Emily Lyons

Dear Friends,

I have deployed Matthew 25:40, as people often do, as an appeal to remember those most in need.

Like Mark 12:31 and John 13:34, it distills Christ’s teaching to its essence: love one another. That’s easy to get behind.

But what’s this about separating sheep from goats and eternal punishment? That’s a bit harder to digest.

The first thing that came to my mind when revisiting Matthew 25 is the 1999 song “Sheep Go to Heaven” by the band Cake. Here’s the chorus:

Sheep go to heaven
Goats go to hell
Sheep go to heaven
Goats go to hell

When I was young atheist in college, this song resonated with me. Not because it has a deep or original meaning—the thesis is summed up in the lyric “As soon as you’re born you start dying, so you might as well have a good time”—but because of this cheeky dig at Christianity as I understood it then: a religion of an arbitrary, vindictive God who sends people to hell.

In the early aughts, you didn’t have to look hard to find Christians identifying with this version of God. After all, this was the era when the Westboro Baptist Church started grabbing headlines. If that’s what it means to be “Christian,” who wouldn’t rather be a goat?

Of course, focusing just on the part of Matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats yields a superficial understanding of Christ’s teaching. But so does focusing just on Matthew 25:40. How can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory ideas?

Paul’s citing of Job in his letter to the Romans, “Who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?” sheds some helpful light.

In Matthew 25 the righteous and the damned both ask, “Lord, when did I see you in need of help?” The crucial difference is that the righteous gave help unconditionally where it was needed. The damned gave help only where they thought it was deserved—and because they hoped to get something in return.

The message seems to be: if you deal with God’s people like a shepherd separating sheep and goats, then expect God to deal with you in the same way.

Paul’s letter and the appointed psalms for today remind us that we follow God’s will not when we are judging others in his name, but when we recognize him as the source of all help and understanding.

In Christ,

—Emily