It is a common feature of our human existence that, when we are ill or injured, we suffer as entire human beings. I might break a leg and say just that to those around me. But the fact is that as a whole person, I suffer from the injured leg. The exhaustion that pain brings, affects me in my entirety. The side-effects of medication affect me as a whole. I cannot isolate the affected part of my body and let the rest get on as though nothing has happened. It has a function that the others cannot assume. My broken leg, for example, affects the way I walk. I cannot drive, I cannot climb stairs. I cannot kick a ball or dance. My entire existence is coloured by the malfunction of that one broken leg.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul uses the analogy of the human body to describe the Church of Jesus Christ. The Church is not simply a group of people with common beliefs. We are bound together in a close unity; we are a single entity. No-one thinks of a human family as a group of adults and children who just happen to occupy the same house. A family of parents and children think of themselves as a single entity, and that is how we live, especially when the children are still young. When a child is seriously ill, it is the parents who agonise, who sit up during sleepless nights looking after the child until the danger has passed. As children, when a brother or sister is lost, we worry and cry until the missing child has been found. On the other hand, when someone who has been injured emerges healed from hospital, when a child celebrates a birthday or wins a prize, we all rejoice together.
The Church, as Paul teaches, is even closer. We are all brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus and as such, sons and daughters of God. We are bound together more closely than any human body, more intimately than any human family. We are in fact a world-wide family, drawn from every nation, language, culture, people. We really are brothers and sisters in Christ, sons and daughters of God the Father. We all share in each other’s sufferings and joys. When a child in a family is sick, the mother pays more attention to that child, not because she loves him more, but because at that particular moment he has a greater need of her love. It is the same with members of the Church. We cannot allow ourselves to remain unaffected by the suffering of our brothers and sisters in famine and war.
This idea of mutual concern and love is a central concern of Pope Francis, an integral part of his message. Indeed, it is a central part of the message of Jesus Christ: “Love one another, just as I have loved you…whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers you do unto me.” It is not a social, economic or political message, nor must it ever be allowed to be reduced to one or more of these. It is both simpler and more profound: that, as John puts it, “God is love,” and that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. We can never be indifferent to the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ and still claim to love and serve God. Like a father – for God is Our Father – we must care for and love each other as he cares for and loves us, “…so much that he gave his only-begotten Son.” There are many needs in the Church today; let us all respond to them with love, with prayer, with care and generosity, to the fullness of our ability to do so.
Fr Phillip.
