In our Gospel readings for the past two Sundays, the theme of light has featured prominently. Two Sundays ago, we heard from Isaiah via Matthew, that “the people who sit darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has risen.”1 Then, last week, on the Feast of the Presentation, also known as "Candlemas," from Luke’s Gospel we heard the infant Jesus proclaimed by the old man Simeon as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles.”2
The theme of light seems fitting today as the days slowly grow longer but are still rather short. About now I suppose we all feel like we could use a little more light. The good news, my friends, is that there is a light that shines in darkness: Jesus Christ.
In today’s Gospel not only does Jesus tell us to shine his light on others, he tells us how to do it: by performing good deeds.3 As to which good deeds we are to perform, we can turn to our first reading from Isaiah: feeding the hungry, providing shelter to both the homeless and the oppressed, and clothing the naked.4
Giving shelter to the oppressed and downtrodden speaks directly to treating those who migrate, often fleeing dangerous and violent circumstances, not only with dignity but with compassion. Nothing is more “biblical” than welcoming the stranger from beginning to end. It is by performing such deeds that, according to the scripture, “your light shall break forth like the dawn.”5
Followers of Jesus can have no truck with the kind of unwelcoming nationalism that is growing more and more prevalent in our own country and throughout the world. This is not a political assertion. It is an assertion that arises from the heart of the Gospel as expressed in both the Scriptures and the Church’s magisterium.
For Christians, there is no “us” and “them.” There is only “us.” Where there remains a “them,” followers of Jesus seek to overcome the division by building fraternity in order to establish a civilization of love. Time and again Pope Francis has called on us to create a “culture of encounter.”
In his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), which he insists is the charter of his pontificate, Pope Francis tells us that to truly encounter an Other means “to accept and esteem them as companions along the way, without interior resistance.”6 Moreover, the Holy Father continues, encountering the other “means learning to find Jesus in [their] faces…, in their voices, in their pleas.”7 If necessary, he asserts, we must be prepared to suffer “in the embrace of the crucified Jesus whenever we are unjustly attacked or meet with ingratitude, never tiring of our decision to live in fraternity.”8
Our responsorial today, taken from Psalm 112, sets forth what it means to be a righteous or just person, the kind of person we learn earlier in Saint Matthew’s Gospel Saint Joseph was.9 The righteous person is “merciful and just” and gives lavishly to the poor.10 This is why the just person “is a light in darkness.”11
Oftentimes we make the Gospel about many things. Like barnacles on a seaborne vessel, the Gospel sometimes is bogged down with many accretions, things that are secondary, tertiary, or beside the point altogether. We elevate secondary things while ignoring what is primary. Fundamentally, the Gospel of Jesus Christ consists of Two Great Commandments: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”12 According to Jesus in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”13
In fact, you love God with your entire being by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. Who is your neighbor? According to Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of the Gospel, you “neighbor is not your beloved, for whom you have passionate preference” or “the learned person with whom you have cultural affinity.” Your neighbor is not someone “who is of higher social status” than you neither is your neighbor your social inferior. Your neighbor is the one you encounter towards whom you have a duty, like the Good Samaritan who saw his duty in caring for the (presumably Jewish) man who was beaten, robbed, and left for dead.14
This, dear friends, is how you preach the Gospel. This is how the light of Christ shines in the darkness. This is how life stays savory instead of becoming bland and tasteless. The shortest route to dissatisfaction and unhappiness is living solely for yourself. To be a Christian, therefore, is to be a person oriented to the Other.
Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was a friend of Pope John Paul II, insists that you only become human in and through encountering the Other. This “Other,” according to Levinas, is “the one who is helpless, destitute and needy.”15 Being moved by the neediness of this Other causes [you] to transcend [yourself], or, as Levinas states it: “The Other’s destitution makes me capable of a response, so ‘response-ability’ [for the Other] becomes the key what we call human existence.”16 In the end, Levinas insists: “I come to realize in taking care of others that I am experiencing the Infinite, the Other beyond all others, who is God.”17 This is just a way saying, again, you love God by loving your neighbor.
In a lovely song, “Distressing Disguise,” Michael Card sings about this very simply:
Every time a faithful servant servesWhen you’re dismissed from this Mass, go and make Jesus visible.
A [an Other] that's in need
What happens at that moment is a miracle indeed
As they look to one another in an instant it is clear
Only Jesus is visible, for they've both disappeared18
1 Matthew 4:16; Isaiah 9:1.↩
2 Luke 2:32.↩
3 Matthew 5:16.↩
4 Isaiah 58:7.↩
5 Isaiah 58:8↩
6 Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [The Joy of the Gospel], sec. 153..↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Ibid.↩
9 Matthew 1:19.↩
10 Psalm 112:4.9.↩
11 Psalm 112:4.↩
12 Matthew 22:37.39..↩
13 Matthew 22:40.↩
14 Søren Kierkegaard, “Neighbor Love,” trans. Howard and Edna Hong, in Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, ed. Charles E. Moore, 95-99.↩
15 William Donovan, Sacrament of Service: Understanding Diaconal Spirituality, 24.↩
16 Ibid.↩
17 Ibid.↩
18 Michael Card, "Distressing Disguise."↩
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