A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Martin of Tours, Bishop
Find today’s readings here.
“Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you,
or thirsty and give you drink?
When did we see you a stranger and welcome you,
or naked and clothe you?
When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’
And the king will say to them in reply,
‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did
for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”
We are a “Matthew 25 people,” many Christians like to say. When our good shepherd gets around to dividing the sheep and the goats, putting the merciful sheep on the right and the skinflinty goats on the left, most of us imagine ourselves landing on the right side of the king of history. But let’s be honest about those Matthew verses: They are a pretty tall order in the real world.
I can walk to work from Grand Central Terminal in New York’s Midtown and I will pass two or three hungry, barely clothed people just about every day, and, yes, I have passed an actual naked person or two in this great metropolis over the years with barely a lifted eyebrow, let alone an opened wallet or a hand extended in mercy and compassion. If I am completely honest with myself, I may even recoil in a degree of disgust or fear from some of these disguised Jesuses I’ve encountered.
There are plenty of ways around this, of course, any number of rationalizations that help persuade myself that I am no goat. I cloth the naked when I donate to Catholic Relief Services; I feed the hungry and house the homeless when I give to Catholic Charities. Don’t I buy clothes and toys for kids I’ll never know each Christmas? Send checks to the hungry in far-off lands? Don’t I urge public officials to deploy my tax dollars in more generous disbursements for the less fortunate or in better services for the addicted, the despondent and the mentally ill?
I do. And you probably do too, and you know what, I don’t want to diminish those gestures at all. Those are indeed expressions of the works of mercy that are doing some good in this dark world. I am not going to lay a guilt trip on you for not doing more, for not reaching out your own hand to touch that person in need… still.
The memorial of St. Martin of Tours is observed today and that darn guy, he was one of those soldier-saints, a person of direct not symbolic action. St. Martin the Merciful, according to legend, paused long enough on a dusty road during one military campaign to behold a nearly naked beggar. Turning his sword not into a plowshare but a clothes shear, he rendered his garment and gave the beggar half the robe off his back.
After his conversion to Christianity, St. Martin proved equally determined in other works of mercy, freeing the prisoner whenever he could persuade powers above him to do so. And in those treacherous times of the early church in the Roman Empire, I don’t doubt such appeals for mercy carried some risk, easily interpreted as acts of subversion or defiance. His courage and persistence in mercy makes a good model for us today.
Sometimes your work of mercy in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or clothing the naked will not be extensions or stand-ins for the real thing. Sometimes history and circumstance demand that those works will take a direct form.
In the months ahead, if our president-elect follows through on his campaign promises, many people in a variety of vulnerable communities and categories are likely to become targets of dislocation and difficulty—particularly people who have come as sojourners to this land, a double scriptural claim on our compassion. They will be a Jesus in disguise for our times.
Will we reach out our hands to help? Will we be ready to rend our garments for them or will we pass them by—glum goats, grateful that their circumstances are not ours?
