Sheep and goats in corrals. The Field Museum Library. No know copyright restrictions.
Yesterday my family and I took a bike ride to downtown Chicago. (Under Illinois’s stay-at-home order, biking for outdoor activity is an essential activity.)
It was stunning, in this usually-vibrant city, how empty the streets were. We passed a handful of people out for exercise, air, or to walk their dogs. The buses we passed, which should have been full to overflowing at rush hour, held a driver and one or two other people. The storefront businesses were dark, as billboards and electronic signs at bus stops reminded Chicagoans to stay home to avoid spreading Covid-19.
It occurred to me on that ride how hard it is to be truly Christian during a pandemic like this one. Not hard because our hearts are in the wrong place—I believe that everybody who’s sacrificing to protect the health and lives of their communities is being deeply Christian—but because being truly Christian requires physical communion.
Specifically, I was thinking about Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25. He welcomes the sheep to His kingdom and His right hand because
I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
And when did the sheep do these things? When they had done them for “the least of these [His] brethren.”
The goats, by contrast, were cast away because they had not fed the hungry, taken in the stranger, clothed the naked, or visited the sick and imprisoned.
Now here’s the problem: to preserve life and health, we literally cannot do many of these things. Prisons and other detention centers have been closed to visitors, as have nursing homes. (My wife recently made cookies for workers and residents at a nearby nursing home, part of a community effort to help them. I dropped the cookies off, but was only allowed through the first set of doors.)
As I shelter in place, I don’t see the stranger, the naked, the hungry or the thirsty. And when I’m out, I purposefully stay at least six feet away, which doesn’t bode well for clothing or feeding them.
That’s not to say we have no way of doing for the least of these, but during these times when we can’t be nearby and can’t call on and comfort and serve in person, we need to be thoughtful and engaged in finding ways to serve our fellow citizens and, by extension, our Lord.
So how have you been able to be a sheep and not a goat in a stay-at-home world?