4. A Strange Dialectic Vis-À-Vis The Human Being

          It is a known and lamented fact that the gospels describe very little what took place in Jesus' interior. Because of this the following hard words of the evangelist deserve special attention: "Many believed in him, but Jesus did not trust them... He had no need for them to inform him about humans because he knew what was in them" (Jn 2, 23-25). It is surprising then that this distrusting man is precisely the one who has demanded and expected most from human beings. It is probable that the expression "I will make you fishers of people" is the only program that he presented to his followers when he called them. Rather than simply meaning that these fishers will convert many people, this comment signifies the work of drawing the best human quality from this turbulent sea of inhumanity that we human beings are accustomed to be. It also implies:

• Drawing "the best possible version" from each person, in line with what the prophets announced: "to change the heart of stone into a heart of flesh".
• Draw out that free human being with his "bowels moved with compassion", that one could describe as a person of the Kingdom, in line with the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus.

          But of this whole issue to which Machiavelli himself could have subscribed, Jesus did not draw the conclusion of the Florentine (take advantage of human misery to draw profit for himself), but he asked his own not to be afraid, "because his Father was pleased with them". I believe it is possible to affirm without any sort of apologetics that though Jesus knew, as everybody else, what betrayal and disenchantment was, nobody has drawn out more from human beings than he did. He really seems to have been an authentic "fisher of men". But one must not understand these words in a falsely "supernatural" sense but in the setting of the New Testament that describes Jesus as "presenting himself as a common man and acting as any common person" (Phil. 2,7).

          At the same time, this apparently hard man, turned out shockingly understanding when it was a question of, not what he detested as hypocrisy, but of simple human weakness (Jn 8, 1ff). Except the epithet of "fox" addressed to the little tyrant on duty, there never appeared on his lips a negative judgement on specific people. Jesus was brutal with two groups or types of human beings:

1. The rich who "as they loved money laughed at him" (Lk 16,14), and who Jesus naively asked to put all that they had for the service of the poor (Lk 12, 33); 
2. Those Pharisees that Jesus accused of having hearts not just hardened but blindly "deadened" (Mk 3,5). 

5. His Style

         Although Jesus "did not go to university nor wrote any book" we perceive in the gospels a clear contrast between the beauty of many words placed on the lips of Jesus and the rather simple style of the evangelists.

          His language proceeded from the observation of details, of southern colour and dialectic. His language uses elements such as yeast with which a woman kneads bread, the very small size of some seeds which later grow more than what would seem possible, or the two cents that an insignificant old woman gives in alms and to which Jesus pays more importance than the cheques the lords of this world give. In those two cents was placed the whole heart of the old woman whereas, with the cheques, it was just a way of calming themselves or calling the attention of others (Mk 12, 41ff). His language reflects a graphic way of describing hypocrisy as "straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel"; and this double manner of being simple as doves and "cunning" as serpents, or of "doing one thing without forgetting the other".

          His deepest sayings were not deep because they were inaccessible to simple people but because they had different levels of reading according to the depth of the hearer. Contrary to Greek wisdom, he preferred to speak more of the things we see than of essences that we do not see; but the hearer felt himself raised to the latter through the former. He resorted much to the narrative category, because more people gain access to God only through narration rather than through abstraction.

          And his words frequently found the ethical radicalism of the language of the prophets of Israel, with the wise tone of him who knows how to communicate this ethical radicalism -- option for the poor, non-violence, hunger for justice, mercy, cleanness of heart, working for peace, openness to persecution -- not with hard commands from the outside, but as vehicles of unexpected ways of happiness: "Blessed are those who ...". One gets the impression that towards the end of his life, his language hardened somewhat. This has some relation to the following point.

6. The Unexpected Conflict

          We have already pointed out the fact and the intensity of the conflict Jesus encountered. Jesus posed an unexpected threat for all well-placed people of his society. Perhaps these people fostered the disenchantment in others who were not  enthusiastic about him. The reaction and the decision to silence him were incredibly swift. These people had the quick insight that the Kingdom of God announced by Jesus would end their privileges. 

          On the other hand, there was something in that "gentle and humble-hearted" person that unleashed his aggressiveness. He saw how the name of God was being falsified, how it was used as a reason for doing evil by making use of religion to  perpetuate inequalities between Jew and Gentile, men and woman, between lay people and clergy, etc. This experience led to the scene Jesus created in the temple on his first visit to Jerusalem; and it led to his weeping over the city. The "expulsion of the temple merchants" was not just a mere denunciation of (unavoidable?) economic abuses, but the discrediting of a form of cult that had made sacred those differences between people. At that point in time all this must have come together with the intense awareness that the only differences that really existed for God were rooted in his radical partiality towards marginalized people.

          It is also a fact that the Gospels are marked by the sharp darts that Jesus hurled at the "ecclesiastics" of his time and these the evangelists tried to preserve later so that the same situations would not be repeated in the Christian Church: 

"You are breaking the will of God, taking refuge in your traditions... They eat up the resources of widows with the excuse of praying for them... You pay the small tax of mint and cumin, and you "disregard" what God wants most -- justice and mercy.... They kill the prophets sent by God and then presume to be God's children ... They dress up with religious symbols as though God looks at the exterior... The house of my Father is not a cave of thieves..." (Mt ch 15, 23, 6 and 21).

          The Gospels seem to testify too that towards the end of his life, the language of the Kingdom diminished and Jesus made use of "apocalyptic" language that describes or announces calamities. He did this not so much to  predict, but to warn and to proclaim that, despite these, God still remains the Lord of history. This apocalyptic language was prefigured in one of the most serious sentences of the gospels. It reveals how Jesus was fully conscious of the challenge of his message -- the Kingdom of God does not fit in with the containing vessels of this world -- Jesus said that it would be like putting new wine in old wineskins or putting a patch of new cloth on an old and worn-out fabric (Mt 9, 16). Either the taste is altered, or the cloth will tear. Christian churches know well up to what point their history oscillates between these two extremes: the dilution of the legacy with many reforms or the destruction of the structure from which they have sprung. Jesus never watered down the challenging dialectic of his message "One cannot serve God and wealth" (Mt 6,24). It is just that simple, although our world will deny it. On the other hand, it is not possible to love God if one does not love one's neighbour (Mt 22,34ff). It is not that the both loves are the "same" but it is impossible to separate the two. Although the churches find it difficult to understand.

Conclusion

          If our interpretation of the real Jesus is valid, the accuracy of J.B. Metz's words ought to be appreciated: "Jesus was neither a mad man nor a revolutionary; but he so palpably resembled the one and the other that he gave people a handle to mistake him to be both". At the end, Herod treated him as a fool and his own people handed him over to be crucified as a subversive element. Those who wish to follow him ... should count on the possibility of falling a victim to this misunderstanding" (18).
 
 

          His end -- a death reserved only for slaves and terrorists, the most terrible of that era, is well known to all (19). The striking sobriety of the synoptic gospels when narrating his death has very often been commented upon. They keep aloof from the rhetoric of martyrdom or aggression. Yet it must be added that this end was the logical result of his life, Jesus did not die by some "metaphysical" or divine expiatory plan, that needed innocent blood to placate God's justice, but because of the way he had lived.

          The evangelists present Jesus announcing his passion to the apostles with a wealth of details that lead one to think that these prophecies were redacted by them after the events had occurred and that the confessions or the words that Jesus had used to confide his initial fears were retouched. These predictions unleashed in Peter a contrary reaction. Peter's opposition sprang from his very different idea of what the Messiah should be. Peter upset Jesus profoundly to the point of calling him Satan (Mk 8, 27-33) (20).

          Let us not talk here of the cross, but of the total solitude that accompanied Jesus. Jesus was crucified in the name of God, by the decision of the religious authorities, abandoned by his disciples (one of whom betrayed him and another denied him in public), betrayed too by those crowds that had followed him and now shouted "Crucify him", manipulated as they were by the reigning authorities.(21) A "stranger" had to help him carry the cross, because of his inability to cope with it alone. And around his cross, only one disciple with a group of women faithful to him up to the end displaying more courage than the other disciples(22). Those who had succeeded in getting him to die, freed now from the fear that they had felt towards him, mocked him at the foot of the scaffold, offering to "dialogue" with him and showing their good disposition to hear him provided God brought him down from the Cross.

          Neither God nor Jesus accepted this blackmail. But one can understand what totally black moments Jesus must have gone through which led him to stumble and feel and cry out aloud: "Oh my God, why have you abandoned me?" And it is amazing how in the midst of that dark night Jesus was able to find the strength to assume his own death, giving up his life without them taking it away from him, and exclaiming again in a loud voice: "Abba, into your hands I give up my spirit." Because of this Jon Sobrino writes that, if in the first part of his life, Jesus understood that he had to put all that he had for the service of God, in the second half of his journey he understood that he had to put for the service of the Kingdom all that he was. This jump, from the abandonment of God into the hands of the Father, indelibly marks the depths of our history, whether we like it or not. The later Christian community understood that this leap could only be the work of the Spirit of God (Heb 9,14). It was this that makes one understand how one of the soldiers that was present there, "on seeing how he had died, went down the mountain saying: 'Really this man was the son of God' "(Mk 15,39).

          The anonymous text which we quoted at the beginning spoke of the permanence and influence of Jesus in the memory and history of humanity. Those who through the paschal events, ended up believing in him, expressed that faith by confessing that the man Jesus was the presence and the mark of divinity itself in this human history (the "Son" of God). On this account, those, who profess that faith, must necessarily keep away from making the cult to the divinity of Jesus become a way of escaping from the imperative of his humanity. If one falls a prey to that temptation, one loses not simply something that is humanly precious but loses God  since one would be disregarding one of the fundamental teachings of the New Testament -- that Jesus "although he was the Son" learned through his own sufferings and through his own human history that the fulfilment of what it mans to be human can only be attained in an attitude of acceptance and trust (what in the New Testament is called "obedience" -- Heb 5:8-9).

          We must acknowledge that historical Christianity frequently succumbed to that temptation, especially since when those who would later become the "vicars of Christ" accepted being proclaimed kings contrary to the express example of Jesus. One of the big tasks of Christianity in the future is to get the subversive and rejected memory of that way of being human to be converted once again into its cornerstone. But this would imply that if he now understands and accepts the title of this article the reader would need to ask oneself what he/she (believer or not) could do to get this cornerstone to no longer remain a stone rejected by the builders of this world (23).

1. From The Western World

1.2 Latin America
          What makes a great impact about Jesus is mercy and the primary importance he gives to this virtue; there is nothing further nor closer than mercy. From mercy he defines the truth of God and of the human being. What makes a great impact about Jesus is his honesty with what is real and his drive for truth, his judgement regarding the situation of the oppressed majorities and the oppressing minorities -- to be the voice of those who have no voice, and the voice against those who have too much voice; ... to be the defender of the weak and to denounce and unmask oppressors. What makes a great impact about Jesus is his fidelity to maintaining honesty and justice up to the end despite internal crises and external persecutions. What makes a great impact about Jesus is his freedom to bless or curse, go to the synagogue on a Sabbath and violate it -- freedom, finally, from everything that could be an obstacle to doing good. What makes a great impact about Jesus is that he wants an end to the misfortunes of the poor and desires the happiness of his followers; the beatitudes stem from there. What makes a great impact about Jesus is that he welcomes sinners and the excluded, that he sits at table with them and he is happy that God reveals God's Self to them. What makes a great impact about Jesus is his signs -- only modest signs of the Kingdom -- and his utopian horizon that embraces the whole of society, the whole world and history. Finally, what makes a great impact about Jesus is that he trusts in a caring God whom he calls Father, and before this Father Jesus, while remaining God, is always available -- a mystery that can not be manipulated.

          To see incarnated in one and the same person each of these qualities, honesty and truth, mercy and fidelity, freedom, happiness and celebration, the pettiness of things immediate and tangible and the greatness of utopia, confidence in the Father and availability before God is always a breath of fresh air. To see people like this is good news. But what makes a great impact too and perhaps even more than what has been mentioned before is the existence, in one and the same person, of qualities that are not easily brought together. Jesus is at the same time a man of mercy (misereor super turbas) and a man of prophetic denunciations ("Woe to you who are rich"), a man of austerity ("he who wishes to be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me") and a man of delicate feelings ("your faith has made you whole"), a man of confidence in God ("Abba", Father) and a man of solitude before God ("My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?").

2.1 India
          ... There was a man who came to the world and affirmed that he was one with the Origin; he had come from that Source and that he had to return to that Source; in the period of time that was granted to him, he spent his life doing good, though nothing he did was programmed or really out of the ordinary, though all that he did was intense, complete, authentic. He was simply a man who went through the world without joining extremist groups, who was ready to forgive everything except hypocrisy and, though he made no discrimination, he always appeared to take sides with the disinherited and the oppressed, and as a disinherited and oppressed person he ended his life. He saw the Origin that originates everything and suffered the impact of the forces of evil, but had an unlimited confidence in the breath of that wind that he called the Spirit, which penetrates all places and so this was all he left us as inheritance.

          He looked upon himself as man: (82 times in the gospels). He liked this name, and he discovered for himself and for others that his humanity was none other than the other side of divinity, inseparable though different, so different that he was painfully conscious of the existence of sin. And, nevertheless, he saw in himself and in every other human being not evil but the kingdom of heaven. This is what he preached and practised.

          His birth was obscure. He spent a good part of his life in the shade and his death was even more obscure. And, nevertheless, he never fell victim of frustration; when tempted by power he despised it; and when not successful, he dared to promise that he was going to be really present not only through the Spirit but also through simple food and drink in community. He did not use violence and never allowed himself to be intimidated by power; he preached forgiveness and love; he pronounced words that he affirmed did not proceed from himself. He elaborated no doctrinal system; he spoke the language of his time.

2.2 China
          The idea frequently troubles me that in the name of Jesus, we can say or do things that have very little to do with him. Many Christians misunderstand the expression "Jesus full of the Spirit". Jesus was not "spiritual" in the sense of "pious". In fact, he seemed impious in the eyes of the spiritual leaders of his own religion....

          The falsehood of the Kingdom of God is the empty promise made by those who possess religious privileges but live disconnected from the needs of those who are outside the religious "establishment". The truth of the Kingdom of God is that it belongs to the disinherited and the despised... I fear that we are too inclined to create an image of Jesus favourable to our own interests and in which Jesus himself would not be able to recognize himself... Jesus, by the strength of the Spirit, crossed the borders that separated him from the others and revealed to us how he had the experience of the truth and the grace of God, through ways he could not have experienced in his own religious tradition. What makes Jesus radically different from the religious leaders of his time and made it possible for him to have an unrivalled impact is his profound commitment to the historic realities of his people...

          Religion and legalism have often been strange companions that (according to a Chinese expression) "dream different dreams in the same bed".  Jesus wished to deliver his people from this legalistic religion...

          The farther Jesus is thrown away from the centre of the power of religious authorities, the more he is attracted towards women, men and children who, in his community were excluded from that centre, and also towards those who found themselves outside their own religious community. Those who according to religious authorities were outside the ambit of salvation, got to occupy the central place in his ministry of the Kingdom of God... Two thousand years later, an ever increasing number of Christians in the Third World, keep discovering that Jesus, full of grace and miracle of the saving grace of God, is bigger than the apostles and wider than Christianity. We are realizing that "to give testimony of Jesus up to the confines of the earth" (Acts 1, 8) does not mean one has to transplant the culture of the Christian West, nor extend its theology and liturgy from the West and the North to the East and the South. It means giving testimony of the way Jesus would identify today the manifestations of the saving grace of God in the world of today, and how he identifies himself today with the men and women who work and suffer for what he proclaimed as "the Kingdom of God". 

17 The priests and Pharisees did not enter the atrium of the pagan Pilate "so as not to defile themselves" (Jn 18, 28). Jesus decides to go to the house of the Roman centurion -- knowing well the Jewish mentality -- and of this centurion he asks only one favour at a distance.

18 In Concilium no. 110 (1975) pg. 556.

19 I do not include that part of Spanish youth who have been denied not only a Christian formation (legitimate if that was the will of their parents) but deprived even of information, leaving them in an uprooted and ridiculous illiteracy in this matter. 

20 One must painfully add that the exercise and the figure of the ministry of Peter in the Church of the second millennium appears very similar to the correction that Peter made to Jesus and which merited the wounded reaction of the latter: "Get away from me because your way of thinking is not that of God".

21 One cannot help evoking the final scene of that excellent film ("La lengua de las mariposas") when the people scold the good master they had loved, moved by their fear of the coup d'état.

22 So in the measure in which the priesthood of Jesus is constituted by the surrender of his life, as the letter to the Hebrews states, it could be affirmed that practically only the women participated in his priesthood.

23 For other aspects of the later faith in Jesus, I refer the reader to Booklet 26 of "Cristianisme i Justícia" (Cristología elemental) which is on the website: