It was when I was in my early twenties, and I was a very zealous Christian. I was spending part of my summer holiday in a formation camp in a pretty remote mountain village in Poland. One day I took the opportunity to visit a neighbouring town about 10 miles away. Public transport was very limited so I had only two options to make the return journey back to camp: a 3 hour-long walk or thumbing a lift. I opted for the latter, so there I was, trying to stop cars; sadly all of them were passing me by. I was losing all hope of a lift when at last a car stopped and the driver let me in. I was so relieved and happy! I said to him: ‘you are sent by God’. He dryly replied: ‘No, I’m not, actually.’
At that very moment what he said sounded odd, but for some unknown reason that situation has stayed with me since then – and, trust me, with my rubbish memory this an achievement. Experience garnered from many other meetings and happenings since that incident has helped me to understand the driver’s response.
There’s a passage in the gospel of St Matthew, frequently recalled in speeches on charitable work; we are all very familiar with it: ‘I was hungry… I was thirsty… You gave me food, drink’ and so forth. The idea is simple: Jesus identifies himself with people in need. So, in helping those individuals, we serve Jesus himself. A very noble deed indeed! Or is it?
I’ve found out that many people in need served by eager Christians don’t necessarily feel better; well, they get some food and some help, but they don’t feel noticed as individuals, because those keen Christians solely serve … Jesus in them, overlooking people’s uniqueness, overlooking people’s individuality. Great initiatives, like this kicking off today, are particularly prone to such insensitivity because of their massive scale. It’s easy to grasp the vision of the great overall purpose while not attending to the individual character – and that’s not true Christian charity, because God sees each person in his or her singularity.
We are not called to help other people solely because we see Jesus in them; that’s only a metaphor to motivate us towards doing what is actively right in response to Jesus’ love for us. We are called to reach out and respond to the sheer uniqueness of the man in each man, to the one-off individuality of the woman in each woman, to the unprecedented creation that is the child in each child we encounter. If a man, a woman or a child discerns Jesus in us – that vision should only be a by-product of our will to engage with and to value each person face-to-face and one-to-one.