Wednesday, June 5, 2024
“But when the Son
of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit upon
his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered in his presence, and he
will separate the people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He
will place the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left.” (Matthew 25: 31 -33, New Living Translation)
I do have a support/therapy goat – more precisely,
a screaming goat. Okay, it is a little plastic
goat which sits on a little plastic stump. When I press down on it, it lets out
an unholy and un-goatlike scream. I use
it when the Blue Jays are playing badly (I might wear it out by season’s end).
I press it when my app games frustrate me. I press it when the grackles are
gorging themselves at the bird feeder and letting no other bird near. Sometimes,
I just press it and let the goat scream for no apparent reason other than it
feels good.
Biblical goats have a right to scream.
Goats are regular fodder for burnt sacrifices, especially for sin offerings. “That is why I am sacrificing burnt offerings
to you— the best of my rams as a pleasing aroma, and a sacrifice of bulls and
male goats.” (Psalm 66:15) Come to think of it, I do like curried goat, but
I digress. Levitical law describes how a flawless goat will have the sins of
the people heaped upon its head and be sent out into the wilderness to face
almost certain death, giving us the term “scapegoat,” someone to blame, often
unfairly, when things go wrong.
Then, of course, we have Jesus’
parable about the sheep and the goats. The sheep come out smelling like pure-as-the
driven-snow lambs and the goats come our smelling like, well, like smelly old
goats. In sports, GOAT means Greatest Of All Time. In Biblical terms a goat is
a lost cause.
I can empathize a little with the
goats. They are not innately bad, just thoughtless. They fail to recognize
those moments around them in which they could be active agents of Jesus Christ.
Maybe they are too busy frolicking, playing around, being mischievous, bleating,
butting heads to care about the social injustices that surround them. There is
an implied sense that they think they know Jesus or would recognize him if they
bothered to look, but they don’t. Or, at least, they only expected to see Jesus where he belongs – in church, in holy places,
in sacred texts, in their own familiar herds. Despite all the Gospel evidence to
the contrary, the human goats don’t relate to Jesus’ ministry to the poor, the
hungry, the homeless, the outcast, the broken, the sick, the imprisoned, the thirsty.
They blow their chance to, at least, join the sheep.
It is enough to make a person
scream.
But the portrayal is enough to
make me ask how often in a week do I
miss some opportunity to do something good for someone else? It is so easy to pass
by on the other side. It is simple to turn off the news and live in my own little
private corner of the world. I am not
talking about doing something religious, something saintly, something pious but
a simple act of kindness, compassion and caring.
There is a children’s Sunday School
song that has the repeated lines in one of its many verses, “Don't wanna be
a goat…nope.” The title verse goes: “I just wanna be a sheep. Baa, baa,
baa, baa. I just wanna be a sheep. Baa, baa, baa, baa. I pray the Lord my soul
to keep. I just wanna be a sheep. Baa, baa, baa, baa.”
Thankfully, Jesus is the Good Shepherd
and I hope and believe that he will yet make room for even us goats if we heed
the warning in the parable to get off our little plastic wooden stumps and make
a difference with a little love.
Baa, indeed!
Dale
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