At the
Second coming of Christ, He will reward those who fed the hungry, visited the
sick and the imprisoned, clothed the naked… We all know this Gospel passage. As
Christians, we try to get involved in prison ministries and soup kitchens–and
this is very important and well-deserving of our efforts. But pay close
attention: when Christ addresses the righteous, they are genuinely surprised:
“When have we ministered to you Lord?” Do you think that anyone involved in a
soup kitchen can be genuinely surprised at Christ’s words? It is more likely
that they will say: “Yes, Lord, I ministered to the hungry as if they were You,
and I saw Your image in each of their faces.”
The ones
who are surprised are not the ones who were involved in Christian ministries
and visited the prison inmates because it was a Christian thing to do. They are
the ones who ministered to the needy out of a profound sense of oneness with
them. If your child is hungry, you feed him because you are family, not because
it is a Christian thing to do. When your brother is in prison you go there not
because you participate in a Christian ministry or because you enjoy visiting
inmates; in fact, you may hate going there, but you go anyway–because he is
family. When we treat others as family, we do not expect to be rewarded for
feeding them or visiting them in prison, we do not expect any reward for this
and will be genuinely surprised to get any. If we let a stranger in not because
he might turn out to be an undercover angel but merely because he is a fellow
human being, he is family, then we have understood that to call God ‘Father’ means
to call a stranger a ‘brother’–not in a “churchy” way, but quite literally.
By Fr. Sergei Sveshnikov
Source: https://frsergei.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/have-you-fed-the-hungry-lately/
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