With God there are never halfway measures, and when with loving compassion he descends into the womb of Mary, he takes on our flesh, all of it. God loses himself in love for his own creation. This exquisite loving “lostness” of God is who Jesus is. And in today’s Gospel this compassionate “lostness” of Jesus is given new pitch and poignancy as he identifies himself completely with those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned or strangers: “ ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ ” These words of the Lord were in the first place directed to all those who cared for his first disciples. Nonetheless, in the prayer and pondering of countless generations, Jesus’ words have been amplified, broadened and understood to include any and all “least ones;” who are to be esteemed as sacraments of his presence among us. How many saints and holy founders, and brave missionaries have heard these words of Jesus and put everything else aside to serve him in his least brothers and sisters.
Indeed, God has lost himself into the very fiber of our ordinariness, clothed himself with our wounded, sin-ridden humanity, all of its pain, its sorrow and neediness. He has infused all of it, all of our precarity and desperation, with his very own Self. And so he assures us that we will encounter him in the least the lowest and the last.
I recall the story of a young woman dishing out soup, a sandwich and a generous helping of dessert for a homeless man at a soup kitchen in Providence. She is vibrant and kind and greets him so warmly. The poor old guy is puzzled; accustomed to being avoided and unseen, he is completely baffled by her attention and says, “Wow. You must know me.” He has at last been seen, recognized.
How will I ever learn that I need not, must not avoid those who are in need, no matter how distressing, even repugnant, the poor one I am liable to miss in my world, here in this house, in my prayer, in my heart, in my mirror? Day in day out, all those photographs in the newspaper, always rubble, a little child sobbing, another old woman in a hijab or a babushka sad, displaced, mourning a dear one lost in war, pictures I get tired of looking at but that I must see and allow my heart to be wrenched, my prayer expanded.
We remember dear Saint Francis, realizing one day that he must embrace a leper, the one he had shunned as the most repugnant outcast. Soon after this embrace, Francis will hide in a cave and cry his heart out, grieving over his past sins. In the leper he has come dangerously, wonderfully close to the trauma of bitter self-recognition, the place, the reality to be avoided at all costs has become the scene of encounter, healing and freedom. In the repugnant leper, Francis has embraced his wounded brother, his wounded self, the wounded Christ. Jesus was there, of all places, in his “distressing disguise." It is compassion that leads to this union and intimacy, recognizing God most high who has become God most lowly.
Today’s Gospel scene is often referred to as the scene of Final Judgment; perhaps more than that, it is the scene of final consummation when Christ as King is revealed as All in all, the Axis of all creation, when all divisions are finally abolished, and we understand our co-inherence in Him and in one another. The damnation, the curse Jesus speaks of at the close of today’s Gospel, is perhaps most of all the misery of blindness to his presence, the lack of recognition, which results in a failure of compassion. For all sin is simply blindness or worse, refusal to even look and notice Christ Jesus coming to us disguised in ten thousand places, “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” through the features of our own faces. A God who is not in competition with his creation, but so in love with it all that he has lost himself within it.
Far beyond Ezekiel’s wildest dream in today’s First Reading, God Most High has not only come down to shepherd his sheep but has become himself the wounded Lamb. He has taken on the worst we have to offer, clothed forever in the flesh of our sin-ridden nature, and it is there that we can find and truly recognize him. The Lamb of God, pierced, forever full of holes, those marks of his love, disguised forever as one of his own wounded sheep. Beyond our imagining, well beyond Ezekiel’s vision, beyond imagination, Jesus enfleshes the self-forgetful love that God is in Trinity. Jesus only exists within the reality of this self-forgetfulness of God. And this, above all, is what God has done for us in Christ, what he is doing for us even now- incessantly giving himself away to us.
And so once again this morning we are invited into the understated amplitude of Christ’s Kingship. We may name him King and Messiah, only if we remember that he has redefined the concept - through his nonviolence, his welcome of sinners and outsiders and above all by his free acceptance of persecution and death. Where is Christ as King is finally enthroned? On the hard wood of the cross, humiliated, mocked, bleeding out, wearing the only crown we ever gave him, one made of thorns. There he shows us how far God will go to prove his love.
King is a title Jesus most often avoided. Still king is a title we need, especially today, when leaders routinely “lie without restraint, tread human rights under foot and rely on violence to get their way.” Celebrating Christ Jesus as our King, we expose all of that, its falsehood and offensiveness. Jesus our wounded King, the Lord of compassion goes before us; he leads by falling down, being spat upon, shoved and tortured. Not to teach us how to be doormats but showing us how to absorb hurt because God is beside us, within us, showing us the path to life and fullness of joy.
In humble disguise, Christ Jesus comes to us, truly present in the afflicted and the needy, but ever and always worshipped and consumed only in the Blessed Sacrament we are about to share. A “sacramental realism” impels us in both directions. For if I have not noticed him in the refectory or passing in the cloister, or when I went to the dentist there in the waiting room; if I haven’t noticed him in the check-out line at the Big Y when on a brief shopping errand, I have little chance of recognizing him in a small morsel of broken Bread or a sip of Wine from the chalice. “When did we see you?” We are desperately hungry for this Holy Communion so that our blindness may be healed, and we may see him.
Only true love for Christ our King can sustain us in lives that are too often hard, obscure and laborious. Only the love of Christ Jesus our King keeps and guards us within these walls. Nothing else- no one else- is worth our whole selves, all we have to give.
For all that I have held back for myself in selfishness and fear, please join me in begging his forgiveness, as we prepare to celebrate these most sacred Mysteries.
