What does it mean to love and serve Christ? In today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, we receive an insight into this question. It is an insight that is simultaneously part of the longstanding core of our faith and a new calling that freshly impacts our lives every day. Often referred to as the parable of the sheep and the goats, this scene depicts the hour of judgement when the righteous and wicked stand before Christ. The righteous gain admittance to heaven and are reminded of their service to Christ through corporal acts of mercy, such as providing food, shelter, clothing and accompaniment when Christ was in need. The wicked are cast out for hardheartedly refusing to be of service. Perplexed, they all ask: where did they encounter Christ in such dire need? When did they have an opportunity to minister to Christ in such a direct way? The Lord replies, “whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Reading these words, I am struck by how surprising this statement must have been to the disciples when they heard it from Jesus and how surprising it still is today. Contemporary society, as in Roman Palestine, is misguidedly oriented towards the whims of wealth and power, callously ignoring the poor and marginalized. Indeed, something revolutionary occurs when we hear these words. On one level, Jesus inverts our view of the social world and places the poor and downtrodden in the center of our vision, dethroning the wealth and power that society teaches us to idolize. Secondly, Jesus accomplishes this through the awe-inspiring disclosure of the union of the “least” with the Greatest. With this stark, paradoxical juxtaposition, Jesus jolts our spirits out of their stupor. Christ makes us confront, in a visceral, stunning way, the great truths that the last shall be first and that we fulfill our calling as disciples through service to those who are left behind.

Just as the righteous and wicked souls of the parable gained a surprising new understanding of how to be in relationship with Christ with this revelation, may we be stirred into action by the knowledge that our service to and embrace of the marginalized are one and the same as our service to and embrace of Christ. Recalling that the message of today’s Gospel is at the heart of the social mission of the Church, let us go forth this Lenten season to accompany and support the poor and afflicted in our communities, while also recommitting to advancing the common good across the world through transformative advocacy and reform. May we always live in full awareness of Christ’s living, corporal presence through those that society has turned its back on and minister to them in joyful, untiring accordance with this truth. Let us ask God to help us always remember the needs of those who are living under poverty, mistreatment and oppression, and to help us build a society in which all people and all of the creation have justice.