The Pain of Indifference

    In today's Gospel, the crowds respond to Jesus' teaching by saying, this is a hard saying, who can listen to it? Not them, as it turns out, since after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him. (Jn 6:60-69) These disciples were never true followers of Christ because they did not have a love burning deep inside themselves for Jesus. When it suited them, they followed Him. Yet, the moment His teachings demanded them to sacrifice a little of their comfort and change their habits, they began to complain and ultimately abandoned the Son of God. In a word, they were indifferent to Jesus. In the Gospel, they do not turn against the Lord in fierce opposition; they simply fall away from Him, to ensconced in their earthly comforts.

    Our modern world has grown too indifferent to Jesus. Many men and women spend their entire lives not giving a thought to Him or His teachings. Granted, they do not directly oppose Him or persecute Christians, but this is small consolation to our Lord. He came into the world to save it. In order to be saved, one must be impassioned about Jesus. At least those who oppose Christ's teachings are impassioned by Him, even if that passion is perverted into hate and animosity. Jesus can work with that soul and help him or her. It is the indifferent souls that inflict on the Lord a pain that rivals that of His passion and death.

    The English poet G. A. Studdert-Kennedy wrote a poem called "When Jesus Came to Birmingham." In it, he imagined what it would be like for Jesus, the same God-man who was mocked and crucified at Calvary, to walk the streets of the contemporary British town of Birmingham:

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree, They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary; They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep, For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap. 

When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by. They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die; For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain, They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain. 

Still Jesus cried, 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do, And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through; The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see, And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary. 

     Jesus wants us to care. We have grown too indifferent in our society about many things: our families, our health, but most of all about our salvation. This indifference steals from our energy and our zeal for living. We begin to fall into the habit of living each day in the anticipation of the next one, only to find that tomorrow brings more of the same. At the end of the poem, Jesus cries for Calvary because on that hill He was able to die so that we could live. Yet today, we inflict more pain through our lack of caring than the nails or the sword could ever hope to produce.

     I know there are days when I find myself struggling to think of anything noteworthy I had done the previous day to grow closer to God's love. To live so indifferently is to sacrifice the gift of life. Rather, we are called to sacrifice the gift of ourselves each day, so that we do not hear Jesus declare at the end of days the greatest words of indifference: I never knew you; depart from me." (Mt 7:23)