Sunday Reflection_26th Sunday
For a long time I was uncomfortable with the parable that Jesus tells in today’s gospel. It seemed to me that the rich man really didn’t DO anything that was bad, and the poor man really didn’t DO anything that was meritorious. So why should the rich man end up in hell and the poor man in heaven?
Then in 2009 I attended the Parliament of World Religions held here in Melbourne. One of the sessions I went to was on contemporary Judaism. There were four rabbis making the presentation. I could not help feeling when it was over that Jesus would have been right at home among them; they were saying many of the same things that Jesus said.
After the presentation there was a young man who said to the panel: “I was born a Jew but was not brought up one. However I am now trying to recover my faith. But people keep asking me: what does it mean to be a Jew? I have four rabbis now in front of me; can you please tell me in one sentence what does it mean to be a Jew?” One rabbi got up very quickly, went to the microphone and said: “That is easy: Love your neighbour as yourself; that is what it means to be a Jew.” It was the same answer that Jesus probably would have given in those circumstances.
I realized then that the people who were listening to Jesus’ parable would have understood immediately why Jesus put the rich man in hell and the poor man in heaven. It was not because of something the rich man did. Rather it was something he DIDN’T DO. The rich man didn’t do anything about the poor man who sat daily at his door, and so he broke the second most important law in the Torah: love your neighbour as yourself.
We can, I think, easily enough feel guilty about some of the things we DO; but it is not so easy to feel guilty about the things that we DON’T DO. Sometimes we do nothing because we just don’t notice the needs of others, or we think someone else should be attending to their needs, or we don’t want to get involved. Or perhaps we can feel that “love your neighbour as yourself” is a nice ideal, but it certainly is not a commandment that we “have to do”. And yet today’s parable only makes sense if Jesus is implying that we are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we don’t do.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta recently became St. Teresa of Calcutta. She had been a teacher. But it was when she saw that no one was doing anything for the lepers, the sick and the dying in Calcutta that she decided to do something. The Sisters in her Congregation have continued to care for people that others often don’t even see or certainly feel responsible for.
One of our SVD priests, Edgar Blain, was looking after some lepers living near-by the school where he was working in India. He wanted to be more involved with them, and so he went to Calcutta to talk with Mother Teresa. He recounted his experience of being with the Sisters in these words: When I got to her (Mother Teresa’s) place, luckily she was at home. When I said to her that I had come to see her on behalf of lepers, immediately she said, “Father, come into the parlour”. When I explained more fully why I had come to see her, she said, “We have five mobile clinics, each of which has a Sister and a driver, and they go to certain places in Calcutta at a certain time on a regular basis, so that the poor people know where they can go for medicine. At the moment one of these mobile clinics is free and I will ask the Sister and the driver to take you to one of the leper colonies”. She arranged this and the Sister and the driver took me to a leper colony. At the entrance of the colony there was a leper living in a “house” as big and as high as a kitchen table. She bent down and talked to a man in the “house” telling him that both of us had come to visit him. I bent down to see and greet the leper. I greeted him, but I couldn’t see him. It was black inside the “house”. After a little while we walked away from the “house”. I said to the Sister, “You talked very kindly to that leper.” Looking at me with a faint look of surprise on her face she said, “Didn’t you know? I was talking to Jesus.” To explain her statement further, she said, “If I cut someone’s fingernails, they are Jesus’ fingernails. If I give someone a glass of water, I am giving it to Jesus.”
We are commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves, and for this we are responsible.