Today's gospel is the "as long as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me" gospel. It is connected to the shepherd analogy in the Old Testament where the good shepherd says he looks after the flock, the injured and lost of the flock but "the sleek and strong I will destroy."
This run of parables, the virgins, the "unprofitable servant" and the talents ends here and the next section of the bible takes up the reaction in Jerusalem which leads to Christ's death. The Catholic Church ends the liturgical year at this point and restarts the year next week in Advent and the beginning of the birth of Christ.
These parables are very hard because the judgment in them is hard. Why will the shepherd destroy the sleek and the strong? Are the foolish virgins really to be punished because they are not wise? Where is evil in all this unprofitable servant, foolish girls and doomed sleek and strong? It appears to all come together in this parable, where all are judged by their behavior to the weak, the hungry, the thirsty and the imprisoned. Despite our modern preoccupation with evil, it is negligence that is the failure here. The predator, the savage and the pirate in our lives is an outlier; we can try to protect ourselves from him but he does not determine our code, our principles of living. Our principles of living are the two great commandments. If they are not foremost in our lives we will drift. And these must be in our lives, not in our institutions. The Pharisees gave money to the poor but did it as an institutional requirement, not because it was part of their lives. (Curiously, this charitable view of the world is the single most distinctive aspect I have seen in Muslim youth.)
In the old Rheims Vulgate version, those who had made this behavior part of their being were called "the just."
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