Mtr Mary Trainor

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” —Matthew 25:40

Dear friend,

If you’re anything like me, and if we’re honest, there are some parts of walking the Way of Love with Jesus that are just harder than others.

Many of the hard parts involve other people. It’s easy enough to love, forgive, tend, feed, visit with those who are agreeable, smell good, are grateful and kind, and who do loving things in return. But our ministries often put us together with people who challenge us in one way or another.

And what are we called to do? Love them anyway, feed them anyway, forgive them anyway, and so on. And yet...

A Bishop I knew offered a handy tool for this dilemma. He said to conjure up a picture of however it is we see Jesus, and overlay that image onto the face of the bothersome person. Then, he said, act accordingly.

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these … you did it to me.”

Our Office Gospel today is the classic passage from Matthew (25:31-46) that suggests how we treat the “least of these” among us is how we treat God. 

Matthew contains much language of judgment and outer darkness and weeping and gnashing of teeth. And it also contains this beautiful template of ministry, how we are to walk the Way of Love—which is to take care of God’s family. In Matthew 25, love is not an abstraction, but the down-in-the-trenches caring for one another in our most basic needs.

This comes within an account of “the king” sorting us out to the right and to the left. The right ones being those who took care of the king’s family in all their desperate needs; the left ones are those whose cold hearts turn aside from need and want.

It seems to me that when God considers the breadth of humanity—the right and the left and everything in between—there is a spark of recognition when gazing upon those who best reflect God's own nature.

And for my vote, nowhere in scripture is it clearer as to what God’s nature looks like than it is in Matthew 25: offer food, drink, welcome, and clothing; tend the sick, visit those imprisoned. No matter what.

Though we cannot do this perfectly, I believe our desire to reflect God’s nature does, in fact, please God, to borrow an idea from Thomas Merton.

What’s next is a lifetime of trying to move closer and closer to incorporating that nature into our own. And when we encounter people who make that difficult, let’s overlay the face of Jesus onto theirs, and act accordingly.

It may be helpful and humbling to consider that they just may be overlaying Jesus’ face onto ours.

Mtr. Mary
...while Fr. Robert is away.