The Messiah is the fruition of plenty in paradise, where there once was thirst and the desert. He is the giver of presence, the provider of bread, the one who answers the questions, who provides the meat. It is through His peace that we are brought into being and through His sacrifice that we have learned how to love.
In a discussion with the human beings in a university in the early 1970s AD, my friend Ivan Illich, after a talk skeptical about infrastructural and economic development, was asked by one about Jesus. Where did this former Catholic Priest get off, talking about politics and development and technology, without talking about His Lord and Savior? In response, Ivan grew somewhat somber to describe the Alexamenos graffito. Known to the world as, perhaps, the first extant graphical representation of Jesus, the graffito is engraved on a building near Palatine Hill, a place known as a center of Roman power, with our Savior impaled as a donkey, worshipped by a lone disciple named Alexamenos. With touching somberness, Ivan described how that is how the world sees Jesus.
To the Romans, the cross was incorrigible defeat. There was no coming back from it. To we Americans, it is the equivalent of the electric chair or lethal injection. It is what they used against political dissidents, terrorists and recalcitrant criminals. But then, Jesus.
Jesus, the Word at the beginning of time and our spotless lamb was condemned to it, by His own people who were to be a nation of priests but who were offended by His Way, because He spoke with Authority and good things happened. He offended those who were attached to their way of life, their wealth and their influence, rather than the Way of God. He estranged those who believed that following the law of Moses was all they had to do, neglecting that the Living God desired a relationship with them. He healed people in the name of God, cast out demons and raised the dead. He fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament prophets and rose again after His crucifixion.
Jesus is a living example of the power and humility found in obeying God. He changed people’s lives in ancient times, and He continues to change them today. His example has been followed so much that the calendar made by Julius Caesar, the pre-eminent Roman Emperor, is modified to be based on Him: Christ, crucified and resurrected, BC and AD. Historically, the history of the West has largely been the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Jesus is the light in the darkness, the truth amidst ignorance and lies, and the determination to live and die for love. One of Ivan’s favorite parables he frequently recounted was the Good Samaritan. An Israelite on a walk is robbed, beaten and left in a ditch. Other Israelites, including a rabbi, pass by him, not deciding to help him. Then, a Samaritan, someone who is rejected by Israelites, feels a turning in their guts to help this injured Israelite. This Samaritan, Jesus says, is our neighbor.
There is something intensely voluntary and spiritual about this kinship, and it is something that Ivan described as utterly rupturous of the existing modes of ethics of the ancient world. The word “ethics” itself comes from the word “ethnos,” the same word where we get the word, “ethnicity.” The neighborliness described by Jesus is not restricted to ethnic ties, but is instead a voluntary form of charity felt for the other. This spiritual kinship, based on the personal response to the encounter of the person in another, is not something that can be legislated, compelled or coerced. It can be brought forth into fruition only through the movement of the spirit in the personal encounter.
The person becomes the center in Christ, and Him in others. The other becomes the opportunity to again, personally encounter Christ. This value of another human being, because of simple care or the presence of God, is something radical and never seen before.
Ivan repeatedly emphasized the utter surprise of the gift of God’s incarnation. The fact that God would form Himself in the womb of the little girl Mary is utterly strange and unnecessary. Christ did not arrive in glory, the sun at his back. He became a person, born into poverty and provided for by only those who could see the signs. He was, is a man. The incarnation of God marks a change in the history of human perception itself. You look to see God, Yahweh, in a form like me, not just another abstractly as the storm on the mountain. The Absolute in the human, the Good Himself as a human being, God, incarnate. This change, and the invitation to see the other as not just another, but as the very temple of God, provided an opening for a holy, mystical body to form, not based on any earthly tie, but on the unity provided by the Holy Spirit of God to form the body of Christ.
It is this divine rebirth that invokes our love and devotion. The death of Christ, portrayed by some juveniles in their graffito near Palatine Hill, was the victory of the light, for the light displayed what the darkness does to the light. The resurrection of Christ, His continual love and light, enable us to live how He lived, all those years ago and forever. The Holy Spirit of God, a law of grace unto itself, cannot be bound by the world. He is who He is: free, in power and humility. He enables Us, to be so, too.
Veracity as Virtue 