Mother Teresa once stated, “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely right there where you are, in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, rejected by society, completely forgotten, completely left alone. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.”
What interests me about chapters 5 through 7 in Matthew is not just Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but what took place the day after the sermon. This is when the crowd shrinks to the individual. The audience now has a name. We see it immediately in Matthew 8:1-2: “Jesus came down the mountain with the cheers of the crowd still ringing in his ears. Then a leper appeared” (MSG).
Life just got real. The worst disease came after the greatest sermon. You know what I’m talking about. After the singing and the preaching, there is debt, marriage problems, addictions, cancer, diabetes, divorce and abuse.
Chapter 8 is all about what happens on Monday after the great and inspiring Sunday morning worship service. To know the Bible and how to sing Christian songs is important, but that doesn’t translate into making other people’s lives better when we meet them in a tragedy. You can’t be compassionate without people. No one is compassionate alone. Our Calcuttas are right next to us, and they need our compassion.
Every one of us has three resources to show compassion: time, treasure and talents. I heard someone once say, “You can see the priorities of a person’s life by two documents: a checkbook and a calendar.” I would add this question: What is your talent? You have at least one; everybody does. The apostle Peter wrote in 1 Peter 4:10, “As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” Whether your gifting is loving people, helping people, serving people, giving to people, bringing people to church…it’s always about people. That’s how you show compassion.
Where is your Calcutta? Where does life get real for you? How might you show compassion during your Monday?
After pastoring an inner-city congregation in Detroit for thirty years, Pastor Tim served at Brooklyn Tabernacle in NYC for five years and pastored in Lafayette, Louisiana, for five years. He became Senior Pastor of Times Square Church in May of 2020.