Sorted with the Sheep

 Second Sunday of Advent

At the beginning of my time in Farm Street, I spoke about how I came to be a Jesuit novice. It was a great privilege after that when several of you shared your stories, your faith and your struggles with me. The sense of connection from these encounters has helped sustain me during lockdown.  

 I thought therefore that I would share now something of my faith, in response to and in gratitude for the things many of you have shared with me. Because as a parish, in all our individuality and uniqueness I think our faith grows when we share it with each other, when we feel connected to one another. 

 I want to start with a question. Do you ever sit in church and have an emotional reaction to one of the readings, or perhaps to the homily? You experience, joy, sadness or anger? The reason I’m asking is because this happened to me two weeks ago. The Gospel was from Matthew 25.  

 There are two parts of it. One is Jesus’s close identification with those who are poor and in need. ‘I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me to drink.’ The second is this vision of the end of time in which people are separated into sheep and goats. The sheep go to eternal life and the goats to eternal punishment.  

 When I hear that second part, I always feel uneasy, but when I heard it two weeks ago, I felt angry, really angry. Let me tell you how I imagine it. No one knows beforehand whether they’re a sheep or goat, and then God comes and separates people, separates families, separates friends. How can we bear the finality of it, people we know and love going to eternal punishment, or ourselves going to eternal punishment separated forever from those we know and love. What sort of God is this? 

 I don’t know about you, but if you’re like me, it’s easy not to want to face negative emotional reactions, particularly easy not to want to think about the Last Judgment. Having a beer and watching Downton Abbey are my favourite avoidance strategies at the moment.  However, I think that these reactions to scripture are important they can be the beginnings of a trail which points the way to Christ, not Christ in the abstract, but Christ in our lives, Christ in us.  

 For some reason, in this instance, instead of running from my reaction as I might normally do, I stayed with my anger and decided to pray about it. Suddenly, I stumbled on source of it: I really, really don’t want there to be any goats. I don’t want anyone to go to eternal punishment.  

 As I’ve thought about it, this is my experience of Farm Street too. It is a parish which doesn’t want there to be any goats. It is a parish which reaches out to include rather than to exclude. During my time here, I spoke to both Timothy Schmalz the sculptor of the Homeless Jesus statue, and he said that, as Christians, we should create bridges not walls. This is what the parish is doing too, not only in reaching out to and feeding the homeless for example, but also in enabling all those who volunteer, and the hotels and restaurants which provide the food, to work out our salvation by meeting Christ in the poor. 

 This is all very well. We might not want there to be any goats at the end of time, but what does God want? We find the response in how he acts. As astonishing as it seems, he sends Christ, his only son, to help us and to bridge the gap between him and us. To go back to my prayer, I realised that Christ does not want any goats either and that my wanting that, our wanting that, is a smaller part of Christ’s wanting that. I realised too that what He would like us to do, if we’re willing, is to collaborate with him. So, when we do all that we do as a parish from feeding the homeless to attending Mass, we do it for Christ, to help him to save us and everyone else too, so that at the end of time we are all sorted with the sheep. 

Mr Sam Dixon nSJ