Jesus Christ is he “who has come,” but also the one… “who is to come.” Both aspects, neither contradict nor cancel out each other, but rather, in an eternal dialectic, complement each other, walking hand in hand towards the “plenitude.” (Eph 1:23)
What facet of the eternal Christ is capable of moving, attracting, and saving the pagan man of our post-modern society whose principal identity is egoism? As we know, the laws of the heart are organized and oriented towards the interior of the center. How do we redirect the forces that are connaturally directed towards the center so that they are now oriented outwards towards each other? In the last analysis, one and the same energy becomes egoism or love, depending on whether it is directed inwards or outwards.
The question is really only one: change direction, make a complete turn, a true revolution, a turn which must necessarily go the way of sacrifice and the disintegration of the ego (the “I”).
Love, which is God, became a reality in the person of one named Jesus Christ, the God-with-us (Emmanuel). And this man was, above all, a Poor One, totally unconcerned about himself in order to be interested in others. He gave himself up in order to give encouragement and hope to others. In a class society, he took the side of the downtrodden; and in a puritanical society, he sided with those outside the law.
If the Poor One of Nazareth ever did decide to become the “man-for-other-men”, he needed to realize within his very own self the inversion of forces and instincts, since every man is, by nature, egotistical, inclined towards himself and a seeker of his own self interests. In short, he had to arrive at being a Poor One because only a poor man can truly opt for the poor.
We can say in a different manner: God-Love, incarnated in the Poor One of Nazareth, empty of himself, divested in heroic proportions (to the utmost degree) of his own interests, transformed into the man-for-all-men, a man essentially open to others, the Available One, wholly dedicated to the service of others…, Jesus, “He is” as we have already said: the way that leads from poverty to love.
Taken from the book The Poor One of Nazareth, by F. Ignacio Larrañaga
