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At the Second Coming of Christ, He’ll reward those who fed the hungry, visited the sick and the imprisoned, clothed the naked… we all know this Gospel passage. As Christians, we try to get involved in prison ministries and soup kitchens… this is very important and well-deserving of our efforts. However, pay close attention… when Christ addresses the righteous, they’re genuinely surprised… “When have we ministered to you, Lord?” Do you think that Christ’s words could genuinely surprise anyone involved in a soup kitchen? It’s more likely that they’d say, “Yes, Lord, I ministered to the hungry as if they were You, and I saw Your image in each of their faces”. The surprised ones weren’t involved in Christian ministries; they didn’t visit prison inmates because it was the Christian thing to do. They ministered to the needy out of a profound sense of oneness with them. If your child is hungry, you feed him because you’re family, not because it’s the Christian thing to do. When your brother’s in prison, you go there, not because it’s a Christian ministry or because you enjoy visiting inmates; in fact, you may hate going there, but you go anyway… because he’s family. When we treat others as family, we don’t expect reward for feeding them or visiting them in prison; we don’t expect reward for this… we’d be genuinely surprised to get any. If we let a stranger in not because he might turn out to be an undercover angel but merely because he’s a fellow human being, he’s family, then, we understand that to call God “Father” means to call a stranger “brother”… not in a “churchy” way, but quite literally.
2 January 2016
Fr Sergei Sveshnikov
Fr Sergei Sveshnikov
https://frsergei.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/have-you-fed-the-hungry-lately/
Voices from Russia 
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