About Examinations 5/23/43

Scripture: Matthew 25: 31-45

Text: Matthew 25: 37b “Lord, when saw we thee hungry and fed thee?”

I suppose that most students dislike examinations. If they do not dread them, at least they are glad to get them over with. Probably they fear that some question will appear whose answer has been forgotten - or maybe never learned. How many students, do you suppose, look forward to the last examination of their senior year, with the wistful thought, “If I can just get through the last of these examinations, and pass the course, I’ll never take another exam as long as I live!”

They shouldn’t kid themselves so easily, for they will have a surprise coming to them. Once they leave the school room, they will one day awake to the fact that every day is examination day!

An opportunity confronts us and leaves us passed or flunked in the minute that it takes us to make up our mind. Every daily task is an invitation to success, or failure.

The story is told of Gracie Allen’s visit to a fox farm. While she was there, she asked the manager, “How often do you skin the foxes?” And he replied solemnly, “Only once. To do it more often would make them nervous.” Human beings are not so lucky. Nervous or not, life may “skin” them again and again. It is our lot to take our examinations daily.

All of us have the experience, when you come to think of it. Every meal the housewife cooks is an examination of her skill. That is why she takes pride in keeping her family well fed and why she finds it so humiliating to have the roast burn or the cake fall - and why she has that feeling of desperation when she can’t get a roast or hasn’t enough sugar left for a cake. Every carpenter takes an examination every day that he works on a new house. He flunks or passes by the quality of his workmanship. Every case the lawyer tries, every sale the merchant makes, every letter the secretary types, every sermon the minister preaches, every edition the editor publishes, every decision the executive makes, every shoe the cobbler repairs - all these are examinations by which our acquaintances and associates judge us for better or for worse. It is no good answering “Not prepared.” If we can’t meet the unexpected, we aren’t prepared at all. We are examined daily.

And moreover, we examine others daily. We pass judgment on the teachers we have, the movie actors we see, the fellow students or fellow workmen or associates we know, the politicians we read about and elect or defeat, the writers whose stories we read. We are the “examiners” as well as the “examined.”

Jesus had this in mind often, and he dealt with the matter in at least two ways. For one thing, he warned his followers to be careful in their examination of others in order to avoid being unfair. “Judge not,” he said, “lest ye be judged; for with what measure ye judge it shall be meted out to you again.” [Matthew 7: 1].

A scholar says that the word Jesus used, as recorded in the Gospels, was the word which connotes a snap judgment - a quick condemnation based on little or no understanding. Jesus had often been the victim, himself, of snap judgments. People with no understanding of him accused him of being a glutton, a wine-biber, a blasphemer, a rabble-rouser, a law-violator, a man who had no regard for the standards of right and wrong. It was by that kind of examination that he finally died - an examination carried on in hysterical hatred, before a judge who cared more for politics than justice, with witnesses that were probably bribed. In that case it was the examiners who flunked; and innocence suffered, and through suffering and death, triumphed.

Jesus, in another connection, pictured the examination God gives to man. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, he dramatizes a story of final judgment. He says that there will be some surprises at that examination. The ones who think they know all about it will fail, and the humble ones who believed they did not know very much about it will be surprised to come out on top. God will say to these humble ones, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, 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 then these people who have been trying to live rightly in a quiet way without advertising it are going to be incredulous, he says. They will think that there has been a mistake. “Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the answer will come, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The others, though they may have acquired prominence in the eyes of men, will flunk that examination because they have not cared for the hungry and the sick and the overburdened.

The great difference between our daily examinings and the examinations of God is that we judge by the standards of what is temporal, or even temporary, and God brings the standards of eternity to his tests. We are apt to give the prizes to the mighty, the prominent, the able talkers. God gives the rewards to the people of peace and good will, to the teachable, the humble, the righteous.

Fred Eastman (and I’m largely following his ideas this morning) says that these two teachings of Jesus might be put in this way: beware of making snap judgments, and practice the judgments of love.

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the great change that would occur if we applied these two precepts of Jesus to our daily examination of others. Suppose we begin at home and see what happens. Maybe the fathers of some of you young people seem a little old-fashioned: not a bad sort, really, but not up-to-date in thinking: a bit fossilized. Ought to know more of modern psychology. Don’t understand young people and their right to live their own lives. Seem to expect one to live like the Puritans of two or three hundred years ago. Possibly! And it is also possible that this is snap judgment. A more careful judgment might lead you to the conclusion that father, though he is no picture-book saint, has learned a good many tough lessons from life, and has found some of the answers the hard way. Perhaps hardship and suffering may have taught him a few things he would like to pass on to his children - if they will have them.

Mark Twain spoke of his father once in this way: “When I was sixteen,” he said, “my father was an ignoramus; but when I was twenty-one I was amazed to discover how much progress the old man had made.”

[end of p 8; pp 9, 10, & 11 apparently missing]

seeds along about 200 miles of railway right-of-way as he rode across the prairies of Iowa. Now people revel in the beauty of those blossoms. A little thought on the part of travelers who pass that way might enable them to say of that man, as Jesus might say, “You blessed of my Father, I was hungry for beauty, and you brought it to me.”

When a wisp of a woman, from a country that has been devastated and tortured and humiliated under an aggressor that must be resisted, expresses with set jaw and lips thin her countrymen’s continued determination to resist, then in the same speech tells us all that we must try to understand and forgive, I have a notion it were good for us to listen to her and ponder. When Jesus said “Love your enemies” he wasn’t saying something sentimental. Why should we love an enemy? To feel warm and good inside ourselves? Not at all! There’s some sort of divine wisdom in that command of Jesus.

For the only hope of a neighborly world in the future lies in the ability to see past the vile brutality that is all too real, to the human underneath - the hopes and ambitions like ours, the hungers and fears like ours, the temptations and triumphs like ours, in understanding of which our children’s children might find peace and progress, free from the destruction of warfare.

If, one day, we shall be able to find the human, in an enemy we must now restrain, we may get the surprise of our lives out of the examination - the discovery of a brother is the spirit, and a possible neighbor in the kingdom of God.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, May 23, 1943