April — The Art of Becoming
Day 119 — 29 April
The Face You Did Not Expect to Find
“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” — Matthew 25:35–36 (KJV)
There is a moment in the practice of becoming that arrives so quietly, so unexpectedly, and with so little fanfare that you can pass through it entirely without recognising what has happened, and yet when you finally see it for what it is, it changes the way you understand every act of crossing, descending, feeling, speaking, and serving you have ever performed.
It is the moment you discover that the person you became for was carrying someone else within them all along.
Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, recorded in Matthew 25, is one of the most confronting passages in the entire Gospel tradition, because it locates the presence of Christ in the very last place religious expectation would think to look: in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. The people who are commended in the parable are commended precisely because they served without recognising whom they were serving, and the people who are challenged are challenged precisely because they failed to see what was standing in front of them the entire time.
The Greek word ξένος (xenos, meaning “stranger,” “foreigner,” “one who is unfamiliar,” or “a person outside the community”) is the term from which English derives the word “xenophobia,” and its placement in Jesus’ list is theologically deliberate, because ξένος (xenos, “stranger”) describes exactly the kind of person the art of becoming teaches you to move toward: the unfamiliar one, the outsider, the person whose world differs from yours and whose language, customs, and experience require the full repertoire of identity, initiative, descent, observation, empathy, and fluency to engage with authentically. When Jesus says “I was a ξένος (xenos, “stranger”), and you took me in,” He is declaring that the act of becoming for the stranger is itself an encounter with divine presence, whether the person performing the act realises it at the time or otherwise.
The word γυμνός (gymnos, meaning “naked,” “poorly clothed,” “exposed,” or “without adequate covering”) describes a person whose vulnerability is visible to everyone who passes, and the act of clothing the γυμνός (gymnos, “exposed”) is an act of restoring dignity, of covering what has been laid bare, of performing for another person the very thing that the art of becoming, at its most tender, has always been about: entering the space of another’s need and providing what they lack from what you carry.
The word ἀσθενής (asthenēs, meaning “weak,” “sick,” “without strength,” or “infirm”) is the adjective form of the same ἀσθένεια (astheneia, “weakness”) that Paul celebrated in 2 Corinthians 12 on Day 116, and its appearance here tells us that the person you visit in their ἀσθένεια (astheneia, “weakness”) is carrying within them a presence you may perceive only in retrospect, a presence that transforms the act of visiting from obligation into encounter.
The word φυλακή (phylakē, meaning “prison,” “a place of guarding,” “confinement,” or “a situation from which one cannot extract oneself”) describes the most isolated and inaccessible of all the conditions Jesus names, and the act of coming to the person in φυλακή (phylakē, “confinement”) requires the most deliberate and costly form of becoming imaginable, because it means entering a space that the rest of the world has agreed to avoid.
And then Jesus delivers the line that rewrites the entire framework: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The Greek ἐλάχιστος (elachistos, meaning “least,” “smallest,” “most insignificant,” or “lowest in perceived value”) identifies the people in whom Christ’s presence is discovered, and the dative pronoun ἐμοί (emoi, meaning “to me” or “for me”) completes the identification with an intimacy that leaves zero distance between the person served and the Christ who receives the service.
The Visit That Changed Everything
Think of the friend who drives across the city on a Thursday evening to visit someone whose illness has entered a phase that medicine can manage but cannot cure, and who sits beside the bed in a hospital ward that smells of antiseptic and tastes of fluorescent light, holding a hand that has grown thinner over the past three months, listening to a voice that carries less volume than it once did, and offering nothing more than the gift of being physically, bodily, incarnately present in a room that most visitors have stopped entering because the trajectory has become too painful to witness.
The friend brings no solution. The friend carries no remedy. The friend possesses no power to reverse what the illness has set in motion. And yet the friend’s presence in that room, the weight of their body in the chair beside the bed, the warmth of their hand around the patient’s fingers, the steadiness of their breathing in the silence between sentences, performs a work that no medical intervention can replicate: it communicates, in the language that only physical presence can speak, that this person is worth crossing the city for, that their diminishing body still holds infinite value, and that the art of becoming reaches its most sacred expression when it enters the room that the rest of the world has quietly decided to leave.
This is the dimension of becoming that underlies every other dimension we have explored across this month, and it is the dimension that Jesus identifies as the criterion by which the entire enterprise will ultimately be measured: did you see the person in front of you, and did you enter their world with whatever you carried, even when what you carried felt insufficient, even when the room was difficult, even when the outcome was uncertain, and even when the cost of entering exceeded what you had budgeted for the journey?
The art of becoming, at its most irreducible, is the art of showing up. It is the art of being physically, emotionally, spiritually present to the person whose need calls for your engagement, and it is the art of trusting that the Christ who dwells within the ἐλάχιστος (elachistos, “least”) is the same Christ whose presence sustains you through every act of faithful crossing you will ever perform.
Every lesson of this month converges here. The settled identity of Day 91 gave you the stability to enter difficult rooms. The initiative of Day 92 gave you the courage to move toward them. The descent of Day 93 taught you to kneel beside the bed. The observation of Day 94 taught you to see what the room actually needed. The emotional entering of Day 95 taught you to feel the weight of the silence. The fluency of Day 96 taught you to speak the language of the person lying in front of you. And the love of Day 104 is what brought you through the door in the first place, because only love sustains the kind of presence that enters a room with no agenda other than to be there.
You will encounter Christ today in a face you did not expect to find Him in. It may be the face of a colleague who is struggling, a neighbour who is isolated, a stranger who is lost, or a friend whose suffering has entered a season that you feel powerless to address. And the question this penultimate day of April asks is the simplest and most searching question the art of becoming has ever posed: will you show up?
Declaration
I show up. I enter the rooms that need me, even when I carry no solution and possess no remedy, because my presence is itself the offering that the moment requires. I see Christ in the face of every ξένος (xenos, “stranger”) I welcome, every γυμνός (gymnos, “exposed”) person I cover, every ἀσθενής (asthenēs, “weak”) person I visit, and every soul in φυλακή (phylakē, “confinement”) I come to, and I serve them with the reverence of someone who understands that the ἐλάχιστος (elachistos, “least”) carries a presence that transforms every act of becoming into an encounter with the living God. I am present without agenda, faithful in the flesh, and willing to enter the rooms the rest of the world has decided to leave. The God whose presence fills every space I walk through is the same God who meets me in the face of every person I serve, and I trust that the art of becoming, in its simplest and most irreducible form, is the art of showing up with everything I carry and trusting that it is enough.
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