Christ the King & Matthew 25

Lyn Pajk
Nov 30, 2017
2 min read

On Christ the King Sunday, November 26, our Gospel reading was from Matthew. In that reading we heard how Jesus will separate the sheep from the goats at the end. It will be based on how we cared for those the world sees as unimportant. Remember how your middle schooler came home from the first two weeks of YM with “Y.D.F.M.” on their fingers and toes. That’s Matthew 25!!!

The following is from the Diocesan Leadership Day in November of 1994. It was shared by M.J. Calnan, but I don’t know who the author is. However, I’m sharing it with you today in Thanksgiving to all of you parents who live out the call of Matthew 25 every day…

“I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink, naked and you clothed me, homeless and you sheltered me, imprisoned and you visited me…”

“When Lord? When were you hungry and I fed you?”

“How could you ask that, you of the three million peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the one hundred ways to fix hamburger that could have been steak if you hadn’t been feeding me? How could you ask?”

“And you were thirsty?”

“I was in the Kool Aid line that came in with the summer heat and flies, left mud on your floors and fingerprints on your walls and you gave me a drink.”

“But naked, Lord, homeless?”

“I was born to you naked and homeless. You sheltered me, first in your womb, then in your arms and clothed me with your love and spent the next 20 years struggling to pay the mortgage and the fuel bills and keep me in jeans.”

“Lord, I never knew I visited you in prison. I’ve never been in a prison.”

“Oh yes, for I was imprisoned in my littleness, behind the bars of my crib, and I cried out in the night and you came. I was imprisoned inside a 12 year old body that was exploding with so many emotions that I no longer knew who I was and you loved me into being myself. I was imprisoned behind my teenage rebellion, my anger, my cell phone and my music and you came and sat by the wall of my hostility, took the abuse I heaped upon you and waited in love for me to open the door.”

“Now enter into the kingdom my Father has prepared for you since the foundation of the world.”