Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Christ.…
    If we hadn’t got Christ’s own words for it, it would seem raving lunacy to believe that if I offer abed and food and hospitality to some man or woman or child, I am replaying the part of … Martha or Mary, and that my guest is Christ. There is nothing to show it, perhaps. There are no halos already glowing round their heads—at least none that human eyes can see. It is not likely that I shall be vouchsafed the vision ofElizabeth of Hungary [thirteenth-century princess, later landgravine of Thuringia], who put the leper in her bed and later, going to tend him, saw no longer the leper’s stricken face, but the face of Christ. The part of aPeter Claver [seventeenth-century Jesuit who nursed Africans caught in the slave trade], who gave a stricken Negro his bed and slept on the floor at his side, is more likely to be ours. For Peter Claver never saw anything with his bodily eyes except the exhausted black faces …; he had only faith in Christ’s own words that these people were Christ. And when on one occasion [those] he had induced to help him ran from the room, panic-stricken before the disgusting sight of some sickness, he was astonished. “You mustn’t go,” he said, and you can still hear his surprise that anyone could forget such a truth: “You mustn’t leave him—it is Christ.” …
    To see how far one realizes this, it is a good thing to ask honestly what you would do, or have done, when a beggar asked at your house for food. Would you—or did you—give it on an old cracked plate, thinking that was good enough? Do you think that Martha and Mary thought that the old and chipped dish was good enough for their guest? …
    For a total Christian, the goad of duty is notneeded—always prodding one to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege. Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was expected of them—is it likely that Peter’s mother-in-law grudgingly served the chicken she had meant to keep till Sunday because she thought it was her “duty”? She did it gladly; she would have served ten chickens if she had had them.
    If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ, it is certain that that is the way it should still be given. Not for the sake of humanity. Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time. Not because these people remind us of Christ … but because they
are
Christ.
    We have reached a stage in our reflection where ordinary prose breaks down and only the words of scripture or of saints and poets will do. None of us will be lost in the abyss of nothingness and nonexistence; we will all be called forth at theLast Judgment. As Emily Dickinson wrote:
        
They dropped like Flakes
—
        
They dropped like Stars
—
        
Like Petals from a Rose
—
        
When suddenly across the June
        
A Wind with fingers—goes
—
        
They perished in the Seamless Grass
—
        
No eye could find the place
—
        
But God can summon every face
        
On his Repealless—List.
    But when we are called forth from the dust of death, the Just Judge will ask us if we lived by theCosmic Code, the underlying principle that animates the universe, the code ofjustice andmercy, the code of caring for the neighbor who is in need. The Good Samaritans of this world, except in extraordinary cases, see only the man fallen among thieves, the person who needs help. They do not see Christ; they may never even have heard of him. But he is there, warming human encounters, softening the harshness of existence, lighting the darkness of faith, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
        
 … for Christ plays in ten thousand places
,
        
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
        
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
    1 The passage from Colossians accords well enough with another, First Corinthians 14:34–36,