The misunderstanding was recently on vivid display here, where conservative and liberal interpreters feud over the meaning of Matthew 25:40 for the contemporary social situation of wealth and poverty.
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.
Unfortunately the text has little meaning for the contemporary social situation, except perhaps to teach those who think that they are Jesus' followers that they are not, and those who are self-satisfied humanitarians that they are dull.
The significance of "my brethren" is much more than what its conservative interpreters say it is. The phrase locates it in apocalyptic time, to the activity of The Twelve before the end of the world. It cannot refer to future generations, as if it were some timeless instruction for right living which liberalism for example can pride itself on by making it the law of the land. Jesus does not at all imagine such a future. He does not even imagine our existence. Instead Jesus imagines a future cut short by judgment and the arrival of the kingdom of God. It is the narrowest of time horizons constrained by the expectation of an imminent end of the world.
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. ... 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 (Matthew 25:34, 41).
The activity of The Twelve is what is expected of disciples who have paid the cost to escape the apocalyptic sentence of death: Leaving all and following their Master, selling what they have and giving to the poor, embarking on an itinerant life preaching a similar repentance, traveling without visible means of support and relying on God to provide, and so on. This is all of a piece with the teaching on discipleship and the instructions to missionaries elsewhere, summarizing and presupposing it.
"Salvation" comes to a house that provides these itinerants their food, drink, clothing, shelter, palliative care for illness in the event, and companionship if and when imprisoned for posing a threat to the powers about to be overthrown by the inbreaking of God's reign. Such acts constitute their own repentance and solidarity with the "Christian" message.
Needless to say, this is a vision which has almost nothing to do with the Pauline Gospel per se, but amazingly survived in the written record anyway despite its failure to materialize.
It does live on in Paul, however, in another form, in "the collection for the saints". Paul's pledge "to remember the poor" is specifically defined by that, and not by a dull humanitarianism. Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem, in fact, is the second great animating feature of his missionary journeys but is still little remarked let alone appreciated in your average church today. As for the dull humanitarianism, we have to wait until the 19th Century and Liberal Christianity before we really get the groundwork laid for that contemporary misreading of the ancient sources referred to above. It was against this that Schweitzer's critique based on apocalyptic was launched at the beginning of the 20th Century.
We talk about that critique a lot here.
