Who Counts as "The Least of These?" | Matthew 25 Explained

In Matthew 25, Jesus says, "whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me." But who is he referring to as "the least of these?" Was he talking about vulnerable believers within the church, or anyone in need—regardless of faith? Mike and Skye explore the biblical and historical arguments on both sides, how early Christians understood the passage, and why this interpretation shapes how we think about charity, mission, and the scope of Christian love. (Click here for the full episode)

Mike: I recently heard a sermon preached on Matthew 25, where Jesus talks about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger. And in the passage Jesus says, “As you did this to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

The preacher said that this should be interpreted to mean caring for the vulnerable in the local church. I always read it to mean caring for the vulnerable world at large, or at least the very big church.Alright, so the gist of it is—because I’ve heard the same thing—that when Jesus says, “Whatever you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me,” Jesus is actually talking about fellow believers, not just everyone. So who’s right?

Skye: So this… there’s a long—not terribly long—but there’s a decent length debate about exactly this question. It tends to be more fundamentalist Christian traditions that want to narrow the definition of who Jesus is talking about; that he’s only talking about fellow Christians, fellow believers. In some cases, even just the apostles, you know, people who are spreading the message of Jesus that he has in mind.

And it’s larger traditions of the church—the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, more mainline Protestant denominations—that take the expansive view that he’s talking about anyone who is poor, suffering, hungry.

Couple things. Number one: when you go back and read the earliest church fathers on this—Augustine, Origen, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa—you go on down the list. Universally they all interpret Matthew 25 the same way, which is they take the expansive view, that Jesus is identifying not just with Christians but with anybody who is poor, homeless, naked, imprisoned, whatever.

So that’s interesting. If Jesus really just meant Christian disciples here, you would think the earliest Christian disciples would be like, “No, he’s talking about Christian disciples.” That’s not how they read it. So that’s a strike against the narrow definition.

The other problem with the narrow definition, I think, is that it would contradict both Jewish teaching and Jesus’ own words throughout earlier chapters of the gospels. For example, a lot of the categories that Jesus lists in Matthew 25—the poor, the naked, the homeless, the foreigner—these are categories he draws from the Torah, in which God’s Old Testament people, the Jews, the Israelites, are commanded to show kindness and compassion to all of those categories of people, including those outside the Israelite community. Right? The foreigner, the stranger, all that.

So for Jesus to essentially quote the Old Testament Torah and narrowly define who these people are, when the Torah itself expansively defines it, would be really weird—especially given the fact that earlier in the gospel accounts Jesus has the Good Samaritan story, where there’s a stranger on the side of the road whose identity is unknown, and a priest and a Levite don’t help him and the Samaritan does. And the whole point of that story is to broadly redefine who is your neighbor away from someone who shares my ethnicity or religious identity, to anyone in need.

Mike:Yeah.

Skye:That’s clearly the point of the Good Samaritan story. So then when you get to Matthew 25 it would be bizarre for Jesus to say, “No, I’m just talking about people who share your religious identity. That’s all I’m talking about here.”

So I think when you look at both internal evidence from Jesus’ own teaching in the gospels, the link to the Old Testament law, and then the early church fathers who wrote about this a lot, they all agree that Jesus is referring to anybody in need as his brother, not just those who are Christians.

Mike: So do you know then how the other interpretation became popular? The interpretation that Jesus was actually just talking about fellow believers?

Skye: I don’t. That’s a good question. I could research that; I don’t know offhand. But I know why it did. And that is: Jesus doesn’t just say what you do to the least of these, he says what you do to these brothers of mine, the least of these my brothers.

So the problem is when he says “my brothers,” people are going, “Well, elsewhere in the gospels he talks about his brothers as his disciples.” So I think there’s an honest and not nefarious interpretation that goes, “Well, why would he say brothers if he’s meaning people who aren’t his disciples too?”

But I think when you take the preponderance of evidence, he’s saying—again, you get this in the Old Testament—that God talks about the orphan and the widow: the orphan is his child, the widow is his wife. He especially identifies with these broken, marginalized, needy people. And Jesus is echoing that same sentiment from the Torah by saying, these people in greatest need, they’re the ones I identify with, just as God in the Old Testament does too.

So I think that’s where the “brothers” language comes from, and he doesn’t simply mean “my disciples.”

Mike: I think part of it too, frankly, is that we are inclined to try to make Jesus’ teaching easier rather than harder. And really what these last two questions get at is this temptation many Christians have of, “Oh, I just kind of want to focus on my fellow believers, because we think the same things and it’s going to be a lot easier to care for them and do work with them.”

It becomes challenging when we open that up to people who don’t believe the same thing, and we’re worried that somehow we will become tainted ourselves, or that people will assume we believe things we don’t believe. And it gets back to this age-old question of: how do you maintain doctrinal purity while also striving for community and unity and caring for others?

Skye: I think that’s a very generous way to put it. Can I say it in a non-generous way?

Mike: It’s a new year. You have a chance to be different this year!

Skye: I know, but this is important. I think psychologically part of what’s behind that is: if God’s love is really as indiscriminate as Matthew 25 would say, or many other parts of the gospels or the scriptures would say, then I’m not as special as I thought I was.

If my call is to reflect and emulate the mercy and love that God has shown by being indiscriminate in my love—including to my enemy, forget the non-disciple of Jesus, we’re talking about the enemy of Jesus—I’m supposed to love and give. If I’m supposed to be as indiscriminate in my love as my heavenly Father is, then that means my receiving of his love doesn’t make me special. I’m just part of the unwashed masses that he loves.

And we want to believe that I’m special. My group is special. We’ve got it figured out. We’ve got the truth. We’re the people being saved from the flood. We’re the people that God has selected. We’re the called.

This is the same hubris that the Israelites had. They thought they were special because God called them, and he reminds them over and over and over again in the Old Testament: “You’re nothing special. I called you because you were the smallest and the weakest, and you’re just as frail as everyone else. Don’t put yourself on a pedestal. I will use you and you’re going to be my instrument, but it’s not because you’re special.”

And we continually fall into that thing. So we want to narrowly define Matthew 25 because we want to believe we’re part of a special group. Sorry, you’re not.

Mike: It’s kind of like when—maybe it’s just me because I’m a bad person—I’ve had this experience where I will get a compliment from someone I highly respect or look up to or a really important person, and I’ll be like, “Oh wow, that really means a lot.” And then I will find out, “Oh, they sent that compliment to someone else,” especially if it’s someone I don’t really like very much. And then I’m like, “Well now it means nothing.”

I am so sinful in my human nature that it’s like, “Oh, if that compliment wasn’t meant just for me, then it completely invalidates the compliment.”

Skye: Have you seen that bumper sticker? In fairly large font it says, “Jesus loves you,” and then smaller underneath in parentheses it says, “But then again, Jesus loves everybody.”

It’s kind of a backhanded way of taking the compliment away, and there’s a weird theological truth to that that we need to grapple with.

But I think in our fallenness, in our pridefulness, we want to believe we are special. And therefore God’s love has to be limited and discriminate in order to make me as its recipient special. And it justifies me then limiting my love and being discriminate.

And that plagues all kinds of religious communities. It plagued God’s Old Testament people. It plagues the church today. And I think it’s completely incompatible with the message of Jesus.

Mike:Yeah. I mean, so much of the New Testament is reminding churches: you were once sinful, away from God, far from God. God loves you. Therefore you go love the people who are far from God now.

Skye: This is the central problem Jesus is unearthing in the parable of the prodigal son. The older son is like, “What the heck? I’m special. I’ve obeyed everything you’ve done. Where’s my party? Why are you celebrating this idiot brother of mine who did all these terrible things?”

And the father’s saying, “I’m celebrating because he’s come back home to be with me. You’re always with me.” And the older son just couldn’t get that, because he was rooting his identity in the fact that, “I’m not like the younger son. I’m special.” And the father’s going, “You’re special because you’re with me, and he’s with me too.”

And that is anathema to religious people who believe they’re more important or special to God because of their righteousness, their morality, their doctrine, whatever it might be. And it’s grotesque to us to think that there are people who have heretical doctrine, are immoral, ungodly, non-Christian—and God loves them just as much as us.

We cannot accept that. And that’s a huge problem.