<p>25:36&nbsp;<em>Naked</em>- The Lord Jesus was naked or at least without clothing on the cross.&nbsp;</p><p><em>And you clothed Me</em>- As the believers clothed Him, so He will clothe them (Rev. 3:5; 7:9; 19:8; being clothed upon with immortality is definitely a picture of salvation). He will act spiritually to us, in terms of salvation, as we have acted materially to His brethren as they in their lives, as the body of Christ, experience various aspects of His life, sufferings and death.</p><p><em>Sick</em>- Gk. 'weak'. &quot;He was crucified in&nbsp;<em>weakness</em>... we also are&nbsp;<em>weak</em>&nbsp;in Him&quot; (2 Cor. 13:4). His crucifixion 'weakness' is manifest in all who are in Him, part of His body. Both in His life and supremely in His death, the Lord carried our weakness / sickness (Mt. 8:17, quoting from the prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus in Isaiah 53). He fully shared in &quot;our infirmities&quot; (Heb. 4:15 s.w.) and was &quot;compassed with infirmity / weakness&quot; (Heb. 5:2 s.w.). Clearly the weakness / sickness of the Lord is to be found in all those in Him, and we are to minister to that as we would minister to Him personally.</p><p>1 Cor. 8:9 is one of several passages which warn us not to make &ldquo;the weak&rdquo; to stumble. There are weak members amongst every group of believers, and therefore we should watch our behaviour, because it will have an effect upon whoever is weak. But this doesn't mean that&nbsp;<em>we</em>&nbsp;actually know who&nbsp;the weak ones are. Because we don't know who is especially weak we must always be careful in our behaviour,&nbsp;<em>whoever</em>&nbsp;we are with. Indeed, we have to adopt the perspective that in a sense we are&nbsp;<em>all</em>&nbsp;weak.&nbsp; The Greek word translated &quot;weak&quot; usually means one of two things: physical illness, or spiritual weakness. Sometimes these two senses are combined (e.g. when James speaks of praying for the &quot;sick&quot; brother, or when Jesus talks of how pleased he was that brethren had visited the &quot;sick&quot; brother in Mt. 25:36). Paul&nbsp;often uses the word in his letters to Corinth. He says that we are&nbsp;<em>all</em>&nbsp;weak because of our natures (1 Cor. 15:43), and that Christ died on account of the fact that we are weak (2 Cor. 13:4 Gk.). Because of this, Paul reasons, we're all weak, because Christ died for every one of us. He therefore says that to sin against a weak brother is to sin against Christ; because Christ has associated himself with our spiritual weakness, in order to save us from it (1 Cor. 8:12). Thus he says that when we visit a weak brother (spiritually? it's the same word), we visit&nbsp;<em>him</em>. He so closely associates himself with the weak brother. Christ on the cross carried the sins of &quot;the weak&quot; (i.e. all of us), and thereby left us an example of how we should behave towards the &quot;weak&quot;. In this context, Paul says that we should likewise love our neighbour (in the ecclesia; Rom. 15:1-4). What he seems to be saying is that we should understand that we are&nbsp;<em>all</em>&nbsp;weak, and therefore try to help each other, in the same spirit as Christ died for the weakness of each of us. If we recognize that we are&nbsp;<em>all</em>&nbsp;weak, we'll avoid two common mistakes: 1) Thinking that some brethren aren't weak and should therefore be followed blindly; and 2) Thinking that some believers are &quot;weak&quot; whilst the rest of us are &quot;strong&quot;.&nbsp;Paul didn't want the Corinth ecclesia to think he was wagging the finger at them and implying: 'You lot are so weak, but I'm strong'. Several times he speaks of his own weakness, and he glories in the fact that although he is so (spiritually) weak, God works through him so mightily; indeed, he comes to the conclusion that God's strength is perfectly expressed through his spiritual weaknesses (2 Cor. 11:30; 12:5,9,10). He says that he preached to Corinth in the first place in (spiritual) &quot;weakness&quot; (1 Cor. 2:3)-&nbsp; because it seems that when he first got to Corinth, he wasn't spiritually strong enough to grasp the nettle of witnessing to the city as he should have done (Acts 18:9,10). Having admitted to Corinth that he himself was weak, he can say that whenever one of them is weak, he feels weak too; in other words he's saying that he can totally empathize (not just sympathize) with a weak brother's feelings (2 Cor. 11:29).&nbsp;</p><p><em>And you visited Me</em>- The idea is not really to pop around to someone's house or hospital ward. The idea really is of identity, with a view to salvation. Thus God visited us in Christ to save us (Lk. 1:68,78; 7:16 &quot;God has visited His people&quot;; Acts 15:14 God &quot;visited the Gentiles to take out a people&quot;; Heb. 2:6 &quot;what is man that You visit him&quot;). This is the 'visiting' in view. As He ultimately 'visits' us to save, crossing the huge distance between God and man to do so, likewise we are to 'visit' our brethren. Again, what we do materially for those in Christ is a reflection of what He spiritually does for us. This is to be the motivation; to perceive that their poverty, their imprisonment, all of which may be their fault, is a reflection of our spiritual need and poverty, as we like them miss chance after chance to pull ourselves out of our poverty, and fall down too easily into survival and coping mechanisms that bind us to our poverty. And we are to show the same compassionate care to them as the Lord does to us.&nbsp;</p><p><em>I was in prison and you came to me</em>- Prison is a metaphor for where sin and spiritual debt leads us. We are all hopelessly in spiritual debt and therefore in the debtors' prison (18:30). The Gospel which saves us is of freedom for the spiritual prisoners. And we are to reflect that experience in visiting others in prison, even if it is their fault they are there, just as it's our fault that we too are imprisoned spiritually. And &quot;prison&quot; was understood by Peter as a fair description of the Lord's sufferings, &quot;to prison and to death&quot; (Lk. 22:33). In His death, the Lord went to the &quot;spirits in prison&quot;, He was with them&nbsp; / us there (1 Pet. 3:19). But &quot;prison&quot; wasn't necessarily understood as a building with &quot;Prison&quot; written on it. Legion was 'bound', imprisoned, with fetters (Lk. 8:29 s.w.); and yet still free. Likewise Paul was 'bound' or 'imprisoned' to a soldier (Acts 28:16 s.w.). The Lord's binding could therefore be fairly understood as an imprisonment. And He was imprisoned at least for 24 hours before His death. The wonder of all this is that those imprisoned even by the effect of their own sin are thus still fellowshipping the Lord's crucifixion sufferings; and we are to minister to them as we would have done to Christ on the cross. Would we not have rushed to provide something in response to His plea &quot;I thirst&quot;? Of course. But we are to do so in response to the need of His brethren. Even &quot;the least&quot; of them, who are suffering for their sins.&nbsp;</p><p>So we can say that hunger, thirst, being a stranger, naked, weak and imprisoned are all things which the Lord experienced during His life and especially in His death. His brethren, His body, share His sufferings. We are to minister to them as we would have done were we there beholding the sufferings of Christ on the cross. We should emerge from such &lsquo;beholding&rsquo;, as we do it at the memorial meeting, practically resolving to reflect it to His brethren. And we are the more motivated by realizing that all those situations of hunger, thirst, imprisonment, weakness and nakedness are in fact metaphors for our own spiritual poverty, which the Lord through the cross responded to, in utter grace. As He has done spiritually to us, so we are to do, spiritually and materially, to others. All those symptoms of poverty are often (although far from always) the result of mismanagement, weak motivation, unhealthy coping patterns, chronically missed chances&hellip; and yet in spiritual terms, those things are the story of our lives. In the materially poor we see exact reflections of ourselves, of our spiritual poverty and failures. As the Lord has graciously responded to us in our weakness and self-inflicted poverty, so we are to do so to His people.</p>