Matthew 25:40 with St. Teresa of Calcutta
“And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’”
Mother Teresa became well known for speaking about “the Gospel on five fingers,” or “the five-finger Gospel.” With her ever luminous smile, she would hold up her hand and count off each word with a finger: “You. Did. It. To. Me.”
It can seem like a radical oversimplification of the Christian faith, but the saint, with her graced wisdom, is on to something here. In Matthew’s gospel, the five-finger moment occurs in the twenty-fifth chapter and it’s a moment unique to the Matthean account. The importance of the words are heightened by their placement within a passage about the final judgment. Consequently, the importance of doing is brought out with emphasis: “As you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.” We will not be measured by vague intentions, positive thoughts, or sympathetic emotions; no, we will be measured by our actions and the character that is formed by those actions and gives rise to them.
But the most important word of this phrase is not “did” but “me,” because, as Mother Teresa makes clear, it refers to Jesus. “[Jesus] makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the sick one, the one in prison, the lonely one, the unwanted one, and he says: ‘You did it to me.’ He is hungry for our love.” The Gospel is not about any old kind of doing; indeed, it is not even about merely doing good. Rather, it is about loving. It is, firstly, about loving Jesus and, secondly, loving others for his sake. Mother Teresa detects a beautiful pedagogy at work here: “His ways are so beautiful.—To think that we have God almighty to stoop so low as to love you & me & make use of us—& make us feel that He really needs us.” Jesus humbles himself by taking on the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, and when, for his sake, we love and serve those in need—the unseen, the unloved, the unclaimed, the unborn—we become instruments of his love in the world. [1]
