When was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty and gave you food and drink? Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family you did it to me. This is a New Testament question and answer almost as familiar as that question Jesus asks that we have yet to answer satisfactorily: Who is my neighbor?

Some recent commentators see "the least of these…" as referring to missionaries sent by Jesus into the world and regard the discourse as directed to righteous pagans who might be saved from damnation by acting with compassion toward those in relationship with Jesus. Now, I wouldn’t want to suggest we are talking here about academics on meandering sabbaticals, but I will at least suggest that such an interpretation, at first glance, highlights the problem that faces us all in the sometimes rarefied academic air of the theological institution: a professional, a scholarly, oddly enough-even a clerical distance from the flesh and blood humanity Jesus came to save.

"…For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink." I worked for fourteen years at Princeton Theological Seminary and it was a wonderful environment in which to live and be engaged in ministry. I do not hold it responsible for the malaise that gradually fell upon me, the lip service I began to pay to the urgent words of the gospel that compel us to the place where basic human needs require words and deeds. I came to take the hungry for granted. I came to take ministries of compassion toward those who are poor for granted. I assumed others were taking on the burden of the poor and the destitute. I was distanced from the hungry poor by the shape and form of my calling, by the community in which I lived, by the route of my daily routine, by the absence of the needy from my field of vision. Those I saw were at the edge of my sight; I was immune to their plight and my part in it.

I became practiced at the deception that poverty has any claim upon my attention, any share in the allocation of my energy and resources that was beyond the intermittent pangs of conscience, the compassion, the occasional horror even that nags at us all when confronted with even a glimpse of the magnitude of the deprivation that engulfs much of our world. In the United States alone, 31 million people, including 12 million children, live in households that experience hunger or are at risk of hunger (U.S. Department of Agriculture). Seven hundred eighty million people in the developing world are malnourished (Bread for the World Institute, A Program to End Hunger, p. 30). It is all so distant, so far away, the people nameless, the faces alien, without intimacy and immediacy. I read a line recently that has stayed with me, "We are becoming a society which has lost the ability to shudder." I rarely even responded to appeals for disaster relief; do any of us, beyond the occasional CROP WALK? I thought, my denomination is taking care of that, what I give regularly at church covers that too. I know it’s out there-hunger, poverty, homelessness, but it’s always been there and always will be. It just doesn’t have anything to do with me, well, not much anymore. Me and mine are at least a generation away from all of that. Ain’t going back. I’ve seen to that.

Sure, newly arrived Guatemalan immigrants are piled up in houses in Princeton meant for single families. Sure, they and most of the African Americans in town live in the John Street area and Redding Circle and work in the hospital, in the eating houses of the University, on the grounds of the seminary or university, in the wealthy homes-or do day work of one kind or another. But what has that to do with me? Their children enter school in kindergarten already behind and the gap widens in the middle school and by high school becomes deeply cultural as well as academic, the protective membrane of childhood raw from the friction of under-valued difference.

Yes I know the Bible, even Jesus talks about visiting the prisoner but the Pentecostals and the Baptists and the Nation of Islam will take care of that. I don’t know where the prison is and don’t welcome the dehumanization associated with visiting someone there. In Trenton (where I now live), the graduation rate in the city’s only high school is 65 percent! Twelve Presbyterian churches have closed since the mid-sixties; how many others from other mainline denominations? I was not alone in letting my focus shift from the least of these for whom Jesus cared so deeply.

What happens to us? We get so fully engaged in my work, my study, my call, my Jesus, that we don’t see Jesus in the world, in the faces of the least among us.

I trust that each of us is where God wants us, doing what God wants us to do. But don’t you have moments when you wonder, what am I doing here? Or more precisely, Why aren’t I there, helping to feed, shelter, mend, preach good news-to brothers and sisters trapped in lives that appear small and confining, preyed upon by forces our rich and powerful nation has let loose and does not have the will to tame. You and I in the high-end churches, in the well-to-do churches of whatever stripe, in the mega-churches of fervent or seeker-sensitive praise; we have a special responsibility to keep the clear-eyed focus of the gospel on the people for whom Jesus had a clear-eyed concern; the least among us. They are young and old and of every color and nation. They are refugees and working poor, they are children abandoned by war and disease; they are casualties of ancient hatreds and modern greed. We need to see the world as it is, in all its beauty and its horror, the terror and the peace that here and there prevails; the middling comfort of some, the obscene luxury of a few, the crushing poverty of most. We must remain awake and alert as stewards of the earth and shepherds of God’s people, as disciples of a radical Messiah whose love sought out the least among us and sent him to a cross of death.