The Stranger

A man came in our office seeking help with logging into his email. He was elderly, rolling a suitcase behind him, and smelled homeless. The smell...it was overpowering and noxious, it seeped into your clothes. His presence was an awkward inconvenience at an inopportune time. I wanted to ignore him, but he insisted on waiting for someone, as his ride wasn't coming to pick him up for a couple hours. I remembered the words of Jesus to offer water to the thirsty, so I offered him a bottle of water, but it was more out of guilt and concession. He didn't want water.

I think he really just wanted to be seen and heard. And I refused to see or hear him. When we think we are some righteous people in our personal theoretical universe, we really need to check ourselves in the nitty gritty smelly business of everyday life. Because if you can't prove it there, the rest doesn't really matter.

I've proved myself in my heart as a Pharisee of Pharisees. If you're anything like me, you want to go home justified at the end of the day, be assured that you did your Christian duty, whatever that was. Maybe it's dropping off a can of green beans in the food collection box, or a dollar to a homeless person. But sometimes Jesus visits in ways that cut us to the heart and expose us for who we really are--impatient, judgemental, proud, self-congratulatory, disgusted. And you don't go justified. You go home uneasy and convicted.

Jesus comes in the distressing guise of the poor, in the words of Mother Teresa. How often do we turn him away in our hearts and in person? It's easy to share an inspirational meme on social media. It is uncomfortable and challenging to sit with the actual, flesh and blood poor. We are called as Christians not to tolerate or endure the poor, but to wash their feet, strip off their rags and cloth them in the finest raiment, for they are Jesus, our Lord. Not in a theoretical, theologically lofty way. In a very stinky, very inconvenient, very embarrassing, very REAL way.

Make no mistake. Jesus visited me today. I turned my back on him, no time for you, not unlike the rich man who ignored Lazarus. I didn't want to soil my hands giving him the time of day. It was a heart issue. It may not have taken much for me to see and hear him, but the sin is damnable, to read about beatitudes than to live them, to study works of mercy than to practice them. We have both Pharisee and Publican within us. And we know which one went home justified...the one who beat his breast, lowered his eyes, all he could say being, "God, be merciful to me a sinner."