Friends, this Sunday's Gospel for the feast of Christ the King is the wonderful yet chilling text from Matthew 25 where Jesus promises us and warns us that we will be judged on how merciful we have been to the poor and the least of our brothers and sisters. The following is a quote from St Teresa of Calcutta who comments on this text:
'In order to help us deserve heaven, Christ set a condition: that at the moment of our death you and I—--whoever we might have been and wherever we have lived, Christians and non-Christians alike, every human being who has been created by the loving hand of God in his own image—--shall stand in his presence and be judged according to what we have been for the poor, what we have done for them.
Here a beautiful standard for judgment presents itself. We have to become increasingly aware that the poor are the hope of humanity, for we will be judged by how we have treated the poor. We will have to face this reality when we are summoned before the throne of God: “I was hungry. I was naked. I was homeless. And whatever you did to the least of my brethren, you did it to me.”