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About fifteen years ago I asked the artist to paint three pictures for me based on Matthew 25--a hungry person receiving food, a naked person being clothed, and a prisoner being visited. I was working in India and Bangladesh with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) at the time, and this Scripture was very real to me every day. "Read the words of the Bible very carefully," I said. "Put Jesus into Calcutta in the way that this Scripture puts Him into our world."
A few weeks later the paintings arrived, and I opened them in anticipation. They were striking. The Calcutta skyline was in the background, and familiar street scenes were in the foreground. In each picture the Christ figure wore a glowing white robe; light and peace emanated from Him. In one picture Christ brought a bowl of rice; in another He respectfully put a shawl around a shivering old woman; in the last picture He brought a glow of light with Him as He stepped into the prison cell.
Every one of these pitiful people was being helped by Jesus. I sighed in disappointment when I saw the pictures. They were so appealing and so untrue to the biblical text. In Matthew 25 Jesus says that as we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit those in prison, we do it to Him. He is the hungry, the naked, and the imprisoned. When we serve them we serve Him, even if we don't know it.
It's hard for us to envision Jesus needing us or depending on us. Jesus is God, and God is strong, powerful, and self-sufficient. The artist in Calcutta couldn't imagine Jesus receiving, so he painted Jesus giving.
Yet in Matthew 25 Jesus says quite clearly that what we do to the least important or powerful, we do to Him. Jesus is the weak hungry one, He is the shivering person without clothes, He is the lonely person in prison. When we see Him in those forms we don't see "Him" with a capitalized name, but "him", an ordinary person, with "no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him." (Isaiah 53:2)
The two major Christmas stories in the Bible tell of the birth of a baby boy, a boy who was so ordinary that no one beyond His family would have normally noticed His birth at all. The shepherds had to be terrified by angels, told what had happened, told where to go, and told how to recognize Him or else they wouldn't have noticed the birth. The magi from a distant country had to be guided by an unusual star, and when they found Him they found an ordinary baby.
In fact Jesus was so ordinary that when Herod's soldiers went to kill Him they killed all the babies in the region who were two years and younger; they killed them all because there was nothing to distinguish Jesus from the others as being an exceptional child. He wore no obvious signs of royalty or deity.
The great miracle of Christmas and of all of our lives is Emmanuel "God with us". God with us in the ordinary relationships and events of our lives. The presence of the Spirit of God in our lives and our world makes everything new, even though it may still look ordinary!
We, ordinary people like the shepherds, become joyful, excited messengers of what we have seen with new eyes and heard with new ears. We would have missed it, because the kingdom of God so often is like yeast, doing its work imperceptibly. We would have missed it if someone hadn't pointed it out to us. But once we saw the ordinary baby in a new light, once we recognized the presence of Jesus so near to us, we were changed.
Mother Teresa may greet the Mennonites from around the world gathered at the Mennonite World Assembly not far from St. Paul's Cathedral in Calcutta in early January. She often speaks of seeing Jesus in the eyes of the poor and the dying, and there are plenty of those in Calcutta. The global Mennonite family will see them.
Whether we see Jesus in their eyes as Mother Teresa does, or whether He is hidden, as He was to those in Matthew 25 who asked, "When did we see you?" He is present in the ordinary events and encounters of our lives. Each experience and every person is an opportunity to serve Christ.
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