THE FIRST LOOK
The first look of Jesus isn’t directed at the sin of people, but at the suffering that ruins their lives. What first touches his heart isn’t sin, but pain, oppression, and the humiliation that men and women endure. Our greatest sin consists precisely in closing ourselves off to the suffering of others in order to think only in our own wellbeing.
Jesus feels himself «anointed by the Spirit» of a God who concerns Self with those who suffer. It’s that Spirit that drives him to dedicate his whole life to freeing, relieving, healing, forgiving: «The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has chosen me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed and announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people».
This program of Jesus hasn’t always been that of Christians. Christian theology has directed more of its attention to the sin of the creatures than their suffering. The well-known theologian Johann Baptist Metz has repeatedly denounced this grave displacement: «The Christian doctrine of salvation has dramatized too much the problem of sin, while it has relativized the problem of suffering». That’s the way it is. Many times the preoccupation for human pain has remained lessened by attention to the redemption of sin.
We Christians don’t believe in just any God, but in the God who pays attention to human suffering. In the face of the «mysticism of eyes closed», proper to the spirituality of the East, turned above all to attention to what’s inside, the one who follows Jesus feels self called to cultivate a «mysticism of eyes open» and a spirituality of absolute responsibility to look out for the pain of those who suffer.
For the truly spiritual Christian –«anointed by the Spirit»– they find themselves, just like Jesus, next to the needy and the humbled. What characterizes this follower isn’t so much the intimate communication with the supreme Being, as much as the love for a Father God who sends him toward the most poor and abandoned beings. As the cardinal Martini has remembered, in these times of globalization, Christianity must globalize its attention to the suffering of the poor of the Earth.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
