Who are the sheep, and who are the goats?
” the Desert Fathers of Egypt used to ask (see Matt. 25:31-46). “The sheep are known to God,” they replied. “As for the goats – that means me.” There are three steps to be taken when reading Scripture. First, we reflect that what we have in Scripture is sacred history: the history of the world from the Creation, the history of God’s chosen people, the history of God Himself incarnate in Palestine, the history of the “wonderful works” (Acts 2:11) after Pentecost. We are never to forget that what we find in the Bible is not an ideology, not a philosophical theory, but a historical faith. Next, we observe the particularity, the specificity, of this sacred history. In the Bible we find God intervening at specific times and in particular places, entering into dialogue with individual humans. We see before us the distinctive calls issued by God to each different person, to Abraham, Moses, and David, to Rebekah and Ruth, to Isaiah and the prophets. We see God becoming incarnate once only, in
