To answer your question really depends on how it is understood.
If the first statement is a quid pro quo understanding.
IF I do this God MUST do that. Or IF I do all these things THEN Jesus will save me. Then the statement is false.
If, however, one asks if I feed the hungry, give drink to the thristy, clothed the naked, visited the sick, sheltered the stranger, ministered to those in prison in order to obtain salvation then I can answer yes and I would base my answer on the words of Christ regarding the judgment The witness of the Psalms, Proverbs, the Prophets, and the New Testament is that on the day of judgment we stand according to our works. What is written in the Book of Life, the Book of Judgment, what is written is what we have done, not what we have claimed, not what we have verbally or mentally affirmed, not what we have said, but what we have done, this activity.
So how to understand this? We must do all out of love. Sometimes love IS work.
The judgment, then, is on how we treat people. The judgment ultimately is love. Did we love our neighbor, our enemy? Did we love our fellow human beings? That’s it. That is it, because the commandment of God, the great and holy commandment, the Sh’ma Israel, is that you will love the Lord your God with all your mind, all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. That’s how it’s quoted in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, there’s no “mind,” because in Hebrew, “heart” and “mind” were the same thing, but in the New Testament, written in Greek, they add specifically “mind.” That means, of course, that we are to love God with everything we think, with everything that we desire, with everything that we know. With all our soul it means all our behavior, our life, our activity. Then with all our strength, meaning all the power that you have: your property, your money, your clout in society, whatever kind of power you have, particularly money, property. We have to love God with all those things: mind, soul, heart, and strength.
And then the second great commandment that goes with it from the Levitical code is that we are to love our neighbor as being our very own self. In other words, we find ourselves in our neighbor.
So the love of God is proved by the love of the neighbor, and this is said explicitly in I John, when he says how can we say we love God whom we do not see if we do not love the person next to us whom we do see. Anyone who claims that they love God and does not love the person next to them, according to St. John is just a liar. Just a liar. So the love has to be expressed to the human being. That’s where we show our love for God.
The same St. John, in his first letter, also said, “Let us love not in speech or in word, but in deed, in work, and in truth,” because the only way we can show that we are lovers is by how we act, how we behave. St. James says in the Scripture that that’s the only way we can prove we are believers. He said, “Show me your faith without your work.” You can’t do it. Faith without works is dead. The devil believes in God, but he does no works and therefore he shudders, the Apostle James says. So we have to act. We have to work.
Love has to be expressed in concrete, specific acts, and that is what the judgment is based on. However—and this is a very good case study to prove that you cannot isolate any texts of Scripture from the whole of Scripture; any texts must be read in the light of the whole scope of the entire Scripture—here when we think about this parable of the judgment, we have to know that those acts which express love, which are absolutely necessary—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, taking in the stranger, the homeless, visiting the sick and the imprisoned—those are acts that must express love. When they are done without love, they profit us nothing, as the Apostle Paul said, and they are nothing.
So we have to read Matthew 25 in the light of I Corinthians 13, where the Apostle Paul says not only, “If I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have all faith to move mountains and have knowledge of all the mysteries and have not love, I am nothing and it profits me nothing,” but he also says, “If I give everything I have to the poor, if I even give my body to be burned, and I’m not doing it out of love, then it profits me nothing.” And this is very frightening, because it is possible to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty and clothe the naked and shelter the homeless and visit the sick and the imprisoned without really having love for them.
St. John Climacus, of the Ladder, he said, “Why is it that some people who do so many beautiful, righteous acts when they are healthy—they visit sick people and they help homeless people—but once they get sick and they can’t do it any more, they turn into monsters.” They’re cranky, they’re bitter, they’re judgmental. He says, “Why is it?” Or why is it that a person who may be very virtuous in the world will enter a monastery and turn into a total terror? He said, “The reason is because the righteous activity while we were living among our fellows, incapable of working with them”—these are his words—“was irrigated by the putrid sewage of vainglory, of vanity.”
St. Cyprian of Carthage went so far to say we could even die as a martyr for Christ and not be saved because we can do that out of arrogance and vanity and pride and judgment of others. He said if a person dies a martyr out of self-will, not because he’s caught and persecuted, he violates the commandment and simply ends up in hell. So it’s very terrifying to think.
So yes, we can do things to obtain salvation but they must be done out of love not to obtain a reward. For by doing out of love we become like Christ, which is after all the goal of salvation. The goal is to be transformed into Someone not a goal to be spared from something.
