“I Was a Stranger”

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for 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, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:31–40, NRSV)1

A lot of remarkable things are happening in this passage. One thing that strikes me is how Christ becomes a stand-in for humanity in its humblest forms. As taught here and in other scriptural passages, Christ is not just an individual, but also a body or community composed of many members who become both the objects and the subjects of a trial that is ongoing to this day. Will we, the subjects of this trial, take his name upon us by seeing Christ in even his most humble relatives, or will we fail to recognize him and pass by?

Jesus seemed to have a knack for maximizing every teaching opportunity, for striking at the heart of an issue and reaching his audience where they were most vulnerable. As I read his words carefully, he seems to be asking us to do pretty hard things, things that take us well out of our comfort zone. When was the last time you visited someone in prison, for example? I’m reminded of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: ”…What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great… When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small.”² I speak to you today as a fellow struggler. I’m not doing that well at this, but like you, I am at least convicted by Jesus’s words and I want to try harder.

Sometimes what seem to be our strengths can actually get in the way. This is taught well by a related parable of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan. One challenge of this parable is that we’re so familiar with it that we think we know it already. We’ve convinced ourselves that it is an indictment of religious insincerity and religious hypocrisy: of people who profess one thing but do another. But actually it’s precisely the opposite. It’s about the danger of sincere religion and religious sincerity.

To understand this, we need to get a little background into the Jewish religion of the day. Among the Jews’ most important practices was their purity code, something not uncommon for many different religions. Certain objects, people, races, foods and drinks can make the practitioner of a particular religion unclean and impure. To the Jew, coming in contact with a Gentile or even sitting down to eat with them, or touching a dead body, among many other things, made a person spiritually unclean, and they would have to go through a cleansing ritual at the temple in order to regain their purity. We Mormons are not without our own proscriptions, so we should hopefully be able to understand this at some level.

So when the first man in the parable, a good, sincere priest of the Jewish faith, heads home to Jericho after serving in the temple at Jerusalem, and encounters the unconscious man, stripped and beaten by the highway side, he is faced with an important question: “Can I be a neighbor to this man? Can I get involved with this man according to my religious code?” He doesn’t know for sure if the man is Jew or Gentile, because he has been stripped of all clothing, and he may even be dead. He knows if he gets any closer than five feet away from a dead body, he will be rendered impure and have to make the trek back to Jerusalem to cleanse himself. Like every good and sincere Jew, he makes the traditional calculation and arrives at the traditional answer. “Can I be this man’s neighbor?” And the traditional answer according to his religion is “no.” He arrives at this decision not by breaking his code but by keeping it; he does it out of sincere religious devotion.

The next person, a Levite, is more of a common functionary than the priest. Far be it from him to question the wisdom of one who is higher in the line of authority than himself. He also comes to the sincere conclusion that it would be a violation of the commandments to approach the man, and wisely passes by on the other side.

Then comes the first surprise in the story. According to the pecking order that the listeners would expect, the next person would probably be a layperson, an ordinary Israelite. They probably expected some kind of twist to the story, because this guy Jesus is always twisting stories, but this still threw them for a loop. He’s not even in the pecking order at all. In fact, he comes from one of the very untouchable classes that you’re not supposed to have anything to do with—a Samaritan.

The Samaritan had a similar code of religious purity, but when confronted with the injured man, he is moved with compassion. I’m told that the English translation here doesn’t do it justice. In the original Greek verb, splahnk-neetz-o-my, there is a connotation of upset bowels. It’s as though his guts are writhing and turning over in compassion. This explosion of compassion is so overwhelming that it simply blows the purity code apart, and he goes across the road and ministers to the man. That’s the scandal at the heart of the story.

Now let’s pause for a second here to think about our codes, our [doctrines and commandments]. We need them. We need our codes because we are a potentially chaotic people, we humans. We do terrible things to each other. We need discipline and order. We need highway codes in order not to kill each other on the roads [and even then we struggle to keep them]. We need our codes.

And the history of human culture is the history of the codes that we have devised to keep ourselves from destroying one another, to keep some kind of cooperation and peace and love and human community. But there is something else that we also learn, that the codes themselves are means to ends and never should become ends in themselves, because otherwise they become stupid.

The temptation as Mormons is to assume that our codes are perfect, having been received more recently and by a more direct revelation in our time, but as Paul said, “where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away” (1 Cor 13:8).³ Charity is the only thing that “never faileth.”

Jesus said to people that he was arguing with about the Sabbath (which is a good example of a good code, because people need a rest): it was made for us, not us for it.

The same could be said for all the commandments. And, as Jesus taught, there will be times when we have to look beyond them in order to minister in love to the fullness of humanity.

As we think about how we can minister to the stranger, I think it’s important for us to be as relentless as Jesus as we strive to identify the most needful targets of our compassion today. For example, if Jesus were to tell this parable to a Mormon audience, the Priest would probably be an apostle, the Levite a Seventy, stake president or bishop, and their failure to do the needful would be the result of a sincere effort to keep the commandments. The Samaritan would be whatever one might imagine to be the most untouchable class in our culture today, perhaps a gay person who has apostatized from the Church, maybe even who is covered in tattoos and swears like a sailor for good measure, but who nevertheless manages to be a good neighbor to someone who is in desperate need.

Jesus was always focused on the marginalized, the underdog, and his teachings remain relevant because every culture and power system has its pariahs, its untouchables, including ours.

As I’ve tried to step outside of my comfort zone and suspend my codes long enough to truly listen to and help the shunned and the oppressed, I have seen Christ in their countenances. I don’t do this as often or as well as I should, but I’m trying to do better. I hope you’ll join me. In the name of Christ, amen.