The Least Of These Has A Name

It was a Tuesday and it was his own son who did it, and his son was not trying to do anything.

They were driving back from the co-op and the radio had been on and he had been saying what he says, which is that people in this county have been left behind, which he believes and which is true. He has said it for years. He says it well. He has a way of putting it that makes people at a table nod.

And the boy, who is fifteen and mostly quiet, said: like who?

And he said: well. People round here.

And the boy said: no, like who. Like which people.

Not a challenge. He was just asking the way a fifteen year old asks, because he genuinely wanted a name so he could picture it.

And his father drove about four more miles and could not produce one. Not one person he actually knows who is having a hard time right now. He knows the county. He knows the figures, roughly. He has strong and well-organized opinions about the whole situation.

He could not name a person.

If you have got opinions and no names, come and sit down out here. Nobody is going to tell you to care more.

Every noun in that scene is singular

Here is the sentence everybody quotes from that chapter, and I want to point at its grammar, which is doing something.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

One of the least of these. One. Not the least of these as a body, not the poor as a class, not a situation in a county. One.

And go back through the list in the verses before it and the same thing happens every time. I was hungry, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty. I was a stranger. I was naked. I was sick. I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Singular the whole way through. First person singular, actually, which is stronger still. Not they were hungry. I was hungry.

The whole scene is built to make it impossible to answer in the plural. And the people in the story who get it right cannot even remember doing it, which tells you it was never a policy they had. It was a series of specific afternoons with specific people whose names they knew.

You are being asked for one, and it is already within reach, and one is the entire scale the verse operates on. Matthew 25:40 is where that sits, in a grammar that refuses the plural at every turn, and the same Spirit who kept that wording is the one who moves a good man from a category to a name.

Opinions are not the enemy and neither is he

Now let me be fair to him, because there is a lazy sermon here that I am not going to preach.

His opinions are not fake. He is not a hypocrite. He genuinely does believe this county has been left behind, and he is right, and the people who nod at the table are right to nod, and somebody has to think about the whole picture or nothing ever changes at the scale it needs to change at.

The problem is not that he thinks in categories. It is that thinking in categories is the only thing his compassion has ever been asked to do, and it turns out that is a complete and self-contained activity. You can do it for twenty years. It produces real feeling and real conviction and it never once requires you to learn anybody's name.

And it is comfortable in a way he has not noticed, because a category cannot be at your door at nine at night, and a category never disappoints you, and you can be extremely angry on behalf of a category from a warm truck.

You have a heart that already works, and it was working the whole time you were driving and talking. He promised it, in the psalm about a heart of flesh replacing a heart of stone (Ezekiel 36:26), and His Spirit does not need to install compassion in a man who plainly already has it. He needs an address for it.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before another word, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one.

And notice again what the judgment scene turns out to be about. A meal, a visit, a coat, a stranger let in. All of it can be done by a man eating three full meals today, and none of it asks anything of anybody's body.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have never been one step behind anybody here, and you were not behind because of anything physical. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been distributed by medical criteria.

If today has more weight in it than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.