34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
The power move that Johnny Cash makes in his legendary 1968 live album At Folsom Prison is that the Man in Black–drunken, drug-addicted, adulterous, self-destructive Johnny Cash–actually practiced what Christ preached: they were in prison, and Cash came unto them.
And not just came unto them, but sang for them, performed a full concert set, livened up their day for once, spoke their language (he definitely swears on this live album more than his more family-friendly fare), singing one lighthearted song on prison life and death row inmates after another—even sang a couple songs written by actual prison inmates themselves—all without judgment and without guile.
Cause we’re all really good at justifying to each other and ourselves why we should not actually do any of the things Christ enumerated in this passage: how just giving food, or water, or clothes to the poor, without money and without price, makes them complacent, lazy, and useless, that we need to teach them to earn their daily bread; that corporations and computer servers need access to fresh water too (they’re the real job creators around here, after all), not the thirsty who’ll just waste it; that we should only take in the stranger if they carefully and expensively fill out all the massive, punitive paper work properly and pay our extortionate fees, and that they have no one to blame but themselves if they can’t afford it, or fill out the paperwork wrong, and who cares if they actually pay taxes and increase GDP and harvest the literal food we need to survive, they need to learn to follow the laws of the land; and the fiends thrown in prison are there because they deserve to be, and we must avoid even the appearance of evil by refusing to consort with them; and so on and so forth. I’ve seen the comments of those glorying in the suspension of SNAP benefits, in cancelling free school lunches for the poor, in how Utah itself is abandoning its highly successful and Christ-like “housing first” policy for the homeless, to instead punish them all the more severely.
Thing is though, absolutely nowhere in Matthew 25, or in any other scripture for that matter, does Christ ever allow for any of these qualifications. So many self-declared Christians claim to take the Bible at face value, to interpret it literally, yet then fail to do so right when it matters most. We hope, we pray instead, that we can qualify for Celestial Glory on absolutely any other criterion–on how we avoid profanity, on the “cleanliness” of the media we consume, on how nicely we dress for Church, how much tithes we pay, how often we read the scriptures, and a thousand other things beside–as though Christ had not already spelled out explicitly what the sole criteria he will utilize at the Final Judgment, plain as day for all to see.
And Johnny Cash followed it: he actually visited them in prison. He took literally the only part of the Bible worth taking literally, and which the rest of us stringently avoid taking literally at all times. Yet in the Great and Final Day, I think deep down we all know that it will be far better for folks like him than for almost the entire rest of us.