Visitatio Christi : Matthew 25:33-46 as Apocalyptic-Ethical Impulse

Introduction

Cyril O’Regan has rightly observed that there is not really a Roman Catholic apocalyptic theology. ² One of the reasons for this non-apocalyptic or even anti-apocalyptic tendency is the strong institutional, doctrinal, and juridical character of this tradition. In the twentieth century some Catholic systematic-theological attempts have been undertaken to retrieve the apocalyptic: O’Regan points to Johann Baptist Metz and Hans Urs von Balthasar as two major figures. In Catholic moral theology, however, the apocalyptic has been even less prominent as a theme, in line with its major source, Thomas Aquinas, who explicitly positioned himself against the apocalyptic ideas of Joachim of Fiore. ³ If there would be a point of departure for a Catholic apocalyptic ethics, it would be Matt. 25:33-46. ⁴ This parable, in which the coming Christ identifies himself with ‘the least of these my brothers’ (Matt. 25:40), has functioned time and again as a stimulus for religious commitment for the vulnerable and poor. In an often paradoxical way, this apocalyptic vision has been organized in the form of ‘works of mercy’ and, especially in the modern era, institutionalized into structures of charity.

In this article, I will explore the interpretation history of Matthew 25, focusing mainly upon the Roman Catholic tradition—both its theology and ecclesial practices (the ‘works of mercy’)—and bring to the fore a particular perspective, which I call ‘visitatio Christi’. First, I will reflect on how to deal with the apocalyptic unsettling of the boundaries of community and solidarity. Second, I will address with Paul Ricoeur the tension between system and personal encounter in light of Matthew 25. Third, I will draw attention to attitude as a key to apocalyptic ethics—a point highlighted by Protestant interpreters—and to the implied reversal of roles. Fourth, I will treat the motive of the sacramental presence of Christ in the poor as an apocalyptic catalyst for radical love. To conclude, I will briefly hint at how Pope Francis is employing this very apocalyptic-ethical imagination for a world in crisis.

The Works of Mercy and the Limits of Love

‘I was hungry and you gave me (no) food, I was thirsty and . . .’ (Matt. 25:35/42)

As a final story in a series of eschatological parables, Matt. 25:33-46 describes an apocalyptic judgment in which all the nations are divided into sheep and goats, according to the acts done or omitted for persons in need. The exegetical debates often concentrate upon a double identity problem: who are ‘the nations’ who will be gathered and judged? And who are ‘the least of these my brothers’ with whom Jesus identifies himself? ⁵ For both questions, there are particularist responses, which, for instance, claim that ‘the nations’ is referring to ‘pagans/non-Christians’ who would be called to take care of brothers and sisters of Christ (in particular, Christian missionaries). Another particularist interpretation reduces the question at stake to an internal affair of fraternal care within the Christian community. For a long time, particularist interpretations were common in Christian traditions. More recently, however, universalist interpretations have broadened the scope of this parable to all people: all human beings will be judged according to what they have done to all human beings in need. ⁶

In the reception history of this parable, this text has often provided a strong impulse to do good works in the hope of eternal reward, or at least out of fear of punishment. ⁷ The parable has been translated into a to-do list for disciples of Christ, as sanctioned by eschatological judgment. There were debates about which acts were required. Jesus, however, simply alluded by means of synecdoche to existing summaries of good works, which could be typically found in surrounding cultures. It is significant that the list appears within a parable, a provocative literary symbol which is trying to convey something other than a comprehensive list of practices. The originality of this parable lies in the way in which Jesus identifies himself with the person in dire need—radicalizing a preceding Jewish tradition of situating the Lord among the poor. ⁸

Inspired by Jewish traditional practices, the so-called ‘works of mercy’ developed as a concrete ethical implementation of the parable in the life of the Church. ⁹ At best, the works of mercy did indeed embody a Christ-centred spirituality of solidarity with people in need. James Keenan goes as far as to call them ‘the heart of Catholicism’. ¹⁰ They were developed into two sets of seven works: alongside the ‘corporal works of mercy’ (i.e., to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead) were placed the ‘spiritual works of mercy’ (i.e., to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead). ¹¹

The Catholic philosopher Paul Moyaert has positively appreciated the wisdom of this tradition as it would help to direct the measureless love to which the Gospel is calling us. ¹² According to Moyaert, unchecked love of neighbour could end up in what he calls an ‘apocalyptic universe’, ¹³ in which people lose themselves and have to sacrifice everything they hold dear as this love demands limitless responsibility. Moyaert critically distances himself from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, in which the latter praises an excessive and humanly impossible selfless love of neighbour. ¹⁴ The works of mercy seek to limit and embody neighbour love, thereby respecting the limits of our human condition and making Jesus’ commandment bearable. The works of mercy are a way of bringing measure and order into the realm of love, while at the same time not reducing it to utilitarian practice within a merely immanent frame—as, for instance, the spiritual work of praying for the living and the dead illustrates.

Moyaert’s realism about the limits of human capacities for love contrasts with a more recent Roman Catholic reading, in which Matthew 25 has been interpreted in a universalist way. ¹⁵ The Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et spes, the magna carta of modern Catholic theological ethics, clearly states:

In our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord, ‘As long as you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it for me’ (Matt. 25:40). ¹⁶

Elsewhere the document alludes to the parable from Matthew: ‘since the greater part of the world is still suffering from so much poverty that it is as if Christ Himself were crying out in these poor to beg the charity of his disciples’. ¹⁷ Recent popes have consistently invoked this biblical passage in the same universalist way. ¹⁸ In a Latin American context, Jesus’ parable has been one of the major scriptural arguments for liberation theologians to defend ‘the option for the poor’. ¹⁹ The judgment of all nations urges the faithful to radically side with the excluded and change unjust systems.

For Johann Baptist Metz, the German political theologian who explicitly reclaimed the critical potential of the apocalyptic, the major biblical reference is also Matthew 25. ²⁰ Inspired by Jewish philosophers Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, Metz does not interpret the apocalyptic as foretelling some future event; rather it voices the cry of the victims of history, who were often made and forgotten in the name of progress. For Metz, Matthew 25 functions as an ‘apocalyptic sting’ ²¹ to push us towards overcoming the boundaries of our solidarity to include the disenfranchised. Recently, Justin Ashworth has invoked Matthew 25 in the context of the debate on migration, specifically in order to defend a Christian witness against borders. He does so by answering the question ‘who are our people?’ with an apocalyptic ecclesiology. ²² For Ashworth, ‘the presence and activity of God among the crucified peoples of today’s world’ ²³ calls Christians to become radical witnesses of solidarity with the vulnerable, that is, without regard for state borders or citizenship. ²⁴

The Dialectics between System and Encounter

And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family [literally: ‘these my brothers’], you did it to me’. (Matt. 25:40)

In a lecture for Catholic bishops in Paris, 2009, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben criticized the Church as having lost the Messianic tension in its attempt to embody the Kingdom of God. Agamben quotes Alfred Loisy’s famous dictum that ‘Christ announced the coming of the Kingdom, but what came was the Church’. ²⁵ Reminding the Church of its origins, Agamben does not refer to Matthew, which has been the gospel so much cherished in the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, he has a preference for Paul, whom he interprets as a radical Messianic thinker diametrically opposed to any form of system. Part of Agamben’s strong anti-institutional bias can be understood in terms of his Italian context, where from the nineteenth century onwards the Catholic Church consolidated its worldly power through a large institutional network of care and education services. The works of mercy became organized as ‘apostolic works’, which the Church presented as the realization of the God’s kingdom on earth. ²⁶ Within this triumphalist ecclesiology, Matthew 25 was still a major reference point. However, it was turned into a socio-political program and its apocalyptic dimension was largely ignored. Too often the service to the least was turned into a routine within an abstract system in which the concrete person in need was kept out of sight. Scandals in Catholic charity institutions, which have come to light in recent decades, illustrate how such instances could produce the opposite of the intended heaven on earth.

The answer to institutional derailment, however, is not necessarily to withdraw oneself into small-scale initiatives of direct solidarity. The French Protestant philosopher Paul Ricœur takes Matthew 25 together with the parable of the Good Samaritan as his point of departure for a reflection on the dialectics between the neighbour and the socius. ²⁷ For Ricœur, ‘neighbour’ and ‘socius’ refer to two ways in which we relate to other human beings. The neighbour stands for the direct encounter with a concrete human person, while ‘socius’ indicates the human being as an abstract social category, to which we are linked by institutions and structures. Ricoeur distances himself from what he calls ‘personalist anarchism’, ²⁸ which in the name of neighbour love would exclusively focus upon the personal encounter with persons in need who are near to us, ignoring distant others and the structures of injustice that often keep them out of sight. Especially in complex modern societies, Christians cannot limit themselves to face-to-face charity, which would be naïve or even hypocritical.

On the one hand, the eschatological parable in which Christ identifies himself with an individual person cannot function as an excuse for not working for structural justice. On the contrary, the latter also bears Christological significance. Playing with the theme of the incognito Christ (Matt. 25:37–39.44 ‘When was it that we saw you. . .?’), Ricoeur suggests that we do not know in which relations—neighbour or socius—we will have encountered Christ. The ultimate meaning of our acts and institutions remains hidden: love is not always where it appears to be, but can be present in the abstract service of a social security system, to which we contributed without being aware of what it meant for the least of our brothers and sisters. In other words, the institutional is a necessary dimension for extending the ethics of love to a more universal level. ²⁹

On the other hand, the neighbour dimension, the personal encounter, remains a critical moment in the machinery of technocratic systems. Time and again the mystery of human relations and the dynamic of love risk being overshadowed. Institutions have a tendency to reduce people to numbers, to objectify the human subjects that they are meant to serve, and foster the abuse of the power which can be unleashed by institutional relations:

[M]easured over against the love of neighbour, the socius relation is never intimate enough, nor broad enough. It is never intimate enough, since social mediation will never become the equivalent of an encounter, of immediate presence. It is never large enough, since the group only asserts itself against another group and closes in on itself. ³⁰

Through the encounter with the destitution of concrete persons, Jesus’ apocalyptic voice breaks into the course of history, both calling us to invest in whatever is needed at the institutional level and judging our efforts by continually questioning us. It is often through the concrete presence of one person to another that structures gone astray are interrupted. And this encounter dialectically becomes the impetus for radical institutional innovation—as individual acts will not suffice to respond to the needs of the destitute.

Visitatio Christi: Attitude and Reversal of Roles

‘When was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?’ (Matt. 25:37)

An important clue in Matthew 25 is that both the sheep and the goats are surprised to hear that they either did or failed to do the right thing. Readers of the parable are seemingly in a different position: they receive a warning not to miss Christ when he appears in the figure of the needy. On this basis the parable has been used as a lesson to lead people on the way to heaven, tending towards a form of self-righteousness through works. Protestant interpretations have often objected to this reading by emphasizing that the perplexity of the righteous when they hear about their right actions points at their humility and radical dependence upon Christ for the eschatological vindication they receive—in contrast to the self-asserting attitude of the condemned who question the charges brought against them (Matt. 25:44). ³¹

Even if we are informed by the parable, there might still be a sense in which we are unable to identify Christ or the kind of action required of us. As Ricoeur hinted at above, the meaning of history and our acts remains ultimately hidden to ourselves. And this ignorance is precisely a blessing in that it opens us towards a different attitude. Apocalyptic ethics is not about informing us by a special revelation of which works to do in order to get eternal rewards, but it primarily implies a transformation of attitude. ³² It is not about knowing what to do, but rather about a different way of seeing, which involves different ways of being and doing. Alicia Vargas points to the emphasis upon attentive perception as a precondition for service when those addressed by the king ask: ‘When was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?’ ³³ The surprise of the people in Matthew 25 might instill in us the openness to being surprised as well. ³⁴ Apocalyptic ethics implies an optics of hope, a reshaping of our vision into a receptivity towards the coming of the O/other. ³⁵ Over against the activism which characterizes much of modern mentality and policies, Erik Borgman calls for a ‘contemplative’ turn. ³⁶ In the present, here and now, the apocalyptic awareness is oriented towards the in-breaking of the reign of God. The human act emerges as a response to and a participation in the coming of Christ in our broken world.

In the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia (480–547), the founder of Western contemplative monasticism, we find the following counsel for his community: ‘All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35)’. ³⁷ Matthew 25 inspires a radical form of hospitality. In this context, I would like to offer a counterpoint to the common interpretation of the works of mercy as a form of imitatio Christi. When James Keenan, for example, argues: ‘We respond to the sick, because Christ did’, ³⁸ discipleship is conceived of as following in the footsteps of Jesus, as imitating the master. By contrast, Matthew 25 imagines the ethical life more as a dynamic of what I would call visitatio Christi: ³⁹ Christ is visiting us in unexpected and unnoticed ways, and this visitation elicits acts of love. For example, when we provide hospitality to refugees, the perspective of Matthew 25 does not depict this as our way of representing Christ to the suffering persons in need. Rather, Christ is to be located in the latter: Christ appears in the other.

This is the radical reversal that Matthew 25 brings to our ethical stance. It questions the ways in which we often implicitly locate ourselves vis-à-vis those in need, and also where we locate Christ. In her article on prison ministry, Vargas points out that in their outreach to society’s outcasts, Jesus’ disciples are perhaps not being sent primarily to evangelize or serve the lost, but rather to encounter Jesus through the prisoners, that is, those who embody the suffering Christ, as well as his love, trust, and hope in a dehumanizing context. Vargas aptly formulates the paradox:

Jesus becomes the subject of ministry as he perplexes us, we who might have thought that we would be talking about Jesus to others, and are surely surprised to find him there opening our eyes so that we might ‘see’. So: Who ministers to whom? ⁴⁰

The ministry becomes reciprocal when inmates, for example, help those Christians visiting them to discover their need for liberation from their own prejudice and blindness concerning systemic injustice.

As such, apocalyptic ethics subverts the hierarchical relationship which so often lets contexts of care drift into paternalism and abuse of power. ⁴¹ ‘“The least” are, therefore, not only objects of our compassion, but also subjects embodying the Son of Man in whose presence we live’. ⁴² The dichotomy between being the subject and object of charity is in this way broken down. ⁴³ In a similar way, Matthew 25 has inspired liberation theology to claim that the poor should be considered as the subjects of liberation with their own agency: ‘the poor evangelize’. ⁴⁴

The Sacrament of the Least: Relocating Christ and Participating in Incarnate Love

The shift in attitude and perspective sketched above goes beyond the current sensitivity about asymmetrical power relations, as has been articulated, for example, in feminist care ethics. Matthew 25 provides a theological underpinning which embeds the moral life within a transcendent dynamic.

In his interpretation of Matthew 25, Jürgen Moltmann claims that it grounds ethics in an ecclesiological question: where is the fellowship of Christ to be found? ⁴⁵ Moltmann distinguishes a threefold promise of Christ’s presence: as the exalted one manifest in the word and sacrament of the church; as the crucified one hidden in the least of his brothers and sisters; and as the Christ who will come in glory. Through Christ’s identification with the poor, a latent brotherhood appears, which dislocates our imagination of the body of Christ. Matthew 25 confronts us with ‘the apocalyptic Christ, the poor, hungry, forsaken Judge, [who] has generally remained outside the door of church and society’. ⁴⁶ Moltmann also points to what we called visitatio when he states that what happens in the encounter with the disinherited other is not only that I become—referring to an expression of Luther’s—‘a Christ like Christ’ [the familiar theme of imitatio Christi or alter Christus] to the other when I open myself in love, but also that the other becomes to me ‘a Christ like Christ, a savior and judge’. ⁴⁷ When Christ, the coming judge and saviour, says ‘whoever visits them, visits me’, he gives the downtrodden an eschatological dignity and joins their yearning for justice.

Combining Matthew 25 with a spiritual theology of love, Hans Urs von Balthasar developed the idea of ‘the sacrament of the brother’. ⁴⁸ In his sacramental approach, he highlights how Christ’s hidden presence in the poor and forsaken makes God appear in our world in a very concrete way:

[C]harity is not asked to discover Christ ‘behind’ the brother, ‘representing’ him in a kind of hide and seek game, still less to love Christ ‘in the place of’ the brother, so that here would be an indistinct to and fro between the two subjects. It suffices for him to love the brother together with Christ; then he will love him with a love that ascends towards the Father, seeing, too, through the hidden and disfigured face of the brother the original of all this disfigurement [i.e., the Crucified]—for love. ⁴⁹

In this divine presence in our daily life, even if barely noticeable, the Holy Spirit enables and dynamizes the fraternal love which is humanly impossible. In the encounter with the poor, God enters into our life as the source, motive and end of love—whether one recognizes God or not. This distinguishes the love provoked by Christ from a humanitarian view on love: God is the first to love and move us, and our love is directed towards God. ‘It loves God through the brother, God in himself and God for us in Christ and the Church’. ⁵⁰ The human person, both the poor and the one loving them, is situated in a dynamic of coming from and going to God—created, called, redeemed. This opens neighbour love to a hope in God.

In an approach to Matthew 25 that is also explicitly sacramental, liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez claims that such a strong identification of Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters helps to avoid the risk of instrumentalization of the poor:

The neighbor is not an occasion, an instrument for becoming closer to God. We are dealing with a real love of man for his own sake and not ‘for the love of God’, as the well-intended but ambiguous and ill-used cliché would have it. . . ⁵¹

Love of the least ones is only authentic if it is a truly human love for concrete human persons treated as ends in themselves—embedded in the horizon of the ultimate source, motive, and end of love. At this point Gutiérrez offers a helpful corrective to von Balthasar who has a tendency to present neighbour love as so divine that both the neighbour and the moral agent risk being reduced to channels of God. ⁵² For Gutiérrez participation in the ongoing movement of incarnation implies that our love of neighbour is not only fully divine, but also has to be fully human. Given the fact that human beings cannot be considered in isolation from the society they live in, this emphasis upon the full humanity of Christian love also inevitably requires commitment for structural change beyond the traditional works of charity. ⁵³

The references to Church and sacrament in the authors do not imply the exclusion of those who are not members of the official Christian communities, but rather disrupt closed notions of Church and sacrament and direct them towards any place where the encounter with the least happens. In this light, a contemporary activist like the French farmer Cédric Herrou who practises hospitality to undocumented migrants, going against the logics of the state system which declares them ‘illegal’, might appear as a secular apocalyptic. ⁵⁴ The hardening migration policy increasingly criminalizes citizens helping undocumented persons in dire need. Arrested and brought before the judge, Herrou appealed to the French core value of fraternity, to defend his acts of solidarity beyond borders. In his case which became known under the paradoxical name ‘délit de solidarité’ (solidarity delict), he claimed to belong to a universal brotherhood which had been occulted by the reigning regime which limited the fellowship of humans to those possessing state citizenship. ⁵⁵

Let me conclude this section by pointing at the way in which the theological interpretation of Matthew 25 opens a different track in apocalyptic ethics, one that integrates the Christian belief that the incarnation already happened, and is sacramentally continued at all places where Christ can be encountered, in particular, in the least of our brothers and sisters. This incarnational/sacramental dimension, as inspired by Matthew 25, makes a crucial difference from the political-philosophical retrieval of the apocalyptic Paul, which often offers a variation of Jacques Derrida’s apophatic ‘Messianism without Messiah’ or ‘apocalypse without apocalypse’. ⁵⁶ From a Christian perspective, the Messiah has already come, and the apocalyptic mode of being consists in living in the tension between the already and the not yet of the second coming. Even more, what Moltmann, von Balthasar and Gutiérrez highlight is a third way in which Christ is coming in the here and now. ⁵⁷ They avoid the political-philosophical tendency to resolve the tension between revealing and hiding by giving up the real presence of Christ. The apocalyptic dimension is not only about Christ dislocating, but also Christ relocating each time anew.

Pope Francis, a Catholic Apocalyptic?

By way of conclusion, I would like to recapitulate the preceding points by indicating ways in which the current pope is drawing upon a Matthew 25 apocalyptic imagination to develop his account of a Church and world in crisis. ⁵⁸ Significantly, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church chose a name that refers to the apocalyptic saint Francis of Assisi, whose conversion to a life of identification with the poor Christ (imitatio Christi) had been provoked by an experience of encountering Christ in the lepers (invitatio Christi). ⁵⁹ Pope Francis’s manifold references to Matthew 25 integrate the different steps in our article.

First, Pope Francis invokes Matthew 25 in his recovery of the works of mercy as a concrete form of neighbour love shown to the least of the human family. ⁶⁰ At the same time he highlights the universalist scope of a fraternity beyond borders, as he recently did in his social encyclical Fratelli Tutti applying Matthew 25 in the context of global migration movements. ⁶¹ In line with this first point stands the second: Pope Francis focuses upon encounter as a key for criticizing and transforming systems of oppression, yet he never places the personal level and structural change over against each other. Indeed, he dialectically maintains the tension which we also saw in Ricoeur’s reading of Matthew 25. ⁶² The third aspect of the apocalyptic ethics developed in this article is situated at the level of attitude and perspective. Pope Francis claims that Matthew 25 is provoking us to see differently and to contemplate Christ’s presence in unexpected places. The option for the poor does not spring from our own initiative, but is rooted in the movement of God who became poor in Christ and keeps on visiting us in the least of our brothers and sisters. This implies a radical reversal of roles: Pope Francis calls not only for a conversion towards a ‘Church for the poor’ and ‘a poor Church’, but with Matthew 25 he calls for ‘a Church of the poor’, where the latter are the subjects teaching the community what it means to live in Christ. ⁶³ The poor are the location where the visitatio Christi happens, the dynamic which elicits our response of love and opens the way to an imitatio Christi—our first imitation of Christ, however, being the identification with the least. ⁶⁴

To be clear, in my article I did not intend to reject the imitatio Christi outright, which can be based upon solid scriptural grounds indeed (for instance, John 13); my point is that Matthew 25 brings to the fore a different theme which is situated at a deeper level. The visitatio Christi is an apocalyptic-ethical motive which ignites our moral life and calls us forth. ⁶⁵ This intuition is deepened in a fourth step, the sacramental approach of recognizing Christ in the suffering other and responding to God’s invitation to participate in Christ’s transformative love. This apocalyptic-ethical tone is apparent in a homily at Madison Square Garden, New York City, 25 September 2015, where Pope Francis evoked the hidden presence of Christ as follows:

Knowing that Jesus still walks our streets, that he is part of the lives of his people, that he is involved with us in one vast history of salvation, fills us with hope. A hope which liberates us from the forces pushing us to isolation and lack of concern for the lives of others, for the life of our city.

A hope which frees us from empty ‘connections’, from abstract analyses, or sensationalist routines. A hope which is unafraid of involvement, which acts as a leaven wherever we happen to live and work. A hope which makes us see, even in the midst of smog, the presence of God as he continues to walk the streets of our city.

What is it like, this light travelling through our streets? How do we encounter God, who lives with us amid the smog of our cities? How do we encounter Jesus, alive and at work in the daily life of our multicultural cities? ⁶⁶