A most interesting passage. Growing up in a hardcore fundamentalist church I can’t recall how many times I heard sermons about the forgetful Bridesmaids. But I can’t recall a single sermon on the Sheep and the Goats. Odd. Until of course you realize what Jesus is actually saying. That your fate in the judgment to come is based on your ethics. How you treat people. Uh oh.

The dichotomy between faith and works, or faith vs works, is a much later phenomenon than is regularly perceived. It is born of an interpretation of Ephesians and other Pauline forgeries. It seems pretty clear that Matthew with his emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law and his subsequent insistence on a strict adherence to it would not have found these sayings strange. I suspect the historical Paul himself would have found the incipient antinomianism of the forgeries horrifying. That’s what James is responding to.

My impression is that the current fundamentalist interpretation of Matthew 25:31ff concentrates on the fact of the judgement and the separation of the sheep and the goats rather than on who the sheep and the goats are and exactly why they’re being separated. After all, Matthew is saying the same thing as Paul, right?