Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter
by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets”.

(MATTHEW 7:12)

“It’s interesting to note that in the famous text on the Final Judgment in the Gospel where Jesus describes how God will divide the sheep from the goats on the basis of how they treated the poor, neither group – those who did it correctly and those who didn’t – actually knew what they were doing.

The group who did it right stated they didn’t know that in touching the poor they were touching Christ. The group that got it wrong protested that had they known that Christ was in the poor, they would have reached out. Jesus assures us it doesn’t matter. Mature discipleship lies simply in the doing, regardless of our conscious attitude.

We need to be alert not just to our conscious attitudes but to what we are actually doing. We can – in all sincerity, in all good conscience, in all good heart – be blind toward justice and the poor. We can be moral men and women, pious churchgoers, generous donors to those who ask help from us, and warm to our own families and friends. Yet at the same time we can be blind to ourselves, though not to the poor; be unhealthily elitist, subtle racists, callous toward the environment, and protective to our own privilege. We are still good persons no doubt, but the absence of compassion in one are of our lives leaves us limping morally.
 

How will our goodness be judged? How do we treat the poor, and how well do we love our enemies?” (9).