“You don’t know who I am, do you?” That’s the way she put the question to me at a recent gathering. I honestly did not know how to answer her question. For the life of me I could not put a name on her face. I did remember having met her several years ago. Not sure where or when. My mind worked rapidly but to no avail. She was standing there with her question in front of me: “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
Inside, I was dealing with embarrassment. My good ol’ sense of inadequacy rose up in me like the sun in the morning and the moon at night. Shame on me for not being able to recall the name of this woman or remember where or when we had met. I shuffled my feet, looked at the floor, trying to find an exit. Maybe she would walk away and take her question with her: “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
The moment of truth was there. Fish or cut bait. The ball was roundly in my square court, so I answered her question quite simply: “Yes. ” The answer was as oblique as the question. But she had put it to me as a “yes or no” proposition. “Yes”, I said, leaving her to fill in “I don’t know you.”
Should I blame my faux pas on the tendency of the aging process to forget? Perhaps it’s just a human thing. The mind simply goes blank; the computer’s memory chip fails us at times. The tip of my tongue can get very crowded at times.
Preacher Gordon was an erudite bachelor minister in the last generation of the great southern Presbyterian saints and overly admired by the single ladies of his congregations. In his later years he was invited to preach at a former parish. As he was shaking hands after the service, this woman grabbed his hand and exclaimed, “I bet you don’t remember me.” Without so much as a pregnant pause, Gordon replied, “When I left here, darling, I had to forget you in order to get on with my work.”
Mary Magdalene was up early on that first day of the week, according to John’s Easter Gospel. When she found the tomb empty, she was beside herself. Someone, whom she mistook to be a gardener, asked her about her troubled look. The conversation is Jesus’s way of saying to Mary “You don’t know who I am, do you?” For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out this stranger of Galilee who dared us to welcome the stranger. Honor all people. Love your neighbor and your enemy. Wait! Did the Jesus say “enemy”? That’s pushing the envelope. Maybe the rabbi had heard the old Jewish proverb that says “my enemy is just a person whose story I haven’t heard yet.”
We’ve heard the old, old stories of Jesus forever, but we still have an identity crises recognizing him in our neighbors and enemies. In true Matthew 25 form, we could ask when did we see you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and give you clothing? And the all-inclusive answer, of course…just as you did it to one of the least of these…!