A Reading of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats

Towards the conclusion of Matthew's gospel, Jesus tells a story which reveals the difference between those who are living as God's people and those who are not.  In the story, those who are identified as God's people are sheet, and those who are not are goats.  The difference between the two appears on the surface to be their behaviors: the sheep are identified as God's people because they have engaged in acts of service to others: feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, and otherwise helping those in need.  The goats do not engage in these behaviors.

The tendency when we read this story is to see the point of the story as a code of ethics: as admonitions to do the actions of the sheep in order to gain God's favor, and to avoid the punishment that is given to the goats at the end of the story.  But if we place ourselves in the story, we see that the methodology by which the sheep and goats are distinguished is not known to the sheep and goats until the story is told (i.e. the sheep and goats do not know until this moment of judgment the methodology through which they will be judged).

The behaviors of the sheep is not an exhaustive list of the acts that we must engage in to be God's people.  Rather, they are representative of the things that God's people do.  And as the sheep have not been given prior notice, they do not engage in these acts because they have been commanded to, but because it is their natural propensity to do them.  A clue to understanding the story is that in the ancient world, sheep and goats were thought to have different natures: sheep were sacrificial and virtuous, and goats were not.  Just like we have natures that we attribute to animals today (e.g. dogs and cats).

The purpose of participation in the new covenant community is not to engage in specifically defined behaviors to avoid punishment, but to have our underlying nature changed from one called by Paul as the Old Adam, to the New Adam, Christ.  If we live in the Spirit of Christ, we become holy, our nature changes, and it is our natural propensity to engage in the behaviors described in the story.  We don't have to be told to do them; we do them because it is our nature to do them.  Consequently, the new covenant community should be focused not on the incidentals of what God's people should do and shouldn't do, but on the transformation of our hearts and minds