So, Jesus speaks to us today in His Gospel and says,
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, Who has blessed St. Luke in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the
heavenly places, even as He chose
us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and
blameless before Him. In love He
predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according
to the purpose of His will" (Eph. 1:3-5)
That purpose we hear of today in Jesus declaring the
separation of the sheep from the goats. In our sin, we don’t really want to
know who the sheep are, because we think we are they, but also because we are
only truly interested in who the goats are. That way we can feel better that
there are others worse off than ourselves.
Goat is usually the part of language no one wants to be a
part of. When something gets your goat, it is bad. When someone is a scapegoat,
same thing. It is a negative meaning. This is a fairly new phenomenon, I think,
for we don’t even hear of the word “scapegoat” until a bible translator coins
it in 1530.
Its important to notice that goats have gotten a bad rap.
All your favorite Hollywood demons have goat
features, but in the Bible it is only this one instance where goats appear to
be the bad guys and the reason for our poor view of them as well.
However, for most of the Old Testament, goats are placed on
the same level as sheep. They are a legal substitute for sacrifice. The Paschal
lamb taken and eaten for the Passover may be from the sheep or the goats. And not just at Passover, either, but throughout the year. If a
sacrifice is needed, a goat works just as well as a lamb.
It was also goat skin that covered Jacob in front of Isaac,
his father, in order to trick him into giving Esau’s blessing to him. It was
also the blood of a goat that covered Joseph’s coat in order to trick Jacob.
The only difference, of course, comes when Moses starts
talking about a scapegoat. What that word really means is, the goat that
leaves. You see, on the Day of Atonement, there were two sacrifices to be made,
two goats. One was picked to offer to the Lord and the other was picked to be
led into the wilderness, never to return. Both are equally doomed.
One was picked to die, that one was for the Lord, and the
other for exile. At least it got to live, maybe.
The point is: the only way to tell whether the goat was for
sacrifice or for sin was for someone to declare which was which, just as Jesus
does today. Before Jesus speaks, there is no difference between the sheep and
the goats. Before Jesus separates them, they are all growing up and working the
same way, just like the wheat and the tares.
And lest you tear up the wheat or scandalize the sheep, the
weeds and the goats must remain. In fact, in the Song of Solomon, one of the
ways the Bride finds her Bridegroom is because she feeds her goats.
This means that you do not know who is a sheep and who is a
goat until Jesus says so. And that’s ok, because what you do know is Who it is
that is the sacrifice for sin, both the lamb and the scapegoat: Jesus Christ.
All sacrifices commanded by God in the Old Testament point
to Jesus, no matter what they may be. Jesus is, of course, the Lamb of God that
takes away the sin of the world, but He is also the scapegoat, the goat that
leaves with the sin of the world. He suffers and dies, leaving this plane of
existence, descending into hell and resting in the earth for 3 days.
He is exiled, forsaken by the Father for your sake. This
tale of the sheep and the goats is not about us, it is about the Christ Who is
Himself the sacrifice and priest; both the blessed and the accursed; the One
who leaves and the One Who stays.
Only in Jesus do we have any blessing from the Father. Only
in Jesus are we chosen to be holy and blameless before the Father. Only in
Jesus are we predestined to be the blessed inheritors of the eternal kingdom
given by the King of kings, Himself.
Thus we seek the scapegoat covering that Jacob used. We
search earnestly for the goat’s blood to cover our sinful ways, as Joseph’s
brothers did. We endure both the good and the bad handed out by God, not
because we are strong enough, but because Jesus endures both to the end for us.
The end being His suffering and death on the cross.
So where is the distinction and what does this mean for us? There
are those who say that you do not become a car just because you sit in a
garage, making the negative comment that you are not a Christian just because
you are in a church. What this kind of argument is called is a false dichotomy:
making a comparison of two things that have nothing to do with each other, but
sounds good to the ears.
The problem is that you don’t usually find people in a
garage, or rather, you don’t usually store people in a garage. You store cars
in a garage. You expect to find cars there, not people. You build garages for
the express purpose of housing cars.
Likewise, you put sheep in a sheep-pen. If you want a place
for goats, you put them in a goat-pen. What you do with Christians is you put
them in a Christian-pen, otherwise known as a Church.
It is true that no matter how long a person stays in a
garage, that will never make them a car, but the garage is not preaching the
good news of cars or handing out the holy things of cars, either.
A person does, however, have a 100% chance of becoming a Christian
in a Church. Why? Because God dwells there, He stores His holy things there,
and His transformative word of the Cross is preached there. Garages don’t
preach. God does.
So the sheep and the goats should go to Church, because it
is only there that the goats have any chance of being made into sheep. Living
as often as we can among the holy things of God, makes us holy. This is why
Jesus calls them holy baptism, holy communion, and the holy Gospel.
We do not get to say who are the sheep and who are the
goats. We do get to say, “I am a sheep” because of Who and what we commune
with. We are covered with the blood of the Lamb and the skin of the Scapegoat
in order that our sin and guilt be taken away.
Now to be sure, the goats do not get a happy ending in this
parable told by Jesus, but we do not cling to the labels “sheep and goats” and
we laugh at anyone who asks us whether we are one or the other, because we
know, in our sin, we are the goat. In Christ we are the sheep.
The Lord reveals to us the true label where we are
“blessed by the Father”, that is the cross and the title, “baptized”, and the
occupation, “those who commune”.
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