The saints who best knew the Heart of Christ sometimes spoke of His thirst for us.
St. Teresa of Calcutta, already a nun at the time, was on a train to Darjeeling, India when she had a vision of Jesus on the Cross. He spoke the words from the Gospel of John – “I thirst.” And the rest of her mission in life was to respond to that thirst of Jesus and His Heart which longs for our eyes to turn to Him in understanding, and in compassion.
It is a thirst every human heart knows, especially in suffering, in poverty, and in being an outcast. Christ thirsts from a longing love; we thirst, often, from a deprivation of love.
The prophet Amos and the Gospel this past weekend urge and insist that we respond to this thirst in Christ and in others, especially as we enter into pro-life month.
In Amos’s time, the northern 10 tribes of Israel were being decimated by the Assyrian empire. Their land was being ravaged and pried from their very hands.
Meanwhile, the southern tribes, those referred to by the symbolic name of “Zion” in our reading from Amos . . . we hear they continued reclining comfortably on their beds of ivory. “You are not made ill by the collapse of Joseph,” Amos says. That is, “The news of our brothers and sisters in the faith suffering up north doesn’t make you sick to your stomachs. If you loved, you would ache for them.” And this widespread political indifference becomes the Southern Kingdom’s condemnation . . .
The Gospel looks at things a little more personally. No longer do we have abstract Israelites, brothers and sisters in the faith somewhere up north . . . but a single man, Lazarus, right outside another single rich man’s doorstep. Lazarus, covered in sores; the rich man, covered in luxurious clothes. It is a concentration of our political responsibility toward the poor who thirst for compassion . . . to our personal responsibility.
And at surface, it doesn’t sound like the rich man did anything blatantly heinous in his life. He didn’t murder. He didn’t commit adultery. He didn’t steal or blaspheme against God.
And yet when Lazarus and the rich man die, Lazarus goes to the bosom of Abraham with the blessed, while the rich man ends up in torment.
All because he would not respond to the poor man’s thirst, which shares in Christ’s thirst . . . for compassion.
It can be difficult to discern what we are to do for the poor. Whether the money we give to a homeless person will be used for drugs, or for food. Or whether we really have the time to step away from our families to go and serve them.
But I think we can all take a look at ourselves and recognize, “I can do better. I can pray more for the poor and can be given the wisdom to help them. I can listen more to the stranger, those who don’t fit in, or are cast out by society….” The Kansas bishops have recently named migrants as those particularly worthy of our attention, not to be categorically condemned as troublemakers, liars, or some of the other terms popular in political jargon today.
Mother Teresa spoke of Jesus and His thirst being hidden under the “distressing disguise of the poor.” One has to discipline and train their thoughts and their heart away from condemnation of those we deem inconvenient – the poor, the elderly, the unborn, the migrant – in order to perceive the face of Christ hidden behind them.
But if we can begin to train ourselves to understand Jesus’ thirst for us in the Eucharist – if we can begin to understand His love and compassion and desire for us under the unimpressive disguise of bread and wine, then we can begin to perceive His face beneath the dirt and roughness of the poor. Not simply the materially poor, but the socially poor, the unwanted, the forgotten.
The Lord thirsts for us.
Do we desire to respond to that thirst as we strive to promote the dignity of all human life this month?
Father Grant Huslig, Parochial Vicar