Now, as Catholics, we must note that the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats is not the only thing Jesus has to say about salvation. So we mustn’t pretend the parable is fatal to the sacramental vision. He who gives us the parable also tells us, “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5), and, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). But then the Feeneyite must also remember that this is the same Jesus who tells the unbaptized and Eucharist deprived good thief, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Clearly, we are dealing with a Savior who doesn’t fit into our little systems of order. How do we put it all together?
The key is the simple recollection of St. John of the Cross: “At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.”
The point of the parable of the sheep and the goats is not “You don’t need faith in Jesus in order to be saved.” Nor is it “Everybody cut off from the sacraments is most assuredly doomed.” The point is that, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’words:
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
We are bound by the sacraments, but God is not bound. Jesus does not sit on his hands refusing to work in our lives till we ask him to be our personal Savior any more than he is helpless to act unless we are baptized. Our very ability to seek him is already fruit of his grace. God works through sacraments, most assuredly. But sacraments are given as sure encounters with grace, not as reducing valves designed to make sure the unbaptized are excluded from God.
Christ also comes to us through innumerable creatures, since all of creation is sacramental. And one of the sacramentals bringing us Christ is our neighbor—especially the least of our neighbors. For the stunning truth is that Christ is present in all those you meet. How you treat them is how you treat him. And how you treat them is not merely “spiritual” (that is, with attention to their souls but none to their stomachs, wardrobe, or housing situation). A plumber who uses his skill to fix a single mom’s sink at no charge is doing as much a work of Christ (and for Christ) as the priest who hears her confession or gives her the Eucharist. So if you cooperate with grace, you are Christ’s feet and hands in the world and a gift of grace to your neighbor. Likewise, your neighbor—especially your poor neighbor—is God’s gift to you, a sacramental through whom Christ works in your soul.
That’s why the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats does not remotely contradict the Catholic sacramental vision. Saying that God comes to us in the person of a beggar is not saying God does not come to us in the Sacrament of the Altar.
It is, however, an emphatic denial that God saves by faith alone. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver summed up the Church’s attitude toward this notion quite bluntly when he stated, “If we ignore the poor, we will go to hell.” Faith alone won’t cut it if you send a starving waif back out in the snow saying, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled” (James 2:16).
That’s breathtaking—like a punch in the gut. But that’s what the parable of the sheep and the goats means. The shocked sheep, like the shocked goats, may or may not have had all sorts of theological theories about salvation by faith alone or “once saved, always saved” or the efficacy of the sacraments. What they found, however, was that the King said, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
That is a tonic reminder for Catholics about the Church’s ancient tradition of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. It is also a vital lesson for those who hold false theories of “once saved, always saved.” The corporal works of mercy pertain to the deeds mentioned in the parable of the sheep and the goats as well as to a couple of other precepts of Jewish and Christian civility and goodness done in the love of God. They are
The spiritual works of mercy, while not mentioned in the parable, nonetheless reflect biblical teaching about the love of God for our wretched race. They are the mother of all the hospitals, schools, and other acts of sheer kindness the Church has birthed over the centuries. They are
The spiritual works of mercy are ordered toward the fact that merely relieving physical need, while itself a very good thing, is not enough, because we are human beings. One of the basic mistakes of communism (and capitalism in our increasingly de-Christianized culture) is to regard people as creatures motivated solely by the same instincts that motivate an animal. The idea is that both cows and people need to eat, breathe, work, excrete, and have sex, so a civilization that makes these activities the highest goals is a civilization that has all the bases covered. It is a huge mistake remedied by a simple observation: namely, that animals, in the absence of biological opportunity, go to sleep, whereas humans get bored and restless. Why? Because our spirits cry out for more than eating, breathing, working, excreting, and having sex. We are not mere beasts. We are rational creatures in the image of God who long for union with him. The spiritual works of mercy are founded on the knowledge that man does not live “by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). In this book we will therefore take a look at the corporal and spiritual works of mercy in order to see how to incarnate our faith in works of love for God and neighbor, so that we may, as 2 Peter 1:10 says, make our calling and election sure and, in union with our Lord Jesus, help renew the face of the earth.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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