Of course, there are many kinds of affliction, and all the corporal works of mercy, from feeding the hungry to burying the dead, aim to relieve them. But this begs the question: Why a separate work of mercy that seems to recapitulate all these others?
I think the secret lies in the fact that comforting the afflicted is a spiritual work of mercy. This makes exactly Jesus’ point in countering the devil (and the entire naturalistic bent of the present age): Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (see Matthew 4:4). The deepest affliction is not, in the end, bodily but spiritual. We can endure incredible physical hardship if we are secure in the love of God, the grace of Jesus Christ, and the hope of heaven. This has been demonstrated countless times in the crucible of human history and the laboratory of the saints. Conversely, as the suicide of every rich, famous, powerful, or glamorous person attests, a material world filled with everything the devil offers is, in the end, weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable apart from God.
The sleek, fat, and wealthy Citizen Kane, alone and tormented in spirit, is more afflicted than a man who has lost both his legs but who remains secure in the love of Christ crucified. He requires a comfort that nothing in this world can supply. And his doom, should he refuse repentance, is to become a thing no such comfort will ever reach. This is one of the reasons that the hard task of the Comforter known as the Holy Spirit is often to afflict the comfortable before comforting the afflicted. From Saul of Tarsus to Hans Frank to Charles Colson to Karla Faye Tucker, the Christian tradition is chockablock with men and women who were supremely secure in their pride and who needed to be painfully taken apart down to their foundations in order to be rebuilt by God.
Indeed, in them we are only seeing the truth about ourselves. For we who may not have committed sins so grave that our fall was shattering are nonetheless creatures whose redemption requires nothing less than the horror of Golgotha. That God has favored us with the grace of a quiet life is due entirely to his grace, not because we are just better and nicer than others. There but for the grace of God go we.
That said, the subject here is the comforting of the afflicted, not the admonishing of sinners. There is something in us called “cowardice” that sometimes prefers to admonish the afflicted and comfort the sinner, especially the wealthy and powerful sinner. Everybody’s seen it. It’s the sort of mentality that tells the grieving child she wouldn’t have lost her dolly if she weren’t so irresponsible. It’s the mentality of the Holocaust denier who says, “It never happened, and besides, the Jews deserved it.” It’s seen in the pundit uttering weepy excuses for the rich men who offered free toasters to uneducated people while fast-talking them into that unsustainable home loan, all the while excoriating the poor who thought the banks knew what they were doing.
Of course, this brings us to a tricky question: namely, who are the afflicted, and who is their neighbor? Jesus answered this question for all time in one of his most outrageously offensive parables. The reason it doesn’t offend us is that we no longer share the tribal affiliations, historical grievances, and hostilities of his audience. Retold, in modern terms, it would go something like this:
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.” But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “An American medical worker was going down from Kabul to the Afghan–Iranian border, and he fell among al-Qaida, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance an American military contractor was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise two congressmen on a factfinding mission, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, when they came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a member of the Taliban, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out fifty American dollars and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25–37, Revised Shea Paraphrase)
The Jews to whom Jesus spoke had every bit as much reason to hate Samaritans as Americans have to hate the Taliban. The bitter ethnic and religious loathing ran deep, with real stories of real outrages committed against Jews, just as we have suffered real outrages committed by the Taliban.2 And yet Jesus overlooks the many examples of heroic goodness in Israel’s history and the many real sins and evils of the Samaritans and constructs this story in order to make his point. Why?
Precisely because his purpose is nothing less than to reveal the radically Catholic nature of his mission. He’s not kidding when he tells us his project of redemption is to extend to the whole world. He’s not kidding when he commands us to look past the easy labels and shibboleths and tribal identity badges and recognize that not only are we capable of evil as great as Saul of Tarsus, Hans Frank, and Karla Faye Tucker but that those whom we have assumed to be irredeemable animals are capable of responding to grace. In a word, that our neighbor is every person we meet.
The Church’s historic response to affliction of both body and soul is notoriously indiscriminate and profligate. From the medieval tradition of sanctuary (which protected people from mob violence), to the invention of the hospital and the establishment of the greatest system of charitable works on the planet, to the massive impact of Mother Teresa’s care for the poorest of the poor, and, of course, in the miracle of the sacraments of confession and anointing, the relief of the afflictions of body and spirit has been the work of the Church down through the ages. All this, true, is compounded with the reality of sin, so that many afflictions have been caused by sinful Christians as well as alleviated by them. But the tradition remains what it is, however well or poorly we carry it out.
Nor is comforting the afflicted the exclusive property of the Judeo- Christian tradition. As Jesus’ Good Samaritan illustrates, it is not a work limited to the visible members of the Church. This is a sign of hope, because it illuminates the fact that our obedience to the Spirit is not in our yakkity-yak but in our obedience to Christ.
Meanwhile, the main task is not to peer into the soul of our neighbor and speculate about what his verdict might be at the Judgment. Rather, it is to mind our own business and comfort the afflicted as best we can. Unhappily, these are not hard to find. “The mass of men,” said Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”3 Begin wherever you are, and you can scarcely avoid running into all manner of affliction of body and soul. How to comfort the sufferer? All that we have just considered points the way.
Comforting the afflicted is the work of the king, prophet, and priest you and I became by virtue of our baptism. The corporal works of mercy are the key if the affliction is physical. In this we see the kingly office exercised to prudently order the world and its resources—food, medicine, shelter; physical, emotional, social, spiritual care—in the service of human need. But we must also remember that man does not live by bread alone. The prophet speaks to that, sometimes in encouragement and sometimes in rebuke (especially to idolatrous comforts such as drugs, money, sex, and power). But in particular, our task is priestly in that we stand with the sufferer as Christ crucified stands with us. We emphasize the compassion—the “suffering with”—of God the Son. But we also point to God the impassible Father, the star far above the cloud-wrack enshrouding this world of pain. We remind the afflicted of the hope and joy untouchable by all the pain Satan can throw at us—and that it will be ours in Christ Jesus.
In the end, this means that comforting the afflicted is rooted in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. For that is where our kingly, prophetic, and priestly office finds its deepest source and fulfillment. When we pray for the afflicted, we bear them to God the impassible Father via Christ crucified. When we receive the Eucharist and are sent as living tabernacles into the world, we bear nothing less than the hope of heaven to every sufferer. We may not see how or whether that grace comes to fruition, but the reality and power are there in Christ Jesus, fully present in the Eucharist.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
Advertisement
