Jesus Worldview: Learning to see Jesus, Matthew 25:31-46

Jesus Worldview: Learning to See Jesus Matthew 25:31-46

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins August 2, 2026

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

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Nicholas Winton was born to a well-to-do English family. As a young man he worked as a banker (the family business) and practiced fencing. He was quite an accomplished fencer and had been selected to represent Britain in the next Olympics. Those Olympics never happened because World War II broke out. Shortly before Christmas in 1938, Winton was planning a ski trip to Switzerland, but he canceled his vacation when a friend asked for help. His friend was working with Jewish refugees in Czechoslovakia. When Winton arrived, he found men, women, and children living in horrific conditions. With the imminent prospect of war, he saw little recourse for the thousands of individuals in the camps. Most countries denied access to Jewish immigrants; the lone exception was Winton’s home country. Britain would accept unaccompanied Jewish minors up to the age of 17 if a host family was prepared to receive them. There was no organization, however, to save the Jewish children in Czechoslovakia. So Winton decided to form one.An article about him in the New York Times described his effort as involving “dangers, bribes, forgery, secret contact with the Gestapo, nine railroad trains, an avalanche of paperwork and a lot of money.” He enlisted hundreds of families. He solicited donations. But bribing Gestapo and railroad workers turned out to be an expensive endeavor. The donations fell short. Winton made up the difference himself. The end result: 669 children were saved as the vast majority of their families perished at Auschwitz or other camps. Now, if you were to judge Nicholas Winton on his care for the least of these on a scale from 1 to 10, with one being a miserable sloth who never helped anybody and 10 being saint level, what number would you assign him? Hold that question. We’ll come back to it. And we’ll turn it around. Ten weeks ago, we began a journey together. We called it Jesus Worldview — and the question at the center of it was deceptively simple: what if we actually began to the world the way Jesus sees it? Not the way our culture sees it. Not the way our political tribe sees it. Not the way the loudest voices on the internet see it. The way Jesus sees it. We started with the lens. Whose eyes are we looking through? We found the center: love God, love neighbor. Everything else hangs on those two. We walked the Beatitudes and discovered they were not just blessings but directions . . . a treasure map to where Jesus could be found: among the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful. We watched Jesus choose the edges over the center . . . sitting down with a Samaritan woman, crossing every boundary his culture had drawn, handing her the clearest statement of his identity in the entire Gospel. We heard him stand before Pilate and say, calmly and without apology: my kingdom is not from this world. We watched him kneel on the floor of an upper room and wash his disciples’ feet. We sat with the scandalous inclusion of a Jesus who walked past the synagogue and stopped at a tax collector’s booth and spoke of a God who desired mercy, not sacrifice. We let go, or tried to, of the scarcity thinking that keeps us grasping . . . and opened our hands toward the abundance Jesus kept pointing to in birds and flowers and the simple gifts of an ordinary day. Week after week, we have been learning to see. And today . . . in this final week of the “Jesus Worldview” series . . . Jesus tells us exactly what he wants us to see. Not an idea. Not a theology. Not a worldview in the abstract. A face. His face. Matthew 25 is Jesus at his most direct. There is no parable here, no Samaritan, no prodigal son, no lost sheep. Just Jesus, describing the final accounting of a human life in terms that leave very little room for ambiguity. The nations are gathered. The sheep are separated from the goats. And the criterion . . . the single measuring stick by which lives are assessed . . . is this: “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.” And here is the moment that should stop us cold, because it stopped everyone in the story cold. Both groups ask the same question. The ones who did these things and the ones who didn’t . . . both groups are equally astonished: “Lord, when was it that we saw you?” They didn’t know. Neither group knew. The ones who served the hungry and the stranger and the sick had no idea, apparently, that they were serving Jesus. They were just . . . serving. Showing up. Crossing the road. Sitting down at the table. And the ones who walked past? They didn’t know either. They weren’t twirling a mustache and choosing to ignore Jesus. They just . . . didn’t see him. They looked at the hungry person and saw a problem. They looked at the stranger and saw a threat. They looked at the sick and the imprisoned and saw someone else’s responsibility. They didn’t recognize the face. That is the sermon in a sentence: learning to see Jesus is learning to see the face of Jesus in the faces of the people he kept moving toward. This is where the series takes a turn—a deepening. For ten weeks we have been learning to see the world the way Jesus sees it. Today Jesus tells us something more: he is asking us to see him . . . to see Jesus in the world. Not just to adopt his perspective, but to recognize his presence. In the hungry face. In the stranger’s eyes. In the person the world has written off. The Jesus Worldview, it turns out, is not just a way of seeing the world. It is a way of seeing Jesus: everywhere, always, in the least expected places. I want to be honest with you about how uncomfortable this text makes me. And it’s not just the theological debates, though those are real. Thoughtful Christians have argued for centuries about what this passage means for questions of salvation, of judgment, of who exactly Jesus is referring to when he says, “the nations.” We could spend the whole sermon there. We won’t. What makes me uncomfortable is simpler than that. It’s the wellness check. Think about the last time you had a medical checkup: blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol. Most of us approach those appointments with a certain amount of anxiety. Not because we think anything is seriously wrong, but because we know we haven’t been perfect. We know we’ve eaten the cookies and skipped the walks. We know the numbers might tell a story we’d rather not hear. This text is a wellness check for the soul. And sometimes my self-talk, if I’m honest, goes something like this: “How can I give to every worthy cause? If I help this person, where does it end? I can’t solve poverty. I can’t fix homelessness. What if my money gets misused? I do what I can.” And what I mean, usually, when I say “I do what I can,” is that I do what I can without significantly disrupting my comfort. Nicholas Winton risked his life. But perhaps harder than that . . . he risked his comfort. He canceled a ski trip. He spent his own money. He spent years quietly carrying something enormous. And then, for fifty years, he told no one. That last part is the part that blows my mind. For fifty years he said nothing. He married in 1948. Had three children. None of them ever knew how Winton saved 669 children. One day in 1988, his wife found a long-hidden scrapbook: names, pictures, letters from families, travel documents. He described it briefly and suggested she throw it away. He didn’t think it would be of interest to anyone so many years later. Winton wasn’t interested in a platform. No legacy-building. No brand. Just 669 children, quietly saved, and a man who went back to his ordinary life. When his wife sent the scrapbook to a Holocaust historian, and a newspaper article about Winton became a BBC story became an international story, Winton was asked why he had done it. He said, simply: “One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that.” One saw the problem. One saw. In 1988 Winton was invited to appear on a British talk show called That’s Life. He was nearly 80 years old. He sat in the front row of the studio audience as his story was told. And then the host asked: “Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?” Dozens of people stood up around him. He had no idea. These were the children he had saved. They were now disguised as grown men and women. Filmmakers. Politicians. Mathematicians. Military leaders. Authors. Geneticists. Mothers, fathers, grandparents. He looked around at them with a face of absolute astonishment. He had not known, when he saw those children in the camps in 1938, what they would become. He could not have imagined, when he scraped together the money and forged the documents and bribed the railroad workers, that one of them would found the Israeli Air Force, one would make an important genetic discovery, one would become a member of Parliament. He just saw children in danger. And he helped. And it changed the world. “Lord, when was it that we saw you?” This is the question Matthew 25 leaves us with. And the answer Jesus gives is not complicated, even if it is demanding. Every time you saw the hungry face, that was me. Every time you welcomed the stranger, that was me. Every time you sat with the sick, visited the forgotten, clothed the vulnerable, that was me. And every time you looked away . . . that was me too. For ten weeks we have been asking: what would it look like to see the world the way Jesus sees it? To wear His lens instead of our own? Today Jesus answers the question from the other direction. It’s not just about adopting his perspective. It’s about recognizing his presence. He is not just waiting for us in the comfortable places, the familiar faces, the people who are easy to love, though Christ is certainly there. Christ is also in the hungry face. In the stranger’s eyes. In the person our culture has decided is not worth our time or our money or our discomfort. And the astonishing, humbling, world-changing truth of this text is that we often serve Christ without knowing it; we often miss him without knowing it. Which means the invitation is not to become more heroic. It is simply to become more attentive. To notice. To look. To see. Nicholas Winton saw the problem, and he moved toward it. He didn’t have a theological framework for what he was doing. He wasn’t thinking about Matthew 25. He was just . . . paying attention. And acting on what he saw. That is what a Jesus Worldview produces, in the end. Not a better set of opinions. Not a more refined theology. Not a more impressive religious performance. A person who has learned to see. So I want to ask you the same question I asked about Nicholas Winton. On a scale from 1 to 10, with one being a miserable sloth who never helped anybody and 10 being saint level . . . where would you place yourself? Before you answer, I want to gently suggest: the point of the question is not to make you feel guilty. It is not to send you out of here crushed under the weight of everything you haven’t done. The point is recalibration. At the end of our days (and we all know this, somewhere deep down) the greatness of our lives will not be measured by the size of our bank account, the car we drive, the platform we built, or even our cholesterol score. It will be measured by something much simpler.  Did we love well?  Did we risk discomfort for the sake of another?  Did we learn to see the face of Jesus in the faces of the people he kept moving toward? We have spent ten weeks studying the Jesus Worldview. Today we are invited to make it a practice. Not a perfect practice: none of us will get a 10 on this wellness check, and Jesus knows that better than anyone. But a practice of growing attentiveness. Of widening our circle. Of pausing, just a little more often, before we look away. “One saw the problem there.” May we be people who see. In a few moments we will come to this table. And I want you to know: this table is Matthew 25 in miniature. Jesus takes the hungry and feeds them. He takes the stranger and welcomes them. He takes the broken and broken open and says: this is my body, given for you. At this table, we don’t earn our place. We don’t perform our way in. We don’t arrive having scored a 10 on the wellness check. We come just as we are. Which is — it turns out — exactly what Jesus has been saying all summer. Come just as you are. Receive what you could not manufacture. And go out learning to see . . . in every hungry face, every stranger’s eyes, every forgotten person your culture taught you to walk past . . . the face of the One who fed you, welcomed you, and loved you when you didn’t even know it was Christ. In this world, may we be lik