Author Fr. John Kavanaugh, SJ, and photographer Mev Puleo collaborated on a book, Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ (Orbis, 1991). Ms. Puleo was with a human rights delegation when she took this photo at a Guatemalan refugee camp in Mexico. Her work on behalf of our least brethren ended with her recent death from a brain tumor.
In addition to 25 years of preaching on the Gospels, I have spent the last three writing a column of Scripture commentary for the national Jesuit journal America. The column, always appearing on the last page, is called "The Word."
As I undertake the last of those columns, which will interpret the readings for the feast of Christ the King, this year on November 24, I invite Company's readers to enter with me the very Gospel passage in Matthew that first captured my imagination and has since led me deeper into the mystery of salvation: The story of the Last Judgment.
Matthew's great apocalyptic parable presents the glorified Son of Man, in an entourage of angels, rising in judgment before the world. The blessed and the lost will be separated according to one principle: the care of others.
Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 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, naked and you clothed me. I was ill and you comforted me, in prison and you came to visit me. (Matt. 25:34-36)
This proclamation, formulated four times in the course of the parable, is worth the repetitions. For, like many Gospel passages, we have heard the words so often that they seem ordinary, even though they are the most revolutionary claims about the human condition ever made.
In all the ways God has been revealed to high human consciousness, there has been one abiding theme: the dignity and value of the human person. The ancient Chinese may have been among the first to formulate it: never do to others what you would not have done to yourself. Archaic Babylonian law commanded that we speak kindness and show good will to others. The mighty Egyptians were told, "Terrorize not a human." Buddha reached enlightenment only when he embarked on the life of compassion as a Buddha for others. And Jewish revelation, parent of both Christianity and Islam, revealed the deepest foundations of the truth: "Male and female God created them; in God's own image were they created."
It was not nation that gave humans value, nor was it church or citizenship. It was not sinlessness or innocence that made our lives precious. It was not that we were unwanted or attractive, old or young, rich or poor, powerful or helpless. It was the fact that men and women were the living images of God--the only image of God allowed to us, created for covenant, capable of freedom, empowered to love and be loved.
For Christians, this revelation of God reached its fullest realization in the Incarnation: our very God becomes flesh of human flesh for the sake of humanity, for our deliverance and preservation. Thus it is appropriate that the Gospel according to Matthew, immediately before the narrative of Jesus' passion and death, presents the scene of the Last Judgment as a strategic metaphor wherein the least human person is identified with the Lord of History.
On one level of interpretation, this parable is an indictment of humanity's violent resistance to God's revelation. In our own century millions have been killed in the Middle East for the sake of homeland and nation. Eleven million Hindu and Muslim were slaughtered at the very dawn of Indian independence. Twenty million were wiped out in the purgations of Communist China. Rwanda and Serbia sink under tidal waves of blood.
Away from the fields of war, streets and video screens are playgrounds of aggression. Decisions to terminate the unborn and the afflicted are functions of mere choice and preference, rather than any intrinsic claim that persons may have on our allegiance. And the wealthiest nations of the world, for the most part Christian, traffic in Barbie dolls, Calvin Klein diapers, and video games while hosts of children languish.
Before our own times entire tribes of indigenous peoples were wiped out in North and South America, sacrificed on altars of gold. Jews were banished or forcibly converted long before the abominable "final solution" wielded in a "civilized" country. Men, women, and children of every color and tribe were bound, traded, and killed upon birth, such was their disvalue. Protestant and Catholic warred against each other, sly atheists slaughtered White Russians, and ideologues trained in the universities of France beheaded Cambodians.
To such a bleak history, the Lord of History has spoken: "As often as you have done this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done it to me." But do any, even Christians, attend to the words? Are we more adept at repressing than at enacting the Gospel?
Like all Holy Scripture, the parable of the end times is a judgment on the world. In the litany of human mayhem, we dismember the body of Christ. "You have done it to me." The starving, the unwanted old and unborn, the criminal, those of wrong color, ideology, sex, nation, class--whatever category rendering a person "least" in our minds--bear the face of Jesus.
This judgment of God is a moral command as well. In the eyes of Christ's followers, the bodies of the wounded and murdered carry within them the holy of holies. The killing of them is an abomination. All wars are thereby unholy. Any "choice" to kill a human being is an ungodly act.
This is how grave the Gospel's challenge is. It is so awesome, Christians pretend not to hear it. Fervid humanists or Marxists in their wildest dreams have never approached its revolutionary vision. They would rather think religion is pie in the sky.
But the story is more radical yet. For the parable is not just a revelation of the crisis of history and a call to active love. It is an invitation to personal recognition and acceptance. In all of our relations we encounter God. Our spouses, our children, our neighbor all count as "the least." Every wife who has comforted her husband, every father who gave joy to his child, every friend who has consoled a companion, every mother who has fed her infant or held the dying has encountered the Lord. We suspect our commonplace actions to be insignificant and stale. They are eternal opportunities. As often as we have truly loved, we have loved God.
Still-deeper truths are discovered when Christ's realm is entered. Each one of us, we find, counts as the least. We all bear the countenance of the Most High, no matter how diminished or disvalued we or anyone else may think. We are bodies of Christ. Gerard Manley Hopkins's words, "For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his," reach for the truth, although we actually are his eyes and limbs. Every act of Holy Communion reaffirms the truth: Christ assumes our flesh as his own.
Scripture, in its greatest depth, is not merely a moral challenge or a judgment on the world. Nor is it a program for political or social action or a self-help book. It is, rather, an account of the mystery of salvation that grounds all challenge and judgment, motivates all action, and makes possible the acceptance of our truth as redeemed sinners.
Thus, the parable of the last judgment reveals as much about the nature of God as it does about the course of human affairs. For Christ, the Word of God made human flesh, speaks to the Father as intimately and urgently as he speaks to us. At the end of history, his words are spoken to the God of eternity: "Whatsoever you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do unto me." Truly, these are the words whereby we are sent. But wondrously, they are also the words wherein we are saved.
The act of reading, writing about, or preaching on Scripture is always dependent upon our openness to it as God's very word to us, despite historical conditions, cultural prejudice, or hermeneutical nuances. There is a truth God is trying to get into our minds and hearts. The question is, Do we accept it?
What if, in our thinking, our praying, and our writing about Scripture, we accepted it as if it were real? What if the Word of God is actually true on all levels of our lives: true for a world of nations, politics, and economies; true for our relations with each other; true for each of us in our hearts; true of God? If we enter wholeheartedly into the realm of God's Word, we will finally understand the soaring words of Paul: "Christ must reign until God has put all enemies under his feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death."
Page maintained by R VandeVelde, vande@math.luc.edu. Updated: Fri., January 17 1997
