When Jesus was on earth, his words and actions were not those of someone who was indifferent to people’s situations. He was filled with compassion for the crowds who came to hear him, for their physical needs and for their healing. In the story of the Good Samaritan, he compares those who are indifferent to the suffering of the man who had been robbed with the Samaritan who helped the man. Likewise on the cross Jesus cared about his mother.
On the world stage today, how can we not be indifferent to what is going on? On a more local level where people are suffering or in need, how can we ignore them?
John Donne wrote that...
No man is an island,
entire of itself,
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
Elie Wiesel, who suffered in the Holocaust and saw family members tortured and killed, called indifference a sin.
Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven leaving us to carry on his work of loving and caring for all because now he has no body on earth but ours to do his work. As Edmund Burke said “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Therefore let us not be indifferent to our needy world but seek to know God’s will and be involved in his way forward.