“Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). 

This blog attempts to continue the conversation in last week’s blog, referring to the fact that the way we relate to God develops and changes in different times and contexts. Its thesis is that an individualistic approach to God, for all the good it has done in the past, is not adequate for people to find union with God in today’s world. The Holy Spirit, himself, is offering us an alternative: i.e. that we deliberately and consciously make our journey to God with others: If we reach union with God, we only do so with others. 

I well remember a highly respected, observant and experienced monk of our community speaking about the mistake that people make when they decide – not to love their neighbour for himself or herself – but because they want to love “Jesus” in their neighbour. He explained that, what we must do is actually to love the other person, as a human being, and if we thought, primarily, about loving Jesus in the other, we were ‘forcing it’, ‘manipulating the situation’ and not really ‘being simple, straight forward, and human”.  

That argument to me was very compelling and understandable, all the more so because that monk and I had a good relationship. Yet, Jesus spoke the opening words of the blog, above, and also, when he appeared to Saul on the way to Damascus, he said to him: “Saul, Saul, why  you persecuting me?” I do not like to dismiss the words of Jesus despite what my friend had said. 

In practice over the years, it has sometimes been a struggle for me to put myself out for the other when he, or she, is someone to whom I find it hard to relate. Whenever I was able to manage it, it was because the words of Our Lord helped me: I was doing it for him, in that person. It was also a matter of relating to that person, as a human being. This way of acting led me many times to resolve difficulties with others, and I am glad I followed that way. Yet I have always had, at the back of my mind, what my fellow monk friend said. 

In the meantime, the famous saying in John’s epistles “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4: 12), has only reinforced my conviction that the way to love God is to love my neighbour, and in this way we may achieve even the highest contemplation. This does not take away the value of quiet hours of prayer alone with God. However it is easy to ‘kid myself’ that I am in contemplative union with God, when I say to Him: “Dear God (or Jesus) I love you!” and then I fail to “love” or put myself out for my difficult companion, who needs my attention. St. John understood this, for later on in the same chapter, he writes: “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen”, (1 John 4; 20). 

The Holy Spirit is calling us, in today’s world, to be in the highest contemplation, but immersed in this world. It is a great help to achieve this high aim, by living the present moment to the full. 

Living the present moment well is not easy; all of us are so easily distracted from what is ‘the one thing necessary’, for a host of reasons. One of those reasons for me is not having the awareness of my constant need for God, and his love, in each day – whether I feel up, or down; and the spiritual and mental effort, under the grace of God, to achieve that attitude of mind, at least in my case, is not over yet.

Recently, I came across the following words by a Bishop I knew, personally. His name was Klaus Hemmerle, and he was Bishop of Aachen, in Germany, a philosopher above all, and a Bishop who worked, tirelessly, for ‘The Kingdom’. What he writes here has resolved my difficulty between listening to the words of Jesus and listening to my monk friend.

Bishop Klaus Hemmerle of Aachen, in Germany

 Bishop Klaus was always ‘on the go’, engaging with people, never still for long. This good man lived, and died, for communion, or unity, in the Church; he enlightens me about the challenge presented at the beginning of this short blog. Loving Jesus, in the other, is to love the other as a person, in his, or her, own right. 

“Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40): 

‘This Word tells us definitely what the human person is and what the human reality is … This interpretation of what it is to be human is certainly scandalous, and no less than Jesus who scandalized people by declaring himself the Son of God. In the name of their own freedom, in the name of their own identity and specialness, people feel they must protest against being identified with Jesus Christ. People wish to be loved for themselves, for what they are, and don’t want to be degraded to a kind of mask for Jesus. They fear instead that the ‘something more’ of love that they receive for love of Jesus will be something that takes no account of them, something that puts them to one side, something that robs them of the love they desire for themselves and which they need. But any whose love is such that by loving Jesus in the other person they neglect the other as a person, in this act neglect Jesus as well. And any whose consideration of the presence of Jesus in people leads them to diminish the reality of the human being, in reality have not understood in the slightest the presence of Jesus in their neighbour. 

Jesus makes himself one with me, that is, he does not leave me alone. He is on my side in a radical fashion, he accepts me just as I am, and anything that concerns me concerns him too. I remain myself, I become fully myself, precisely because I do not remain alone. 

The mystery of Christ is the mystery of every human being. What does this mean for the person I meet and what does it mean for me and my life? With reference to the other it means I am never involved with someone who is just a link in a chain or a cog in a machine or merely a cipher amidst the huge mass of human material. Every time I meet a human face, I meet God in the unconditional reality of the divine, I meet the voice that over this human face utters what was said of Jesus on the mountain of Transfiguration: ‘This is my Son, the Beloved!’ (Mk 9:7). There are no exceptions. 

We meet Christ especially in the least, in those who seem the furthest from him, in persons where the face of Christ seems blanked out. How can this be? On the cross, living his forsakenness by God, making himself even sin (2 Cor. 5:21), Jesus identified himself with all that was most distant from God, from all that most seems opposed to God. Only by discovering Christ in our neighbours, in those furthest from the mystery of their own personhood and from the mystery of Christ, giving to the person that human love which is offered in an undivided way to the person and to Christ himself, can our neighbours discover their own identity with Jesus, their closeness to him, their being fully assumed by him.”

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