We may avoid people who are needy, sick or imprisoned, but those are situations in which we see Jesus in our midst
We’ve all been in a group conversation involving someone who wasn’t present. To our surprise, the person we’ve been talking about came up and tried to join the group. The conversation either immediately stopped or the topic was changed.
Do you remember how that felt? There was probably some initial relief, glad that we could change the subject or become silent before the person discovered what we were talking about. Following that, there was probably some guilt because we knew we shouldn’t be talking about others behind their backs. But do we change our behavior?
We’ve probably also experienced being in a group of people and talking about the desires that come from the worst part of ourselves. We’ve talked with those one or two special people about what it would be like if we could rule the world, if we could make people do what we want, if we could get rid of certain groups of people or if we could finally get the break in life that everybody else seems to get.
When Jesus asks His disciples about the nature of their conversation, they are honest with Him, knowing that a lesson will probably follow. The lesson was perhaps a surprise to all of them. Using a child as the center of attention and encouraging His disciples to become like children would’ve been very surprising. Children may have been seen as a gift for the future, but certainly not for the present moment. Some of us even learned that we should be seen but not heard. Why would we be kind to a child in the way that Jesus suggests?
Jesus, being the wise person that He is, knows that those conversations are usually rooted in arrogance, superiority or revenge. He knows that welcoming and loving a child necessitates putting down that arrogance and superiority and paying attention to someone who will take a lot from us with seemingly so little to offer in return. But Jesus stretches the teaching even further. Not only are we to welcome the child, but when we welcome that young person, we are welcoming Jesus into our midst.
We hear this kind of teaching in other places in Scripture, and it might be good for us to pay attention, especially when we are experiencing such divisiveness. Jesus tells us that we will find Him in those situations we don’t ordinarily think of as holy. The places where we will meet Jesus are often the places where we find inconveniences. The places where we will find Jesus are often the places where our judgments and arrogance seem to be at the highest.
Jesus says that we are guaranteed to see and experience Him in the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the lonely, the sick and the imprisoned. Pause for a moment to think about this. Has it been our experience that we seek out this kind of person because we want to meet Jesus, or are these the people we try to avoid? Isn’t it true that we tend to be judgmental and feel superior to many people in these situations?
Is our goal in life to be right and superior and in control? Is our goal to be one with others, especially those most in need? Is our number one priority in life to get as much as we can out of it so that we feel secure and protected? Is it our job to voluntarily empty ourselves for the sake of those who need what we have?
This weekend, we have the following sentence from the letter of St. James: “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice.” It seems like a very important time to make sure that our interior motives and ambitions are in line with what Jesus is trying to teach us. Are we spending more time worrying about what we look like on the outside rather than what comes from inside of us and bears fruit in the world?
Father Donald Wester is retired and serves as lecturer of homiletics at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary.
