Jesus responded to an ancient Israelite yearning for vindication among the nations. The nation’s prophets, in their sunnier moods, foresaw a prominence for little Israel that seemed to defy the data and common sense.
What else is there?
A prophet’s vision, it would seem.
Yet Jesus resolutely sided with that version of Israelite expectation that divided humanity between the just and the unjust rather than between Israel and the rest. Part of his enduringly enigmatic message lies in that surefooted combination of Israelite particularity—it was so strong he once turned away a foreign widow by labeling her a ‘dog’—and universal embrace.
In Matthew 25, Jesus envisions a day when the nations will be summoned to report themselves before ‘the son of man’, accompanied by heaven’s throngs come down to accompany this cosmic judgment. Jesus tells his listeners that this ‘son of man’—more enigmatic than ever when he takes up this allusive yet self-referential descriptor—will divide the nations into sheep and goats, the right and the left, the blessed and the cursed the heirs and the outcast.
Dualism could hardly be more severely spoken, humanity riven down the center irremediably and along criteria that seem not to have been predelivered. All humanity missed the memo.
Ethnicity is cast aside, religious loyalties dismissed as irrelevant, identity clawed free of nouns and adjectives and riveted to a verb: did you or didn’t you? In Jesus’ tale, the nations are astonished at the terms of this uncommon verdict: ‘When did we ever see you?’, they ask, half of them in the astonishment of grace and the other half in one last failed attempt at claiming the high ground.
‘Whenever you locked eyes with the least of these’—one wonders whether Jesus gestured—’and fed them in their hunger, covered their bare bodies with your clothing, sat in prison’s darkness and felt the chill their despair’.
Whenever you did these things, or failed to, the heretofore invisible son of man took note and remembered.
Canter Bridge 
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