Jesus shocked his followers one day with the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in which Jesus likened the love and care we show to people in need – the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the people lacking clothes, the sick, and the prisoner – to showing love and care for him. Jesus said, “[W]hatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)(NIV)
Until recently, I had glossed over the qualifier to this statement: Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. When someone pointed out to me that the statement is qualified, it nagged at me.
What did Jesus mean when he said “these brothers and sisters of mine”? Did he mean only his biological family? Did he mean his followers? Or did he mean something else?
In another passage while Jesus was talking to a crowd, someone told him his mother and brothers were outside wanting to speak with him. He responded by pointing to his disciples, saying, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:49-50)
Does this mean that we only apply the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats to followers of Christ who are hungry, thirsty, in need of clothing, strangers, sick, and imprisoned? Does it mean that we have no divine obligation to love and care for other people (even in our own family)?
Along the same line, I previously noticed that Jesus qualified his prediction that the world would know his followers by their love. He said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35) That qualifier has nagged me for sometime, and for the same reasons as the qualifier in Matthew 25 was now nagging me. I knew I needed to dig into this and develop a better understanding of what Jesus is saying in these passages.
After meditating on these things and considering other Bible passages, I worked out my analysis in Who Are Christians to Love? Matthew 25 and John 13. I determined that we need to understand the bigger picture, and we need to understand context.
Many passages exist throughout Scripture from the Old Testament through the New Testament that convey God’s intention that we love all people. The Bible is rich with passages clearly and emphatically stating that we should love all people, just as God loves all people.
The second greatest commandment – to love your neighbor as you love yourself – is not qualified. The Parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear that our neighbors include people regardless of their ethnic, national, and religious identity – even people we are strongly tempted to despise.
Jesus eliminated all guesswork when he told us that loving our neighbors extends even to our enemies. The example Jesus gives is that God causes sun to shine on the good and the evil and rain to fall for the benefit of the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:44-45) God doesn’t withhold good things like sun and rain from the evil and the unrighteous, and neither should we. We are to be like Him in showing basic love and care for all people.
Jesus added that even pagans love those who love them. We would be no different than a pagan if all we did was to love those who love us back. (Matthew 5:43-48) Rather, we are to “be perfect as God is perfect” and love all people like God loves people, the good and the evil, the righteous and the unrighteous.
When Jesus healed the sick, drove out demons, gave sight to the blind, and showed compassion to people, he did not distinguish between Jews and Gentiles or believers and unbelievers. Of the ten lepers that he healed, only one of them came back to thank him and give glory to God (Luke 17:11-19), but He healed them all anyway.
When Jesus announced his ministry in his hometown synagogue he recalled two stories that triggered the people to want to kill him. These stories demonstrate how God loves not just the Jews (and how the Jews had a hard time accepting that reality). These are the words that provoked his hometown people to want to kill him:
“I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
Luke 4:25-27
The Sidonians were Phoenicians, descendants of the Canaanites who constantly battled the Jews, and Sidon was the hometown of Jezebel, the foreign queen who led King Ahab and the nation of Israel astray. Naaman was a Syrian General who had attacked the Israelites. He was a foreigner, an outsider, from Samaria, which was despised by the Jews Jesus spoke to. Jesus was conveying to his people that he came not just for them; he came even for their enemies.
Just as the people in that synagogue, we struggle to love people we despise. We struggle to love people who have wronged us and don’t believe as we do. We struggle to love people who do not believe as we do. Frankly, we difficult actually loving people in the family of God, too.
The difficulty we have in loving people, even fellow believers, does not excuse us from taking the commandments Jesus gave us to heart. The greatest commandment – to love God – is ultimately inextricably intertwined with the second greatest commandment – to love our neighbors as ourselves. John makes this clear:
“For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.”
1 John 4:20-21
There is that qualifier again – brother and sister. But, we know from other passages of Scripture that the divine obligation to love extends beyond our spiritual family to our neighbors and to our enemies also. Why, then, do those pesky qualifiers keep appearing? I have some thoughts that I will share.
One of them I have already shared: we have a hard time loving each other. How could we possibly love people who don’t believe like we do, people who oppose our beliefs, and people who hate us if we can’t even love those who believe as we do? We have to start in the family of God to learn to love.
We only love because God first loved us. The grace God extended to us allows us to extend grace to others. The forgiveness we receive from God inspires us to forgive others, and the mercy God has shown us, we can learn to show to other people.
We learn to love, first, among our brothers and sisters who know the same love, forgiveness, grace, and mercy that we know. Because we – Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female – are all considered one in Christ, we learn to love others who are not like ourselves in the family of God. Only then are we able to begin to love our neighbors and even our enemies outside the family of God.
Just as judgment begins in the house of God, love begins in the house of God. The Church is our proving ground, and we aren’t going to pull off loving our neighbors and even our enemies if we cannot love each other. Loving each other is absolutely paramount!
That is, perhaps, why Jesus emphasizes loving each other as a priority. Paul echoes this priority when he says, “[D]o good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” (Galatians 6:10) Loving each other is the first priority, but we should not stop there, as Paul points out.
Context is also a key to understanding why Jesus qualifies “the least of these” with “brothers of mine” in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. We have to go back to Matthew 24 to find the context for the parable in Matthew 25.
In the beginning of Matthew 24, Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to engage in discussion. What follows is a discussion that spans Matthew 24 to Matthew 26:2. This discussion is the precursor to the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.
In Matthew 24, Jesus speaks about the destruction of the Temple, deceivers coming, persecution, and times of great darkness. (Matt. 24:2-35) He warns them that they need to keep watch and be faithful, because no one knows the day or the hour of the end that is to come. (Matt. 24:36-51)
In Matthew 25, Jesus starts with the Parable of the Ten Virgins about being ready for when the master returns (Matt. 25:1-13) and the Parable of the Bags of Gold (talents) about being faithful. (Matt. 25:14-30) He is telling his followers to be ready and to remain faithful despite the uncertainty and great darkness to come during which the Temple will be destroyed, life will be exceedingly difficult, and his followers will be persecuted.
In that context, Jesus tells the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. His followers will clearly need each other and will need to depend on each other, and this parable describes how that love for each other will be rewarded when the Son of Man comes in glory. The parable is an encouragement to them of the rewards to them for their vigilance and faithfulness.
The parable also reveals that anyone who treats them well is essentially treating Jesus well, and anyone who does not care for them is failing to care for Jesus. God is just: as people treat them, they will be considered to have treated God; the people who treat them well will be rewarded, and the people who do not treat them well will pay for their failure.
The idea is similar to the instruction Jesus gave to the 72 disciples he sent out to announce the coming of the Kingdom of God: “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me.” (Luke 10:16)
As Paul says, God “reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation … not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:18-22)
This idea – that we are ambassadors of Christ (representatives of God in the flesh, carrying His message of good news to the world) – is what compels us to love not only each other, but to love the people in the world. “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all….” (2 Cor. 5:14)
Our love cannot be limited to the body of Christ because God has commissioned us to go out into all the world as His ambassadors to share the good news of salvation, the coming of God’s kingdom, and to make disciples. God sends us out in the same vein as He came into the world: because He so loved the world….
Just as Elijah provided for the Sidonian woman and Elisha healed the Syrian general of leprosy, Jesus went throughout Galilee and Judah healing, driving out demons, giving sight to the blind and sharing the good news with Jews, Samaritans, and Romans without distinction. This is our model to follow.
First to the Jews and then to the world is the pattern. First love your brothers and sisters, and then love your neighbors, and then love even your enemies is the same pattern.
The promise that the world will know us by our love for one another in John 13:35 was spoken in the same context as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats: in the days or hours leading up to the arrest of Jesus. In John, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet before they partook of the Passover meal. Jesus predicted his betrayal and Simon Peter’s denial of him as he was trying to explain what was going to happen to him. In that context, Jesus said,
“My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.
John 13:33-35
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
He was telling them to stick close together. Sticking close together, taking care of, and loving each other was to be the sign to the world that they were his followers. These instructions were crucial to get them through the dark hour that was to come and the great uncertainty and difficulty to follow as Jesus lay in the tomb, awaiting resurrection.
In John 14, Jesus continues comforting the twelve (minus Judas), telling them not to be troubled because he is going to prepare a place for them, affirming that he is the way, the truth, and life. Then, he promises them the Holy Spirit.
In John 15, Jesus continues to urge them to hang together with the vine and branches illustration. Jesus warns that the world will hate them as the world hated him, but he tells them to expect the Holy Spirit who will guide and empower them for the mission he was leaving them to do – to be his ambassadors, to spread the good news, to testify about him, to introduce people to the kingdom of God, and to make disciples.
His instruction continues in John 16 with encouragement not to fall away, to remain true, and to have faith that their grief and difficulty in the world will turn into joy. Jesus prayed for the Father to be glorified, prayed for his disciples, and prayed for all believers to come. (John 17) Then he was arrested.
In this context, the necessity of loving each other was the priority. They were going to need each other, and remaining true to Jesus and to each other was vital to the accomplishment of God’s purposes at that critical period involving his death on the cross, resurrection, and establishment of the body of Christ which would carry on the work of the message of reconciliation that Jesus began.
None of this prioritization of believers loving our brothers and sisters in the family of believers negates or replaces the overarching command to love neighbors and even enemies. If we can’t love each other, how are we to love our neighbors? And, how are we to love our enemies?
Love begins with God loving us, continues with us loving each other, and these things enable us to extend that love out to our neighbors, to our enemies, and to the world. It is the foundation for going into the world and making disciples, which necessarily starts with us loving each other.
But I want to suggest another take on the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. I have one more thought that may be a bit more controversial, perhaps, then what I have laid out so far, which I believe is standard, orthodox Christianity. But, my last thought will have to wait for another article.
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In the meantime, I will leave you with some food for thought. I believe “the sacred commandment” Peter says that will save us from the corruption of the world is loving other people. See The Way of Righteousness and the Holy Command: an Introduction, The Way of Righteousness and the Holy Command: The Way, and The Way of Righteousness and the Holy Command: the Holy Command. Let me know if you agree, and if you do not agree, let me know why.
Navigating by Faith 
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