From the Principal

Our theme at LCS for 2019 is "Thy Kingdom Come!"

As we unpack this throughout the year in our staff devotions, our classrooms, school assemblies, the Herald, Chapel services and conversations, one of the descriptors can be this simple but profound saying.  Doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.

Most people, if you ask them, will claim to want to do what is right.  If this were really true, we’d live in a much better world.  The problem lies in a shift in the definitions of right and wrong.  

Many will define what is right by what feels right to them at the moment.  While there are many times when we should go with our gut feelings about things, we must never disregard the time honoured, God-ordained rules about what is good.  His laws always have love at the roots – love for God and love for others.

When our actions are rooted in love for self, and we disregard what’s best for others, we often fail to act justly.  Yet when we try to do what is right and good for as many people as possible, when we try to honour God and others in word and deeds, we will more than likely to do what is right. 

Doing the right thing doesn’t always make everyone happy.  To the contrary, it will sometimes anger those who aren’t getting their way.  This may cause us to question our decisions, but we can find peace in knowing that God sees our hearts.  When we truly seek His wisdom and try to do the right thing, He is pleased, even when others are not. This is what most of us would call wise counsel. 

But I want to dig a little deeper into why this is such a central message of the Christian faith.

“Have you ever done something simply on principle, because it was the right thing to do, knowing that you couldn’t explain it to anyone, without there even being a good feeling attached to your act?”

Karl Rahner asked that and then added: “If you have done this, you have experienced God, perhaps without knowing it.”

Jesus would agree, so much so that he makes this both the central tenet of the Christian faith and used this rationale when talking to a group of people who were trying to understand what doing the right thing and loving my neighbour really looked like.  We see this explicitly in the gospels where Jesus tells us that whatsoever you do to the poor here on earth, you do to him. For Jesus, to give something to a poor person is to give something to God, and to neglect a poor person is to neglect God.

There’s an important background to this teaching. They had been asking Jesus: “What will be the test? What will be the ultimate criterion for judgment as to whether or not someone enters into the kingdom of heaven or not? His answer surprised them.

They had expected that the final judgment would revolve around issues of religious belonging, religious practice, correct observance, and moral codes. Instead they got this answer: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

And what, according to Jesus, will be the basis for the separation? Only this: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Invite in the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick and imprisoned? Because when you do these things to the hungry, to the thirsty, to strangers, to the sick, and to the imprisoned, you do them to God, and vice versa.

Immediately there was confusion among those who heard these words. Both those who did what was asked and those who didn’t were equally confused and lodged the same protest: When? When did we see you hungry? When did we see you thirsty? When did we see you naked, or a stranger, or sick, or in prison and serve you or not serve you? When did we see you, God, and do this to you?

Both were caught off guard and both asked seemingly the same question, but their protests are in fact very different: The first group, those who had measured up, are pleasantly surprised. What they say to Jesus is essentially this: “We didn’t know it was you! We were just doing what was right!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In serving them, you were meeting me!”

The second group, those who hadn’t measured up, is rudely shocked. Their protest, in effect, is this: “If we had only known! If we had known that it was you inside the poor we would have responded. We just didn’t know!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In not serving them, you were avoiding me!”

What’s the lesson?

The more obvious one of course is the challenge laid down to all societies and civilizations.  The quality of our faith and its value will be judged by the quality of justice in the land and that the quality of justice will be judged by how the most vulnerable groups in society (widows, orphans, and strangers) fare while we are alive. The Bible teaches that serving the poor is a non-negotiable, integral part of our response to the love God has shown us.  In a sense it could be said that nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. But Jesus adds something: God doesn’t just have a preferential option for the poor, God is inside the poor.

But there’s another lesson too, subtle but important: In this gospel story, neither those who served God in the poor nor those who didn’t serve God in poor knew what they were doing. The first group, who did respond, did so simply because it was the right thing to do. They didn’t know that God was hidden inside the poor. The second group, who didn’t respond, didn’t reach out because they didn’t realize that God was inside the poor. Neither knew that God was there and that is the lesson:

A mature disciple doesn’t calculate or make distinctions as to whether God is inside of a certain situation or not, whether a person seems worth it or not, whether a person is a Christian or not, or whether a person appears to be a good person or not, before reaching out in service. A mature disciple serves whoever is in need, independent of those considerations.

T.S. Eliot said “The greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Jesus would add that doing the right thing is reason enough."

I was helped by some commentary by Ron Rolheiser found here.

Blessings,

Adrian Bosker