Mystics and spiritual giants have invoked it for centuries. In trying to get disciples to love one another, they have postulated that Christ lurks among us, unseen. If he is my brother and sister, I have to be on the alert because when I look at them, they are all I see. And yet, we are to love God, whom we do not see, in the same way we love our neighbor.
When his critics asked Jesus who was their neighbor, he gave them one of the New Testament’s most beloved parables, the Good Samaritan. Preachers have explained that in the Lord’s time, Samaritans were children of Abraham shunned partially because they were not ethnically pure. They were descendents of Israelites intermarrying with gentiles brought into captive Samaria by hostile Assyrians eight centuries before.
Archeologists have uncovered roads that took travelers miles out of their way between Galilee and Judea to avoid these social lepers rather than traveling through their land. It was not too much trouble for the prejudiced to add a day to their trip, just to evade the unclean and undesirable. Jesus remarked that it was the lone Samaritan leper who returned to thank him when the other nine went their ways, cleansed and restored.
Radical Catholic Dorothy Day, whose case for canonization is in Rome, wrote in her From Union Square to Rome, “It is impossible for any of those who has real charity in his heart not to serve Christ. Even some of those who think they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him; for Jesus is disguised and masked in the midst of men, hidden among the poor, among the sick, among prisoners, among strangers. Many who serve Him officially have never known who he was, and many who do not even know his name will hear in the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy.”
It seems blasphemous that Jesus is that prisoner. Prisoners are in jail because they broke the law. Yet Jesus was imprisoned, and he died as a capital offender between two thieves. It was he who said that what we do to the least of his brothers and sisters we do to him.
Blessed Teresa of Calcutta speaks in a similar vein in her A Gift of God: Prayers and Meditations. “If sometimes our poor people have to die of starvation it is not because God did not care for them, but because you and I didn’t give, were not instruments of love, in the hands of God, to give them that bread, to give them that clothing; because we did not recognize him when once more Christ came in that distressing disguise – in the hungry man, in the lonely man, in the homeless child, and seeking for shelter.”
These two powerful women shared the stage in Philadelphia at the 1976 Eucharistic Congress. They had long since spent themselves seeking out the hidden Christ in, as Day called them, the “down and outers,” who could be found in the huge slums of Calcutta and everywhere. But they would be the first to caution us not to devoutly look past, or through, the neighbor in the search for the Lord. We cannot find him if we ignore the person who is he. We do not consider the unfortunate person merely the vehicle for our devotion who may be dispensed with, the way we do with a candy wrapper.
“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen,” 1 John 4, 20. The love of all others was the love with which Jesus confounded his critics, equating it with the love of God. Rabbis hundreds of years before Christ had argued which of the 613 legal prescriptions of the Torah was the most important. How could this unschooled preacher from the backwoods of Galilee answer what they could not? He cited Deuteronomy when he called for the primacy of the love of God. One faction in the crowd was ready to pounce on him for taking the easy way out: It’s quite easy to say we love God. But he astonished them when he brought to the same level of imperative the Leviticus injunction about love of neighbor.
The Lord is much closer than we thought. Can we, will we recognize him?
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