for June 25
Thursday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

There’s two kinds of people. . .

How human beings love to divide the world in two: larks or night owls, Starbucks or Dunks, red states or blue. The possible distinctions go on and on and while some dichotomies can be benign and funny or even insightful, there’s often an implicit judgment that one alternative is better or worse, right or wrong, good or evil.

Jesus seems to be making just such a judgment in today’s gospel. He makes a vivid distinction between  the wise who listen to his words and act on them and the fools who listen but don’t act, between those whose houses stand firm and those who build on sand.

But what about the first verses of this passage (Matthew 7:21-22)? The very people Jesus that sends away as evildoers are calling him Lord, driving out demons and doing mighty works in his name. Why aren’t they ‘listening to my words and acting on them?’ What are they missing? How can we tell these groups apart? How can we know who is on the side of righteousness and who is not, not to mention how we ourselves might be judged?

Today’s gospel comes at the end of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. It is a climactic moment in Matthew’s presentation of Jesus’s teaching, and the evangelist uses it to foreshadow the time of judgment. 

But the criteria by which we will be judged is not by comparison to anyone else. The opening sentence of today’s gospel tells us what matters most: to do “the will of my Father in heaven,” words which echo the way Jesus taught his disciples to pray. And it is the Father’s will, Jesus taught, to “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, [who] makes the sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45-46). The consistent message of the Sermon on the Mount, and of Matthew’s gospel as a whole, directs our attention beyond what words we pray, beyond the good works we do, even beyond our internal dispositions and good intentions, to our very identity with God.

If this is the criteria for judgment, it is a standard we are guaranteed to fall short of, repeatedly. Divide the sheep and goats today (as they are in Matthew 25), I for one won’t be counting on my place among the wooly ones. The paradoxical consolation is that we are still in the midst of the storms of life. The rain and winds and floods that buffet us stand in for all that challenges us: from disease and injustice through the personal clouds that hang over our heads. In the end, we can be reassured that it is not up to any of us to separate out who is among what kind of people. God alone will judge the sturdiness of our faith and how close we have made our home to where God dwells.
—BJ Brown

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.