With eyes wide open
The first Christian communities lived through very difficult years. Lost in the vast Roman Empire and in the midst of conflicts and persecutions, those Christians sought strength and encouragement by waiting for Jesus’ prompt coming and by remembering his words: Watch; Stay awake; Keep your eyes open; Be alert.
Do Jesus’ calls to stay awake still mean anything to us? What does it mean for us Christians today to put our hope in God, living with our eyes wide open? Shall we let hope in the final justice God will secure for the vast majority of innocent victims, who are suffering through no fault of their own, disappear definitively from our secular world?
The easiest way precisely to falsify Christian hope is to expect from God our eternal salvation, while we turn our backs on the suffering in our world right now. Someday we will have to recognize our blindness before Jesus our Judge: When did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in jail, and we did not help you? This will be our last dialogue with him if we live with our eyes closed.
We need to wake up and open our eyes wide. We need to be vigilant in order to see beyond own small interests and concerns. The Christian’s hope is not an attitude of blindness, since it never forgets those who suffer. Christian spirituality does not consist in only looking inside, for its heart is attentive to those who are abandoned to their own fate.
In our Christian communities we have to be more and more careful that the way we live in hope does not lead us to indifference or to forgetfulness of the poor. We cannot isolate ourselves in our religion so as not to hear the cry of those who die of hunger every day. We are not allowed to nourish our illusion of innocence to protect our peace and quiet.
The hope in God that forgets those who live on this earth without being able to hope at all, cannot such hope be considered a religious version of a certain optimism at all cost, lived out without clarity or responsibility? Cannot the pursuit of our own eternal salvation, with our backs turned on those who suffer, be denounced as being a subtle “selfishness extended to the afterlife”?
Probably the little sensibility there is to the immense suffering in our world is one of the most serious symptoms of today’s Christianity getting old. When Pope Francis calls for “a poorer Church of the poor,” he is shouting out his most important message to us Christians in well-off countries.
José Antonio Pagola
December 1, 2013
1 Advent (A)
Matthew 24, 37-44