It is appalling how much Jesus just doesn’t get the gospel! Honestly!

He gets asked by a young lawyer what it takes to have eternal life, which is an American evangelical’s dream question. You LIVE for this stuff! It’s teed up!

The answer is so simple! “Believe on Jesus and you get to go to heaven!” It’s the gospel answer.

And Jesus… JESUS! … botches the answer. He tells some stories about a Samaritan doing something good and says, “Go and do the same.”

What? Jesus doesn’t know the answer to the question of eternal life? What is going on?

Today is Christ the King Sunday and our gospel reading will be from Matthew 25:31:46.

The question is this: When the Son of Man comes in glory to judge all the nations before him, who is in?

He separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep will be able to go in. They enter into the inheritance of the kingdom. (It’s what we think, as American evangelicals, of the goal of the gospel. It’s going to heaven. It’s NOT what Jesus is saying, but we think it is, so there you are.)

Who gets into “heaven” (as we think about it)? The sheep. Why? Because they confessed Jesus as Lord and believed it in their hearts? Do the goats get cast out into outer darkness because they didn’t confess Jesus as Lord?

Again, Jesus gets the gospel wrong!

He bases his decision on how the sheep helped the marginalized. It was about the stuff they did! (What kind of works-righteousness heresy is this???)

All these years of preaching the gospel in an American context, one would know that the most important thing in being a Christian is you confess Jesus as your Savior and you get to go to heaven. It’s just the way it is!

Yet, Jesus never goes to that answer. EVER. When he is posed the direct question on eternal life, his answer is so different. Our view of heaven. Our view of salvation. Our view of confession. It’s all a truncated gospel and it’s simply not what Jesus proclaimed.

On this Christ the King Sunday, may we find ourselves following the KING and his Kingdom and settling less and less for a truncated gospel that simply does not satisfy. May we settle for what Jesus says is gospel!

May we live out the powerful gospel of his Kingdom.