Sheep, Goats, and the Final Judgment

Matthew 25: 31-46 (November 26, 2023)

In 1975, a Marine on leave in Aiken, SC named Dannion Brinkley was on the phone with his best friend while a storm raged outside. As they spoke, a bolt of lightning struck the telephone pole, sending 180,000 volts of electricity burning through the phone line and the handset into Brinkley’s body. “It went into the side of my head above my ear, it went down my spine,” he said in an interview. “It welded the nails of the heels of my shoes to the floor. It threw me up in the air, I see the ceiling, it slams me back down, a ball of fire comes through the room and blinds me. I am burning. I am on fire. I am paralyzed.”

At that point, he left his body, floated above it near the ceiling, and watched from alongside as an ambulance rushed him to the hospital where he was declared dead. According to Brinkley, he woke up 28 minutes later in the morgue, under a sheet, with his friend sitting next to him, mourning his death. He recounted his shocking story in a book called Saved by the Light.

In the same year that Brinkley “died” and then woke up again, Dr. Raymond Moody had already written a book called Life After Life, in which he coined the term “near death experience” or NDE. I read Moody’s book while I was in high school and have been fascinated with near death experiences ever since. In fact, NDEs have now become a significant part of our cultural spiritual landscape.

After floating above his body, Brinkley claims to have been whisked away through a dark tunnel and into a realm of light where he entered a “crystal city.” There he encountered 13 teachers who showed him future occurrences, most of which have since come to pass. But before finding himself in the crystal city, Brinkley had what he called a “life review.” It strikes me that the description Matthew gives us of the sheep and the goats in a final judgment is a kind of life review.

Matthew and his community of Jesus followers, like the Judaism of the time, believed that there was a cosmic struggle between good and evil and that this struggle would reach a culmination at the end of history. Then God’s righteousness would prevail against all the powers of darkness and justice would reign. Mark Allen Powell claims that Matthew’s gospel presents “an apocalyptic vision of the world.” Matthew divides the world into what is divine and what is demonic, and the parable of the wheat and the weeds is evidence of that. In that story, the wheat represents the “children of the kingdom” while the weeds are “children of the evil one.” But in Matthew 15, Jesus claims that it’s the religious leaders who are “plant[s] that my heavenly Father has not planted.” In both cases, these “weeds” are to be left alone, as all will be sorted out later by God.

In today’s reading, Matthew describes the final judgment as a time when Christ returns as Son of Man and king and separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep on his right are “righteous” and have inherited the kingdom that was prepared for them “from the foundation of the world” because they took care of the needy. The goats on his left are “accursed” and sentenced to eternal fire because they did not take care of the needy. But is that all that is going on here? I have a few reasons for us to go a little deeper.

First, Eugene Boring, the scholar I’ve mentioned before, notes that in this reading, “the criterion of judgment is not confession of faith in Christ. Nothing is said of grace, justification, or the forgiveness of sins. What counts is whether one has acted with loving care for needy people.” (Boring, New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. VIII, p. 455)

Another interesting aspect comes into focus when we look more closely at the passage from Ezekiel that we read today. We are given vs. 11-16, and then 20-24 from Chapter 34. In those verses, we see that God seeks out and provides for his sheep. He also promises to establish David as shepherd to feed the sheep. The prophet says that God will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, but the text we’re given is missing a key section that to me explains what that judgment is about.

Verses 17-19 read as follows: “As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord God: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats; Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?” Clearly, there are some among the sheep, the people of God, who are taking what they want and ruining the pasture for the others. These sheep who eat their fill and more but ruin the grass and so starve the other sheep are the fat sheep. Today we might call them “fat cats.”

But if we back up even further in Ezekiel, we see that God’s anger is directed mostly toward the kings of Israel before David, and these Ezekiel calls the shepherds of Israel. To them, the prophet says, “Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, became food for all the wild animals.”

This sounds a lot like our political leaders of today (in fact, our leaders of the last 40 years or more), the fat cats or fat sheep who hoard all the wealth and power for themselves and leave the people in need. And it also sounds like our media who sow seeds of mistrust among us every day so that we hate our neighbors. In many ways, this also sounds like the religious leaders of Jesus’ time. Could it be these power elite that are the goats in Matthew’s vision of judgment? Is it these who, just like Israel’s kings, never gave a second thought to those in need but who hoarded all the wealth for themselves? Who is it that God has entrusted with the care of the sheep, the least of these?

Now I may run the risk of sounding like a broken record here, but I’ve mentioned in several previous sermons that the only people Jesus judges harshly in the Gospels are the powerful. These he calls hypocrites, these are judged, and these are the ones thrown into the outer darkness and burning fire where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. So, my question is this: Is the fire a hell of eternal conscious torment or is it more like a refining fire? Is it meant to punish sinners or to transform us like silver or gold put into a crucible to burn off impurities?

When Dannion Brinkley’s soul left his lightning ravaged body and moved through the dark tunnel into a realm of light, he experienced what he called a life review. In it he saw everything single blessed thing he had ever done. And Dannion Brinkley was no Boy Scout. He was a bully. He had hurt people for most of his life. The most fascinating thing about his life review experience – and this seems to be common for many people who’ve had NDEs – is that he saw everything he had ever done, good and bad, from three perspectives. First, he lived through it again as the one doing the act. Second, he watched it as an observer. And third, he lived through it as the recipient of his action, meaning he felt every feeling of every person he ever helped or harmed as if he was within their own body. He felt every moment of pain that he had ever inflicted upon another being.

Can you imagine the hell that must have been for a bully like Brinkley? Can you imagine the hell that must be for someone like Adolf Hitler?

Now, maybe we can’t take near death accounts as the gospel truth. But the people who have them claim them to be authoritative and completely life-changing. And I believe them. But how does Christ play into all of this?

According to Eugene Boring, “The fundamental thrust of this scene [of the judgment of the sheep and the goats] is that when people respond to human need, or fail to respond, they are in fact responding, or failing to respond, to Christ. Yet this turns out to be a surprise to both groups.” (Boring, New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. VIII, p. 456)

The most beautiful thing about the life reviews described by Dannion Brinkley and others is that they say that even while reviewing the most horrible things they had ever done, the infinitely loving being of light in whose presence they were held exuded only compassion. There was no judgment and no punishment and yet it changed them forever. In a sense, Matthew points to a similar reality, because, as Eugene Boring points out, the dualism of the two kingdoms – God’s kingdom and the realm of the devil – are not both ultimately victorious. In the final scene, only God is king. In a similar way, most near death experiences show a clear difference between this world of opposites and that other realm where there is only love and light.

If I’m right that the goats in this story are those who failed in their duty to care for the people, and the sheep are those who actually did take care of those in need, then this is a judgment of a failure of leadership and a failure of community. But it also shows us as individuals our own ability, or failure, to see Christ as present in every other person we meet. And so, while this final judgment for God’s beloved community may not rely upon a confession of faith, per se, in a sense it does rely on our having the inward heart-felt orientation toward the Christ of love, compassion, and mercy that allows us to live out the kingdom in our acts of love, compassion, and mercy.