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Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.

In these morning meditations we’re following Jesus chronologically through Holy Week, tracing some of the major events that happened during those days immediately following his entry into Jerusalem. Yesterday, Monday, he performed what we know as the Cleansing, or Scourging, of the Temple. At the end of the day he left Jerusalem and walked the relatively short distance to the village of Bethany, where he spent the night.

The next morning, Tuesday, he left Bethany and returned to Jerusalem. It was to be quite a day, and it started with The Cursing of the Fig Tree. Jesus was hungry, and as he walked along he spotted a fig tree. He stopped, hoping to find some fruit on its branches. But finding instead that the tree was growing only leaves – a flimsy substitute for the fruit it should have borne – he cursed the tree for its unproductivity. Quite a scene of judgment, and it set the stage for much of what would happen at the end of the day.

When the day was drawing to a close, Jesus withdrew from Jerusalem to spend the night on the Mount of Olives, and there he told a series of three stories. The first was the story about five wise and five foolish bridesmaids. The wise bridesmaids had made sure they had extra oil for their lamps as they waited for the bridegroom to arrive and lead them to the wedding banquet. The foolish bridesmaids hadn’t planned on the possibility of a delay and so had not brought extra oil for their lamps. And of course there was a delay, and the foolish bridesmaids were left in the dark. The second story he told was about a landowner entrusting various amounts of his property to a number of his workers. Some of them invested the property and were able to show a productive return for their master. One, however, was condemned for simply holding on to what he had been given and returning it intact. Message: Anticipate the opportunity, be productive in seizing it.

Jesus then tells the story in our Scripture reading this morning, what we know as The Judgment of the Nations. Not much ambiguity here. Jesus doesn’t shy away from judgment.

It’s interesting that Jesus chose the Mount of Olives for the location of the telling of this story. The mount is just outside the eastern wall of Jerusalem. The city is bordered on the east by the Kidron Valley, which then rises up to the Mount of Olives. That mount has been referred to Jerusalem’s Watchtower, because all approaches to the city from the north, south and east are clearly visible from it. It rises 230 feet above the Temple, and people were told to be mindful of their conduct while in the Temple, because everything they did could be easily observed from the Mount of Olives. It is from here that Jesus tells his story of judgment.

Let’s take a slight detour. Back in Genesis, chapter 7, we have the story of The Great Flood, when Noah gathered his family and all kinds of animals into the ark and survived for 40 days as the rains inundated the earth and destroyed creation. Most of it, anyway. Noah knew the flood was over and the waters were beginning to recede when he sent out a dove that eventually returned bearing an olive branch, a signal that there was dry land somewhere. The legend that the rabbis pass down has it that the olive branch, which persists as a strong symbol of peace, was plucked from the top of the Mount of Olives.

Ironic that Jesus, God’s instrument of peace by whom all of creation would be reconciled to God, would choose this place of peace from which to talk about judgment. It’s almost as if Jesus is saying that the way to achieve peace is through the doing of justice.

It’s now not quite 7 o’clock in the morning. Most of us will call it a day and lie down to sleep in about 15 hours. Each of those hours will contain opportunities for you and I to do justice, to act justly, precisely in the terms laid out in our Gospel lesson this morning. Many of those opportunities might well come to us in what Mother Teresa would call “a most distressing disguise.” It’s for us to look behind the disguise, to perceive the opportunity there and to be productive in the doing of God’s justice.

May God grant each of us the eyes to see and the ears to hear those whom he sends our way. Today.

Amen.