remarkable it was to notice a kid in a grown up world.
I was watching a TV drama about police recently on which an officer was newly assigned to be a detective. On her first day out the other detectives are trying to help her learn how to do her new job and they tell her that she needs to have "soft eyes". She needs to learn to look at things in a new way. Look at the same streets that she has always been on, the same types of homes that she has always been in, the same sort of people that she has always seen and notice new and different things, a little bit like each time she looks is the very first time she ever has. She has to learn how to see, to train her eyes in a new way.
In our gospel lesson today Jesus is talking to people about how they see. About what kind of eyes they have. There are two groups of people. One group with the right kind of eyes and one group without. Jesus tells both groups that they encountered him many times in life that he was in the midst of the hungry and the thirsty, the naked and those in prisons of all kinds. Both groups were exposed to these people throughout the years and both groups had no idea at all that they had seen Jesus.
So the difference between the two groups was what they did see. The first group saw the hungry, thirsty, naked and those in prison and they treated them with love and compassion. Once they saw them they cared for them. Jesus tells them that by doing so to those, little ones, those overlooked ones they were acting toward him as well. The second group, it seems, didn't even see those in need. They looked right through them or around them or past them. They didn't have the right kind of eyes. They needed gospel eyes. Eyes that were so sure of the message of God's love that love spilled over wherever they looked.
The two groups here are both in shock when Jesus tells them about themselves, the ones who saw and the ones who didn't. So clearly no one was trying to see. No one was trying to earn merit with God or be the ones who did the best job of caring for Christ so how is it that the one group knew how to see and the other didn't?
For that we need to go back to the text. It turns out that it was not the looking, the seeing or the doing that designated children of God in this story. It was being children of God that opened their eyes. It was knowing the message of the gospel. Those who saw were already identified as children of God before any mention of what they did. The seeing was a gift given to them, an ability apparent in them because of who their leader was.
That is where one of our themes for the day comes in. Today is meant to teach us about Christ as our king and leader and the lesson we get is all about taking care of the least among us. Kings in Christ's day, and other rulers for that matter, like governors and feudal Lords were all known for taking things from the people. Tax collecting was the chief endeavor of a king, taxes were collected in order to get enough money to run the state, to ensure lasting power, to fund wars and to live in comfort. So collecting both money and goods from people was common. In fact, even the first fruits of the harvest that were given to temples as a thanksgiving sacrifice to God or to some Gods were subject to confiscation by both the Greeks and Romans around Jesus' time. The king was paid even when people were giving thanks to God. Kings took what they wanted and sometimes they were benevolent and good to the people and sometimes they were greedy and cruel.
But on Christ the King Sunday we don't hear about the King taking from us, only what the king gives for his people.
The king is chief among us to have gospel eyes. Chief among us to see the least, the smallest, the neediest, the littlest. A good king even in Jesus' day would have dealt fairly with the people returning them protection in accordance to what they paid. Offering them freedoms in line with their tax bracket. But our great king sees those whom everyone else overlooks and instead of taking from those littlest ones gives them the kingdom. Gives them his mandate for peace to share with the nations, gives them his great bounty to celebrate at the harvest and most of all gives them one another and eyes with which to see both the love of God and the needs of God's people.
This is the close of the church year. We started with a baby, tiny, meek and fragile who was welcomed like a king and now on this last day we are welcomed by the great King of Kings to see like him and to be like him and to care for all those who are tiny, meek and fragile. This is a great gift, let us give thanks to God. Amen
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