The Fifth Sunday of the Year
Is 58:7-10; 1 Cor 2:1-5; Mt 5:13-16 (year a)
‘Share your bread with the hungry, and shelter the homeless poor. Then will your light shine like the dawn, and your wound be quickly healed over.”
The prophet Isaiah understood the relief of poverty as faith’s most fundamental witness. His words were addressed to a people who had experienced overwhelming deprivation. Their restoration and healing would be complete only when they, in their turn, became the living lights of God’s abiding care for the poor and needy.
When the prophet spoke of the coming Messiah who would redeem a broken world, he described his mission as reaching out to the poor, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and setting free the oppressed.
His vision was in stark contrast to many of today’s underlying attitudes that would prefer to seal borders to the stranger and build walls rather than bridges. For many, charity is perceived as an optional extra rather than the fundamental sign of our communion with a generous God.
St Paul began his preaching with the proclamation of a crucified Christ, a Christ who had taken to himself the poverty of a sinful world. We who share the glory of his Resurrection can be no less generous. Anything that boasts of putting itself first is far from the mind of Christ. We tend to measure charity by the amount given. When Christ described his disciples as the salt of the earth and the light of the world, he was not measuring them in terms of worldly possessions and success. He was thinking of the selfless love that illuminated his life with the Father. This would become their light.
He himself had come as a light that the darkness could not overcome. As his disciples, we can be nothing less. “In the same way your light must shine in the sight of men, so that, seeing your good works, they may give the praise to your Father in heaven.”
We cannot change the world overnight. All we can do is seize each moment, and in that moment choose to give rather than to receive. In material terms, we might have little to give. Our wealth will never cure a broken world, but our compassion, welcome and patient understanding will always be perceived as a light shining in the darkness.
To deny the stranger and ignore the oppressed is to put our light under a tub. It is to choose the darkness.
