So today we come to the end of the church year and the final installment in our year-long reading of the Gospel according to Matthew.
But we don’t end with the last words in the book, where Jesus tells his disciples to “[g]o therefore and make disciples of all nations.“
We stop a couple of chapters back, with the telling of this story about sheep and goats.
Jesus starts teaching in Matthew back in Chapter 5, the beginning of the great ethical discourse we call the Sermon on the Mount. Which basically is a sort of handbook for how to live as followers of Jesus Christ.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says, and he goes on from there.
And his teaching concludes with the story we just heard.
If you think of the Sermon on the Mount and the story about sheep and goats as bookends around everything Jesus taught, this last part is like a final exam: What have we learned from everything he’s said and done in between?
Continue reading