The Goats and the Affordable Care Act

“When I was sick, you visited me.”

Or, now: “‘When I was sick, you visited me.’”

Originally, Jesus said those words. You can find them in Matthew 25, in a parable referred to as “The Parable of the Judgment of the Nations.” In the parable, Jesus tells the story of the end of days, the final judgment of all people. And he relates it like a king dividing up his flock, goats on one side and sheep on the other. But the goats and the sheep aren’t just a natural division based on nationality or religion or ethnicity or lineage. Instead, in the parable, the sheep are the moral people and the goats are the immoral ones.

For the sheep, they are given the Kingdom based solely on the good deeds they did to the King: fed him when he was hungry; clothed him when he was naked; welcomed him when he was a immigrant; cared for him when he was sick; visited him when he was in prison. There is no mention of faith, dogma, or affiliation. In fact, the sheep are stunned, saying, “When did we do these things for you?” God responds saying what was done to the “least of these,” was done to him also. Very powerful.

And for the goats, they receive the opposite treatment. They are cursed and sent to “eternal fire” because they failed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned. And God reckons that this failure to do to others was, in turn, a rejection of him. Like the sheep, the goats are shocked.

These words were more recently spoken by Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) at 1:11AM on January 12 during a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Or better said, these were the words Sen. Kaine quoted as a protest to that vote (see the video here).

This repeal of the healthcare law without a viable replacement is set to remove healthcare plans for millions of Americans, mainly poor Americans, throughout the country. So Sen. Kaine’s protest here, using the words of Jesus is poignant. What we do to the “least of these,” we do to God. And these actions will reverberate through eternity.

Many of my more conservative Christian brothers and sisters rest on the laurels of their religious affiliation and “faith”. But as James teaches, “Can faith save you?...Faith without works is dead.” If we believe our actions are not intimately connected to the eternal salvation – the true reconciliation back to God – that we have faith in, we might take notes on the shock the goats display.