Christopher Adam: Reflection for April 10th 2011

In North Korea, more than 200,000 innocent civilians are imprisoned in forced labour camps, where they face beatings from guards, summary executions and a complete lack of any medical care or adequate clothing and shelter. In Iran, the penalty for homosexuality is either a brutal beating or death by hanging; gay adult men are automatically hanged after conviction, while lesbians receive 100 lashes. In 2010, more than 925 million people, primarily in the developing world, faced starvation and more than one billion were malnourished, representing one sixth of the world’s total population. Here in Canada, 10 percent of the population—some 3.3 million people—live in poverty.

These are the statistics and information that we see each day when we read the news and undoubtedly all agree that as Catholics and Christians, it is our duty to find ways to help alleviate suffering in our own communities and to speak out against injustice, regardless of where it occurs and regardless of what form it takes.

But in tonight’s gospel reading, Jesus is asking us to do more than simply address suffering, poverty and injustice by speaking out, handing out a bowl of soup and a slice of bread to the hungry or finding shelter for the homeless. Jesus calls on us to delve deeper by listening to those who are suffering and treating them not as charity cases who will happily and quietly trudge away after being handed a sandwich, but rather just like anyone of us who needs human contact and friendship–and not simply food in our mouth–to stay alive.

When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, we learn much more about his humanity than about his divinity. Jesus wept. This is perhaps one of the most important phrases in the Bible and these two words together form the basis of Christianity—the belief that God is here, God is with us and—that 2,000 years ago—he became one of us, sharing in our emotions, frailties and weakness.  Had Jesus followed the traditions of Greco-Roman deities, he would have appeared above a weeping Martha and a distraught Mary in a thunderous cloud, looked down on the grieving women with impeccable stoic demeanour and with a macho, masculine pose that would have made John Wayne jealous, only to zap Lazarus back to life and vanish back into the cloud immediately after the job was done.

It might sound trite to say that Jesus felt their pain, but that’s exactly what he felt. He not only understood the depth of human loss, mourning and suffering, but he was also taken aback by his inability to keep his composure and stop himself from weeping at the sight of sadness and despair in others. Jesus took a moment to understand what it meant to lose someone you loved and only after experiencing mourning did he perform his miracle.

When we perform charitable acts—when we feed the hungry, clothe the poor or reach out to someone who has suffered injustice—we must be careful not to allow this to become mechanical—quickly pouring out a cup of coffee, avoiding eye contact and moving on to the next person in the queue. Being Christian—that is, being Christ-like—means being proactive when it comes to listening those who we are trying to help and making an effort to understand the condition in which they find themselves.

Not only do we show compassion by taking a moment to listen to someone whose only human contact may be a handful of words from a busy volunteer who gives him/her a bed to sleep on or a supper, but we also gain a wealth of knowledge on the long-term emotional, spiritual and psychological impact of poverty and injustice. If our political leaders are to draft effective policies that not only alleviate the immediate consequences of poverty—like hunger, and homelessness—but actually address their  root causes and the long-term human consequences of such a traumatic experience, then they must actually sit down and listen to those who live this reality everyday. We can’t offer real meaningful help from the corridors of power, from the ivory tower or from an armchair in the comfort of our living room. We can’t simply give our credit card information to the World Vision representative on the other end of the line, offer up the price of a cup of coffee a day and lean back on the couch in satisfaction of a good deed done. We have to actually get into the thick of it, just like Jesus did. We have to open our eyes to what’s happening around us, allow ourselves to be taken aback, surprised and angered by what we see, and be open to listening.

There is something called the “blind spot” and it is a term sometimes used by historians, sociologists, political scientists and others in the arts and humanities. It refers to the phenomenon of being so close to the fire and totally caught up in the details and humdrum routines that one fails to see what’s really happening right before one’s eyes. As I was preparing for this reflection my years as a student at an American high school in Budapest, Hungary in the mid-1990’s came to mind.

In 1995, I was in grade nine and one of the traditions at the American International School of Budapest was that we started off each year with a class trip. Two of the ways that the school had us understand the region around us, as well as our own host community, was through local trips and by making weekly charitable and social work a requirement for graduation. In grade nine, we visited the scenic Lake Bled area in neighbouring Slovenia, while our grade 10 peers visited Auschwitz, in Poland. While we took in the sublime beauty of a former Yugoslav republic that managed to break away relatively peacefully five years before and as grade ten students saw first-hand the horrors of a World War II death camp, none of us really understood that we were just a couple of hundred kilometres away from the site of the worst case of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass killing since the Second World War, unfolding right under our noses, just a short drive south of our stable, tranquil and idyllic high school existence. In 1995, as we took our school trips, Serbian forces had murdered more than 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men and boys—some of them as young as 15 years old—and deported 25,000 women and girls, in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.  The majority of Srebrenica’s male population was exterminated, thousands of women were raped and infants were murdered; babies often beheaded—right in front of their mothers. More than 200,000 people died in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s, Sarajevo—once a thriving multicultural city that hosted the Olympics—was destroyed, as Serbian snipers besieged the town and bombarded it from the surrounding hills and mountains, and the entire region was thrown into a decade-long period of ethnic hatred, from which the Balkans have yet to fully recover.

As students in an American international school located just a few hours drive to the north of the worst mass murder in fifty years, we were completely shielded (and partially oblivious) to the scale of the horror unfolding less than a couple of hundred kilometres away. In geography class, we learned about countries, capitals and borders throughout the world, from Asia to Latin America—except those in our own region—and I remember our teacher noting that the situation and borders in Yugoslavia were too complicated, ever-changing and simply impossible to follow.

Yet it’s precisely when things seem complicated, or simply too horrible to understand—that we truly need to open our eyes.

The real miracle in today’s Gospel reading was not that Lazarus was raised from the dead. Any mythical deity could have done that. The real miracle is that God revealed himself to us in human form, stripped of all His grandeur and titles. The Creator of the Universe stood among us and wept.

Christopher Adam