Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt: Commentary on the Parable of the Last Judgment
In the text of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31-46), the emphasis suddenly falls on the human being. Throughout the New Testament (and in the Old Testament as well), the priority is to love God: the commandment tells us to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love for others, even though it is deemed no less important, is included in the second commandment, somehow subordinated to the first, as a sort of consequence of the first (Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27). This is how it appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke (‘“Love your neighbor as yourself “ appears in the Old Testament - Leviticus 19:18 - in passing too). In the parable of the Last Judgment, however, the love for one’s neighbor is not only the first but the only commandment mentioned.
Everything here is about human relationships; the text only talks about deeds that help fellow human beings. Love for God is not mentioned anymore, and neither is faith, which transformed itself - according to the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John in his First Universal Letter, chapter two (1 John 2:9-11) and also to the Holy Apostle James in chapter two of his letter (James 2:17) - into works and love for others. The one judged will not be asked of this; he will only be asked if he offered food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcomed strangers, gave clothing to the naked, and visited the sick and those in prison. Everything is therefore focused on good deeds done to those burdened and besieged by troubles, cares, and sorrows.
The Gospels continue the idea that the Holy Evangelist Matthew exposed in detail in Chapter 25:31-46. They tell us that [the Son of Man] will reward each person according to what they have done (Matthew 16:27) and Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? (Luke 6:46). Also, when the Lord refers to the ten commandments in His conversation with the man who wanted to know what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, He mentions only the five commandments that refer to human relationships: You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’ (Mark 10:18). As we can see, the Judgment is performed in the same spirit, based on criteria that are mundane, practical, and pragmatic. When explaining why He was given the authority to judge by the Father, the Lord Himself motivated it by saying, because He is the Son of Man (John 5:27).
What does this motivation mean? It means that Christ has the authority to be a Judge because He was also a man, and so He knows all too well human nature, the world, the way things are in the world, the true relations between beings, their needs and cares, and their pain. Christ is a Judge because He knows how things work from the inside, experientially, as One Who also knew temptation, weariness, hunger, and pain. As One Who stood face to face with pride, envy, hate, malice, treason; as One Who was sold, mocked, slapped, spit upon, and killed in torments; as One Who had a crown of thorns placed on His head, and a purple robe placed mockingly on His shoulders.
As One Who will judge knowingly, not from accounts and statements spread from mouth to ear, One in front of Whom you cannot twist the truth or hide it under beautiful words and cunning talk.
As One Who is also a human being, Who will assess not according to criteria and considerations that are theoretical, abstract, or “divine,” but according to criteria and considerations that are very simple, very human, mundane, trivial, vulgar (we should not be afraid of this word; we should not forget that the language of the Gospels is not fanciful or conceited, that it is not afraid of calling a spade a spade) - the criteria of “the man in the street,” the man who is weary, tired, drowning in sorrows; the criteria of regular human beings who find themselves in the turmoil of the most un-angelic, un-spiritualized life; the criteria of the most elementary common sense. And what are these criteria? Those of helping others (of giving the poor what they need first and foremost: food, shelter, clothing, visits to hospitals and prisons), of being a good neighbor to others, of showing solidarity with those who were not pampered by fate.
There is absolutely nothing “refined” in the way the Great Judgment of the wretched is described (and we are all wretched, all of us who are born under the seal of the ancestral sin) - nothing elegant, “superior,” intellectual, mystical, transcendental, apologetical, “idealistic,” mysterious, hesychastic, “sublime,” or extrasensory or parapsychological. Everything Christ talks about in Matthew 25:31-46 refers to griefs and sorrows specific to the life of ordinary people, people who are sick, hungry, poor, in prison (justly or unjustly), lacking the commodities of life, stricken by the calamities of the simple people: illness, poverty, hunger, bureaucracy, loneliness, insults. The text doesn’t transport us to some imperial court, platonic academy, or sacred realm, but to side streets, lanes, and pathways where people struggle and fight with the exhausting troubles that are representative of a world that Romantic poets called “sublunary.”
[The Final Judgment, Voronet Monastery, Romania; Image attribution: Ghișa Ștefania-Maria, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
Christ will judge as a mortal man would do who could hardly have the wool pulled over his eyes, or as a housewife with much work and little time for idle talk, or as a person well accustomed to a hard life and wearied by it, foreign to any theological, philosophical, metaphysical, ascetical speculation. There is nothing subtle in St. Matthew’s text on the Great Judgement. It talks only about those elementary, coarse, raw deeds that would draw attention and trigger an appreciative reaction from people overwhelmed by the cares and burdens of their day-to-day life; a life that is most distant from aestheticism, spiritual anxiety, mental doubts - from all those entirely different preoccupations of people who don’t know what it is to worry about tomorrow and your daily bread.
Most of all, this is what is surprising, strange, and terrible about the way the Son of Man will proceed when He sits on His throne of glory as on a judgment seat: this sudden return to simplicity, to everything elementary, this exclusivity toward good deeds, mercy and almsgiving, love for the neighbor expressed in terms of helping and supporting human beings made from the same lump of clay, who are temporary hosts of the same spirit.
The criteria of the text are, in brief, strictly “material,” trivial, easily understood, at the level of “the small ones,” of “the humiliated and insulted” (as Dostoevsky liked to call them) who live in squalid outskirts of cities or in impoverished villages, and who can fully enjoy the taste of a good deed. Because the other ones, the “superb” ones (as the French writer Jules Romain calls them), don’t know anything about hunger, nakedness, hospitals, prisons, poverty, or lack of shelter; they don’t know what it is to need help. They, the superb ones, deal mainly with the anxieties of the spirit and the mind, chasing ideas manipulated by the intellect - noble, of course, and necessary for civilization and culture, but sheltered and disconnected from the satisfaction of primary needs and thus from simple unselfish deeds.
And so we see that Christ will not be preoccupied with such subtleties (or even beautiful yearnings for perfection) but with much “coarser” things: He will not reward those who meditated, philosophized, studied the Scriptures or the angelic orders, but those who (in a human, existential, childish, unsophisticated way - as the coal miner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Mary Poppins, or the good-hearted simple characters in folktales and fairy tales) helped their fellow human beings who were in need; they helped them without airs and without the wavering, delaying, and hair-splitting that belongs to the “learned” ones who lack contact with the harsh and merciless realities of life and who are lost in the imaginary world of cerebral constructions.
The Final Judgment, in the Christian view, is altogether mysterious and different from the comfortable conceptions of Judaism. The pious Jew knew that he would be saved if he obeyed the commandments of the Decalogue and the six hundred and thirteen commandments of the law. Not so the Christian, who will face a dreadful judgment because he will not know how the Judge will rule. We know that birth from water and Spirit, faith, good deeds, not renouncing and not being ashamed of Christ, virtues, and all that are similar to these will be held into account, but nobody has absolute certainty. But the Parable of the Final Judgment gives us a precise guide and places us on the solid ground of great and unexpected humility (and even naivety for many of us).
There is a safe, correct path that leads us to a happy solution for the final judgment: the modest path, devoid of airs and extravagance, the path trodden by our ancestors, the path that our conscience has always known to be the right one - the path of doing good and helping those who are so significantly called in our religious texts “all who sorrow.” From what the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew tells us, we understand that Christ’s first interest will be this: how we behaved in the world with our brethren, our neighbors, our friends and our enemies; how we behaved in the relational world.
As at the Crucifixion, there will be at the Judgment a terrible and wonderful kenosis [self-emptying]: the Lord transposes and identifies Himself with His most forsaken, persecuted creatures. He recognizes Himself in the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned…He, the Divinity, would probably not mention hunger, thirst, or nakedness if He didn't become incarnate. The hospital and the prison testify, however, to the reality and the fullness of the incarnation, to the intimate knowledge of the human condition - and I, for one, consider the visitation of the sick and of the imprisoned to be the contribution of Him Who experienced in Himself the bitterness of loneliness and the sweetness of compassion.
Strangely, the human being (finite and infinite, as Heidegger persistently defines him) appears (precisely at the Great Judgment, where we would expect him to be especially considered “infinite”) as a created and vulnerable being, as a particle of a concrete community, with rudimentary needs - and not of a noosphere of the type mentioned by Teilhard de Chardin. But why should we be surprised: as usual, Christ talks and acts differently from what we expect, and even contrary to our expectations. It is a definite proof of authenticity. He indeed became flesh, and it is true that we will be judged in the presence of angels - however, we will be judged by the Son of Man.
From “Dăruind vei dobândi - Cuvinte de credinţă” [“By giving, you will receive - Words of faith”], Nicolae Steinhardt, Polirom Press, Romania, 2008