Revering the wounds of Christ
In the story of the judgement of the sheep and the goats in the Gospel of Matthew we are taken a further step in our meditations. Both groups are told that their response to the suffering of the hungry, the homeless, the imprisoned and others among the forgotten and the injured is their response to Christ. When,in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is knocked off his high horse by the Light that shines more brightly than the Noonday Sun, he is told by the one that he rightly addresses as ‘Lord” that he is persecuting Christ in persecuting the church.
Christ has taken upon himself all of human suffering. Whenever you see human suffering you see Christ’s continuing suffering. Pascal said “Christ is on the cross until the end of the world.” What we do to the insulted and the injured of the world we do to Christ.In the end we are either on the cross with Christ or we are among his crucifiers.This is why, in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, when the holy staretz, Father Zosima, enters the room and perceives the great sufferings ahead for Dimitri Karamazov, he falls on the ground and reveres those sufferings. He reveres them because they are the wounds of Christ.
James rebukes the Christians of his day for prefering the rich to the poor. Unfortunately this distortion of Christian praxis has not disappeared. The mainstream churches of the modern West are generally churches of the professional middle class.The poor and other sufferers are not treated as icons of Christ but as defective people who need to be straightened out by professionals or as objects of cheap and uninvolved ‘charitable’ acts that are nothing more than contemporary analogues of Lady Bountiful wrapping Christmas packages for the faithful poor. There’s no extension of friendship and solidarity.And what we do to such is what we do to Christ.
May God bring us all to see that our only hope of salvation lies in our recognition that we too are the poor and the needy. That we must deliberately enter into solidarity with them because we in fact are one with them. And since all suffering is the suffering of Christ it is there where we can find our Lord and worship him.
-Frank Valdez
