Matthew 25.31-16 

Matthew 25 is all bizzare stories. Ten Virgins in waiting, lamps with and without oil, Master who gives away his treasure to his srevants and moving on for long holiday. It culminates in the event of The Lord who had left all his nations in seeming oblivion, but returns at the most unexpected of times and with the most ironical of statements. In all those stories, there is something fearfully similar..they all centre around a crisis of the Kingdom. In his teachings during the final countdown to the hour of crucifixion Jesus provides some reality bytes of the nature of the Kingdom to come. It was never a and-they-lived-happily-ever-after-thing...There was a moment when the apple cart would be overturned. The real Kingdom of heaven will be manifest only in and through this crisis. It is the time of reckoning.

No one really likes crisis. It always has a bad connotation for it. But if we are honest with ourselves we would realise that anything really good has come out only through crisis situations. Let me get the help of Bruce Main and Erik Erikson to explain something of this stuff.

In clinical work, (as in economics and politics) crisis has increasingly takenon half of its meaning, the catastrophic half, while in medicine, a crisis once meant a turning point for better or for worse, a crucial period in which a decisive turn one way or another is unavoidable. (Erikson)

 Unfortunately in our contemporary christian culture, we have been seduced to belive that Christian faith is about avoiding cricis. Jesus is sold to us as a vendor of ' personal blessing', one who eliminates pain and takes away our problems (Bruce Main, If Jesus were a Sophomore, p.14)

Jesus is very much  undiplomatic in telling that crisis and separation is an innate nature of the Kingdom. It has always been there in the history of the people of God. He points to the days of Noah and the Flood.(Matt. 24.37). The greatest irony of the story is that, faced with the crisis and separation, all those invoved have the very same response. Those accepted and those rejected are confused with the same questions. In fact, such a confusion had percipitated the crisis. They had never seen Jesus as they were living their everyday lives. Yet some of them managed to give their best in their everyday life, though it was just the mundane and the ordinary. The others kept waiting for the supernatural to happen to do something. They missed the divine in their everyday lives.

 Maybe those rejected were debating the finer aspects of what is good and bad or even engaging in hair splitting arguments in what is to work for God, and missed the Jesus by their side. This a sure warning to those of us who claim to be spiritual. Maybe our eyes have to opened for something beyond in the very ordinary...

I go back in time for a conversation with Jesus,

"Jesus, when are we goind to get to the spiritual stuff?" I begin. "This is the spiritual stuff", he replies. I am startled and caught off guard. "But what about the miracles, Jesus? You know the stuff I read about in the gospels. I mean, all we've done today is wash some feet, eat breakfast with a sleazy tax collector, and cousel some woman about her promiscuous sex life...What so special about this?" comes my reply after a hot and exhaustive week.

" The miracles are exceptions, not the rule", replies a patient Jesus...I wasn't doing miracles 24 hours a day..Time passed between the miracles"...

(read If Jesus were a Sophomore, for more of this stuff, 2002, Westminister john Knox press)

 Crisis is the time when your excuses dont work anymore...(my definition, how is it) But the real Kingdom is made of such stuff