The Sheep and the Goats: Who Are the Brothers? (20 of 26)

Everything in this scene hangs on one phrase, and Matthew has already defined it earlier in his Gospel.

The least of these my brothers and sisters. Get that phrase wrong and the passage becomes a general statement about charity. Get it right and it becomes something more specific and considerably more uncomfortable.

How Has Matthew Already Defined Brothers?

In chapter 12, and the definition is not vague.

Told that his mother and brothers are outside, Jesus points to his disciples and says that whoever does the will of his Father in heaven is his brother and sister and mother. The context makes clear what doing that will means: hearing and obeying the announcement of the kingdom.

So when the phrase reappears at the climax of the final discourse, it already carries a meaning. Wright’s reading follows it. The scene is judging those who have not followed Jesus, on the basis of how they treated the people he counts as his family.

Does That Excuse Christians From Feeding the Hungry?

No, and Wright says so directly.

That believers should behave that way toward everyone is assumed throughout the New Testament and does not need this passage to establish it. Nothing here revokes it.

What he cautions against is twisting a passage to fit expectations we brought to it. The general duty is real and it is taught in many places. This scene is doing something narrower, and reading our preferred lesson into it costs us the one actually there.

What Jewish Expectation Is Being Refocused?

The judgment of the nations, which was a standing category.

Some Jewish writing envisaged the nations being judged on how they had treated Israel. That framework was familiar and it is the one this scene is working inside.

The alteration is characteristic. Jesus redefines the people of God around himself, so the criterion becomes how the world treated his renewed Israel, and he does the judging.

Both halves of that are drawn from expectations already in place. Judging the nations was regularly assigned to the Messiah, as in Ps 2. And the king or Messiah is repeatedly pictured as a shepherd, most obviously in Ezek 34, which is likely why the sheep and goats imagery appears in a judgment scene at all.

Wright adds a practical note on the image. Sheep and goats in that region can look alike and are often hard to tell apart, one reliable difference being that a sheep’s tail hangs down while a goat’s stands up. A separation that requires an expert eye is doing work in a parable about judgment.

When Does This Judgment Happen?

Wright raises a possibility here that is worth flagging as his position rather than the standard one.

The scene reads as a single future event, and the New Testament does teach a final reckoning; Wright cites Paul on that and does not dispute it.

But he notes that Jesus is already ruling, according to Paul and the rest of the New Testament, and asks whether this judgment may also describe something running through history from the resurrection onward rather than only a moment at the end.

That is a genuine interpretive proposal and it is contested. It is presented here as Wright’s reading because the post follows his treatment, and anyone teaching this should know it is a position rather than the consensus.

What Was This Passage For Originally?

Encouragement to people in danger, which is not how it is usually deployed.

Wright’s closing turn is the most useful thing in his treatment. Read as a warning to comfortable readers it produces guilt about charitable giving. Read in its setting it tells a small, vulnerable group being sent on a dangerous mission that their older brother is already ruling the world and is keeping account of what they suffer.

For Matthew’s first readers that was not an abstraction. And in many places today the brothers and sisters of Jesus are still met with contempt, abuse and worse, which is the situation the passage was written into.

The people being reassured are the least of these. The people being warned are everyone who encountered them and decided they did not matter.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the talents, which immediately precedes this scene in Matthew.

Footnotes2

1. The Matthew 12:50 definition is checkable in a minute and it changes the passage more than any other single observation about it. Whether one finally adopts the narrower reading, a treatment that never mentions the earlier definition has not done the work.
2. That the passage functioned as encouragement rather than as warning for its first readers is worth recovering. A persecuted minority hearing that the one on the throne counts what happens to them as happening to him is receiving comfort, not an audit.

Sources

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 16-28 (SPCK, 2002), on Matt 25:31-46. Supports the identification of the brothers and sisters from Matt 12:50, the reading of the scene as judging those outside rather than instructing those inside, the refocusing of the Jewish expectation of the judgment of the nations, the shepherd and Messiah background, and the proposal that the judgment may be ongoing rather than only final. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 25:31-46, Matt 12:50, Matt 16:27, Matt 24:30, Ps 2:8-12, Ezek 34:23-24, 1 Cor 15:25-28, Rom 2:16, and 2 Cor 5:10.

Where the sourcing stops: the proposal that this judgment describes an ongoing reality rather than only a final event is Wright's and is contested. The identification of the brothers with Jesus's followers rather than with the poor generally is well argued and is also not universally held, and a reader should know both readings exist.