Monday, Week of 1 Lent

“for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35-36).

In this reading, Jesus tells us that the righteous (the sheep) will be at his right hand, while the wicked (the goats) will be cast out into eternal punishment. The reason he gives to both groups is that they took care of him when he needed it.

Both sets of people do not understand when this happened: surely, Lord, we have never done, or not done, those things for you? Surely we would remember meeting you, would remember that you were in need? When did we ever help or ignore you?

Jesus answers them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (25:40).

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Jesus chooses for his brethren the lowly and the needy; we would never ‘see’ Jesus in them if we were looking for him. It’s a strange concept that you can ‘do unto’ one person by your actions toward someone else entirely. Ordinarily, we would never say that was true: if you help your neighbor with his problems, you’re not helping your mother at the same time, right?

But Jesus thinks differently. Jesus thinks that because he loves these people, in fact loves all people, the way that we treat them affects him. He is angry if we mistreat them, and happy when we treat them well. It is to him that we do these things because he has chosen to be involved in their lives, to care about what happens to them. Ultimately, they belong to him, and so how any of his children is treated becomes a reflection of how we are treating him.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and we are told that we cannot possibly love the God we have not seen if we do not love the neighbour whom we have seen. Jesus is there with each and every human being, making our interactions with each other a reflection of how we receive God’s love in the other. Do we treat the other with dignity and respect, recognizing that they are worthy because God loves them? Or do we scorn those who don’t appeal to us, privileging ourselves over the other and scorning God’s love for them as somehow unimportant?

The truth is that no one can earn a place at God’s right hand – it is a free gift given by the One who made and loves us. But there is also no room in God’s kingdom for those who are unwilling to love, because a heart that is not open to the needs of another is not open to God, either.

During Lent, let us strive to see Jesus in others, that we may come to see each interaction as an opportunity to love God, to be open to God’s healing, and to give glory to the Name of Jesus to whom all our lives belong.