In the three minutes I had to sit in a chair yesterday, I came across this piece about how terrifying it is, in our technological and social media age, that none of us can concentrate on anything for more than a few moments. The author likens the catastrophe of lost attention to fracking:
We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.
The solution, he says, is that
Instead of fretting that students’ flagging attention doesn’t serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught.
You can know how crucial it all is because there are now people calling themselves “Attention Activists” who rail not only against lost attention but also “epistemic injustice.” Apparently, when you sit still in one place and pay attention, either alone or in groups
Deep questions ensue: How do language and identity structure what we are capable of seeing and knowing? How do we change the world when we perceive it differently — and work to articulate those perceptions? What are the political implications of a world we do (and do not) share in fundamental ways? In no time it becomes clear that attention — giving it and getting it — constitutes social life.
This reminds me of the breathless way the New York Times reported about how Zoomers are discovering that taking a walk without a device, such as a phone, in hand, is a mind-blowing (in the right kind of way) thing to do. Imagine, how the settled rest of ordinary activities, like thinking and reading, is being lost so quickly, all because none of us can comfortably bear to be in a world unmediated by content provided by the cacophonous crowd. The smartphone spares us the burden of properly looking at ourselves or each other. What would we do without them? They are so convenient. They tell us how long it takes to get where we’re going. They alert us that our friends are liking our pictures. They tell us to get up and take some steps lest our bodies become as stultified as our minds. Best of all, they promise the very sense of “we” and “us” we so crave even as they fracture the emotional attention required to nurse such a reality into health.
As a connoisseur of the Bible, though, I can’t help but feel that the trouble of fractured, if not fracking attention is a lot older than the advent of the smartphone. It’s not that suddenly we can’t pay attention, it’s that we finally have the devices that give us what we really want—ourselves.
If you’ve been following along in the lectionary, you’ll know that today, at least for Anglicans and people like that, is the last gasp of the old year. Next Sunday the new one creeps in unawares, unremarked by those rifling through bins of red and green paper and piles of stocking candy that if bought today, would surely be slightly stale by December 25th—so, you might as well buy and eat it immediately. The last Sunday of the year is called Christ the King. The readings are meant, if you hadn’t been paying attention, to shock you, to wake you up, to make you wonder if there is something going on that you hadn’t noticed before. The gospel goes like this:
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
The Son of Man, I’m sure you know, is that Person in the visions of Daniel who comes before the Ancient of Days and, after crushing the beasts, is given all authority and dominion and power and honor and glory. It is a curious tableau, tucked in amongst long passages of poetic imprecations—God explaining to his wayward and inattentive people what he will certainly do and why. No one really expected that this certainly metaphorical Person would suddenly appear in the flesh, determined to do what the vision said he would. The throne must be an allegory for something, just like the sheep and the goats. Who even are they? But keep up—pay attention—or the story will go by you:
And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
Someone at least—the King in this case—has his wits about him and knows where he is and what he ought to be doing. He also knows all the creatures gathered in the jostling melee. Some will go to the right to receive an inheritance planned a long time before any of them were even born. The king has certain criteria by which he is able to judge who the sheep really are:
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’
It is unnerving, bewildering even, to think of the King being in such a circumstance that he would be hungry, thirsty, alienated, alone, suffering the effects of snow or heat, ill, and even thrown into prison. What kind of King would go out, on purpose, into the degradation of the world to endure the kind of misery that every person strives to avoid? The trouble with most of us in the West who recline in the early hours in a comfortable bed, trying to decide whether or not to go to church on Sunday morning, is that, especially three days away from Thanksgiving, hunger is not a pressing sensation. As soon as a light flutter of the stomach catches the attention of the mind, all you have to do is wander over and peer in your fridge. If you don’t like what you see there, you can go buy something else.
And yet, the food and water, the health of the body, and the alienation of the soul—these are so essential that we do keep noticing their lack. The sheep the King welcomes into the kingdom gave these things, says the King, to him. But the sheep weren’t really paying attention, and therefore don’t know what he is talking about:
Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Too many people who trust themselves to know what Jesus means miss the point in this crucial hour. It is not, as so many expect, that the sheep gave food, water, shelter, clothes, and love to everyone who needed these things. They might have done that, but most importantly, they gave them to the “brothers” of the King. Who are the King’s brothers? All those looking at him, asking him in astonished joy what he is talking about.
Observe how these sheep come before the throne. They don’t arrive explaining how good they are. They don’t even know that they have done anything that the King himself believed essential. They cared, without even noticing, for each other. At some substrata of consciousness, they acted as though they belonged to the King. Their attention wasn’t on the sick, poor, and lonely, but on their Master, their Shepherd. They saw that he had come to them to lead them wherever he would go. They were struck to the heart by his presence in theit midst, by the food he fed them, by the nature of the drinks that quenched their thirst. The garments they offered to each other, they understood—who knows how—were actually his. When they visited each other in dire straits, they did not offer themselves as consolation, but they offered him. They did this when they couldn’t see him because he had gone back to his throne. And yet he was very near, in their hearts, on their lips, so close that they never thought to question or worry about what they were doing or why.
Meanwhile, there are some goats being rounded up to go to the eternal fire:
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, 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 no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’
These goats, one may presume, had been feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and doing other charitable works—who knows—but they weren’t doing them to those associated with the King. In caring for the children of the world, they carefully excluded Christian children wherever they could. If they dug wells, they made sure not to dig them in places already pledging their allegiance to the Jesus. Meanwhile, they also lectured Christians for everything they did, and, as many people are saying this morning on X, explained at length that you shouldn’t associate with those wrong kinds of believers. You should give those bad Christians a wide berth, lest you be tainted by association.
In some sense, they were paying attention, in that they were always careful to exclude those people whom they knew, at the level of the soul, helplessly devoted themselves to the King no matter the shame or mounting troubles. The King, however, knows the game and sees through it always:
Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, 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.”
Jesus, delivering this desolating promise, turns his face to the cross and goes there, unflinchingly, to rescue his true sheep out of all their sins. If you are wondering what you should think about, how you should feel, what you should do, how you should spend your money or your efforts—you need look only at his face. It helps to read about him in his book, for he is there, crying out with a loud voice on every page, telling you who he is and why you should listen.
And now, I must myself go to church. Hope to see you there!
Those who belong to the King, who look on their Lord, replicate His downward movement, His self-sacrificing way, however incomplete and inadequate. They serve His little ones and when the masks come off, they discover Him. Lord, let me serve Your little ones through whom You are served.
At my own church, the overall sermon on this passage was okay, but missed the mark in some key ways.. As is so common these days, be it evangelical, mainline, sideline (to quote Westminster Seminary CA professor R. Scott Clark), and everything in between, our pastor seemed quite unable to state that the brethren was those of Christ's body in need. In stereotypical mainline fashion, it was, at best, quasi-universalist in approach, and ignored that there are other Scriptures that deal with the more universal aspects of how to treat those of all stripes named in this passage.
I would raise this with him, but in what is probably a sign that days are limited there, I believe - for good reason due to recent past actions - raising questions, no matter how politely or respectfully done, would merely be ignored, because that seems to be what everyone teaches one to do these days in such situations.