USA Budget

Then Shall the King Say…

How does one offer love to a God who is all-powerful and reigns over the universe? Jesus describes a simple, concrete way to act with love for God in the parable of the Judgment.

What a baffling task is the first great commandment of Christendom (Mark 12:28-30)! How does one offer love to a God who is all-powerful and reigns over the universe? Is this why religiosity is so filled with rules, rituals, self-abnegation, and the quest for high emotional states? Do we feel that such actions are tokens proving our love for God?

How to Love God

Jesus describes a simple, concrete way to act with love for God. In the parable of the Judgment, he links love to God with love for others in the story of the King sitting in judgment at the end of time. The King tells those gathered before him that their kind and merciful actions toward other human beings — welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, visiting the isolated and confined, feeding the hungry, bringing water to the thirsty — count as actions done for himself (Matthew 25:35-40).

And as caring for others shows love to God, just as surely a failure to do so demonstrates the lack of love to God (Matthew 25:41-45). Thus, in the God–human equation, human beings enact the first commandment — their love for God — by practicing the second commandment — love for other human beings.

What Would the King Say Today?

In the current broken political climate of today’s United States of America, what would the King say today?

When the Son of Man comes in his glory,…all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.…
Then he will say to those on his left:

“Depart from me,…for
I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat”

You are doing the opposite, taking away my food by cutting funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP (food stamps), which would otherwise feed me nutritious food.

“I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink”

No, you kick over water containers left for me in the desert and harass the humanitarians who put them there. Now you have launched a campaign roaming the country, kidnapping me with masked, armed men and imprisoning me without sufficient water or hygiene. You even arrest the officials who try to inspect the prisons where I am incarcerated.

“I was a stranger and you did not receive me as a guest”

Instead you round me up, detain, and deport me because I am a foreigner within your borders or my skin is not as white as yours — or simply because I said things you didn’t like. Now you have added billions of dollars to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) funding so you can augment your campaign of imprisoning and deporting me.

“[I was] naked and you did not clothe me”

When you arrest me, you turn me over to notorious foreign prisons that take away my clothing, replacing it with demeaning prison garb. At the same time you have reduced funding for ordinary working people and the poor so you could give massive tax breaks to the rich.

“[I was] sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”

You have taken away the healthcare I had in Medicaid benefits and, if I am unable to work, you require me to repeatedly fill out forms and send you documentation that I do not have.

Rather than visiting me in prison, you prevent people from visiting me in prison, often transporting me far away from my home and loved ones.

Then they … will answer, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not give you whatever you needed?”

Then he will answer them, “I tell you the truth, just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me” (Matthew 25:31–46).