“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” (Mt 25:35-6)
In today’s gospel Jesus is a King who loves and cares for the poor.
Truly the words of Psalm 72 are fulfilled in him:
“O God, with your judgment endow the king,
and with your justice, the king’s son…
He shall defend the afflicted among the people,
save the children of the poor, and crush the oppressor…..
For he shall rescue the poor man when he cries out,
and the afflicted when he has no one to help him.
He shall have pity for the lowly and the poor;
the lives of the poor he shall save.
From fraud and violence he shall redeem them,
and precious shall their blood be in his sight.”
And in today’s Gospel Jesus is also a surprisingly new kind of King, one who not only cares for the poor but who identifies with them. ‘I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was ill, I was a stranger, I was a prisoner----and you cared for me. Yes, it was precisely me you cared for when you cared for the afflicted one in your midst.’
This is a gospel that has a powerful capacity to prick the conscience, to make us ponder urgently how we have cared for the poor. It can prick the conscience of the contemplative even more so since we have no apostolate that embraces one form or another of the afflictions that beset human beings. But we should not forget that the King is not only caring for but also identifying with the poor ones. This is where we are meant to find our place in the parable. We are called to be the poor ones with whom Jesus identifies. We are called not to be satiated with the goods of this world but to use them only insofar as we need them, so that nothing will dull our inner hunger and thirst for God. We are called to be strangers to worldly ways so that we may be at home in the ways of God, in his tenderheartedness, his humility, his embrace of the cross. We are called to be prisoners of love, to be hemmed in by what the worldly escape: responsibility for others. As the Rule of St. Benedict says, quoting St. Paul: “Let no one consider what is useful for oneself but rather what benefits the other.” We are called to be ill in the sense that it is humanly inevitable to be so sometimes, and when it strikes us we should embrace it as a poor one---not with anger or resentment or complaining, but with trust in God and identification with the sufferings of Christ. When we enter into these human afflictions with faith we will find an identification with and closeness to Jesus that is worth the loss of everything. Interior poverty has a rough entrance but within it there is nothing so much like the kingdom of heaven. This is where our King lives, here in great poverty of spirit.
Here is a passage from the study of St. Francis of Assisi, The Wisdom of the Poor One of Assisi by Eloi Leclerc. It describes his experience of Good Friday at the time of seemingly great failure: “Now, while he was saying the words, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ he was seized as never before by the feeling of extreme abandonment wrung from the Savior himself. All of a sudden, Francis felt as one with Christ, painfully one. Never before had he understood these words as he did now. They were no longer foreign. For months he had searched for the face of God. For months he had lived with the impression that God was gone from him and from his order. The agony of the Son---now he knew something of what it was. Why, it was the absence of the Father, a feeling of failure, an inevitable and absurd unfolding of events when those with a will for good are swept away and crushed by an interplay of inexorable forces.
The words of the Psalm slowly penetrated his soul. It did not hurl Francis back on himself, not did it encompass him in his suffering. On the contrary, it made him receptive in the very depths of his being to the suffering of Christ. He felt that he had never contemplated this suffering except from the outside. Now he was seeing it from within…It had been a long time since he had first desired to imitate the Lord in a total way. Since his conversion, he had striven toward this goal relentlessly. Yet, he could see clearly at this moment that in spite of all his efforts, he still did not know what it was like to become completely like the Lord, or how far the experience could go…To follow Christ barefoot, clothed in one tunic, without staff, without purse, without provisions---surely this was something. But it was only a beginning, a starting point. Now he must follow it to the end and, like Christ, permit himself to be led by God across an abyss of abandonment to taste in hideous solitude the atrocious death of the Son of God.”
This absolute oneness or identification with Christ that Francis entered, this is the way of the poor. God’s power is at its best in this poverty, more powerful even than when we help the poor. At the end of the book the author again lets Francis speak, “People are not saved by works, however good they may be, but rather, they themselves have to become the work of God. They must make themselves more formless and malleable in the hands of the Creator than clay is in the hands of the potter…They must be more desolate and abandoned than the dead wood of the forest in the heart of winter. Only by starting from this pitiful condition and avowing complete poverty of spirit can people offer a boundless trust to God, confiding to God the absolute initiative of their existence and of their salvation. They then embrace a holy obedience and become a child playing the divine game of creation.”
May we always be the poor ones with whom Jesus can identify. May his kingly power which is at its best in weakness have its way in us precisely because we are poor, and may his way in us be a blessing for the Church and for the whole world.
Image: Christo LI (Grey Shroud), by J. Kirk Richards