‘So long as domination and protest have not been overcome completely, so long as sinfulness and conflict perdure in history, Jesus will ever remain present as a “dangerous” memory and a point of crisis. He will remain to call our own path into question on the basis of his own historical path.’[1] By conserving its structures of sin, the Western world flees the possibility of encountering the Risen Christ in the Third World’s ‘crucified people.’[2] It shows itself like the women in Mark’s gospel: they were terrorised by fright; they fled the tomb, saying nothing. This is how we appear when we act – collectively and in counter-revolutionary collusion – with indifference, saying no words, carrying no deeds, of revolutionary, sacramental love for our despised and dehumanised neighbours in the Third World.

This callous lack of effective, apostolic solidarity on our part, poses serious questions regarding not only our personal and collective will to communion with the life and path of Jesus of Nazareth, but our will to truth.[3] ‘”The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men; they will put him to death; and three days after he has been put to death he will rise again”. But they did not understand what he said and were afraid to ask him’ (Mark 9:31-32). Does this not describe the wound of our situation? How can we presume to know the liturgical and Risen Christ if are not willing to follow the concrete conditions of discipleship in communion with the historical way and life of Jesus[4], who is, at this very hour, in continuity with the crucified people of the Third World, delivered into the hands of men? If we disengage from the Way[5] of the historical Jesus, ‘we should either be failing to grasp the nature of the primitive Christian concern with the identity between the exalted and the humiliated Lord; or else we should be emptying that concern of any real content, as did the docetists.’[6] By avoiding the abstract and impartial Christ – easy prey for ideological manipulation – we choose ‘to adopt the historical Jesus as our starting point….Our Christology will thereby avoid abstractionism, and the attendant danger of manipulating the Christ event. The history of the church shows, from its very beginning as we shall see, that any focusing on the Christ of faith will jeopardise the very essence of the Christian faith if it neglects the historical Jesus.’[7]

Catholicism’s universality, its favouring of the poor and dispossessed, and its epistemology of doceticide, are all spear points of the cross penetrating the old Adamic skull of Golgotha – symbolising our own truncated, partial discipleship – that we may have new and real life as followers of the liberator Jesus, catching sight ‘of the God who saves, the God who liberates.’[8]

[1] Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, p138.

[2] ‘The third world in fact has been turned into a Christ. It is what we have often called, from the viewpoint of faith, “the crucified people”….faith tells us that this people with problems, this “crucified people,” is where Christ is really present; it is where he wanted to be’ (Ignacio Ellacuria, Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation, p34).

[3] Christians in the First World, if faith is to be truly humanising, let alone deifying, must recover a sense of the three-fold engagement with reality spelled out by Ignacio Ellacuria: ‘becoming aware of the weight of reality…shouldering the weight of reality…taking charge of the weight of reality…’ (Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation, p88).

[4] ‘The historical life of Jesus is the fullest revelation of the Christian God’ (Ignacio Ellacuria, Freedom Made Flesh, p27).

[5] The term ‘way’ carries in Mark’s gospel ‘a specialised sense of discipleship and following a road of suffering’ (R.P. Martin’s Mark: Evangelist and Theologian, p214).

[6] Ernst Kasemann, quoted in R.P. Martin’s Mark: Evangelist and Theologian, p44.

[7] Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, p9.

[8] Ignacio Ellacuria, Utopia and Propheticism from Latin America, p55.