Matthew records this judgment scene as the climax of Jesus' Olivet Discourse, the last extended teaching before the crucifixion. The audience is disciples who will soon scatter into a hostile empire. Jesus is telling them, on the eve of his death, that the test of their gospel is not their theology — it is what they did with the people the world walked past.

From the writers we read together

Mother Teresa

founder of the Missionaries of Charity, served the dying in Calcutta

Mother Teresa took Matthew 25 with a literalism that embarrassed her contemporaries. She did not theorize about the poor; she touched them. Each sick person she lifted, she said, was Jesus in his most distressing disguise. She lived the verse the way most of us study it.

The terrifying tenderness of this passage is that you do not have to find Jesus by looking for the unusual. He has already told you where he is. He is in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the prisoner. You will not have to travel far today to meet him. The question is whether you will recognize him when you do.