Christianity is not primarily about private emotion or reason; it is about reality; it is about being seized by the Real. Direct and immediate confrontation with reality is one of its demands.[1] The Franciscan sine proprio (with nothing of one’s own) shows this with admirable simplicity.[2] There is a correlation between absence of ‘self-love, self-will, and self-interest’[3] and grasp of reality. Spiritual and even actual poverty are places of crucifixion and resurrection: they demonstrate, in a concrete way, one’s response to reality and one’s ability to analyse and change it. Responding in this way is humility and devotion, both to God, to the reality He created, and to the Son He sent for our salvation. ‘Ego quos amo, arguo, et castigo’[4], says God to John of Patmos, ‘those I love, I rebuke and chasten.’ This chastening, this castigation arises from reality and points to God. Examination of individual and collective conscience, in the light of the Gospel, leads to a challenge, a castigation, and an imperative: act for the Kingdom of God and against the reign of sin and oppression in the world.

Participation in liturgical sacraments alone is not enough: ‘worship, including the celebration of the Eucharist, is not the whole of the presence and continuity of Jesus; there must be a continuation in history that carries out what he carried out in his life and as he carried it out.’[5] One must live and die as Friends of Christ, for the reign of God on earth as in heaven. Jesus’ words to Peter are addressed to each of us: ‘When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God.’[6] Maturity, detachment, spiritual poverty and actual poverty: these are marks of the Eucharistic tenderness and the martyrial openness required of all Christians. We are called to put our hearts and our hands into the spiritual and actual wounds of the world and those who suffer the false crucifixions brought about by structures of iniquity. Our discipleship depends on the ability to follow the Lamb wherever he goes. Our discipleship presupposes a forensic analysis of reality on the basis of where the Lamb went and the wounds He sustained. Then we may stretch forth our hands in sacramental solidarity with the temporal and historical proclamation of Jesus, allowing ourselves to go the way of the Lamb even unto death and especially against the deaths imposed by the structures of iniquity governing the global society.

Ignacio Ellacuria writes: ‘the life of the Risen One is the same life as that of Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified for us, so that the immortal life of the Rison One is the future of salvation only insofar as we abandon ourselves in obedience to the Crucified One, who can overcome sin.’[7] The Our Father provides extremely fertile ground for contemplating the meaning of these words. ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’; here we see unification of time/eternity, of history/the will of God; we invoke the presence of a concrete, historical incarnation of that for which Christ died: the reign of God on earth. ‘The Crucified One rises, and rises because he was crucified; since his life was taken away for proclaiming the Reign, he receives a new life as fulfilment of the Reign of God.’[8] Christ crucified and Risen for the coming Reign of God on earth: not only in terms of the self but for history and society: ‘his life and death continue on earth and not just in heaven; the uniqueness of Jesus is not in his standing apart from humankind, but in the definitive character of his person and in the saving all-presence that is his. All the insistence on his role as head to a body, and on the sending of his Spirit, through whom his work is to be continued, point towards this historic current of his earthly life. The continuity is not purely mystical and sacramental.’[9] There is a shocking continuity between the Crucified One of Nazareth and the Risen Christ. It is a continuity apprehended within history and within the sense of touch. In Matthew’s Gospel he records that ‘they came and held him by the feet and worshipped him.’[10] They held the feet of the Risen One, the feet that walked unto death for the Kingdom of God. In Luke’s Gospel the disciples see and are invited to handle the ‘flesh and bones’ of the Risen prophet of Nazareth: ‘Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.’[11] The patterns, the wounds, the memories, the transcendental yet historical proclamation is all present. The apostles received the imprint from Jesus of Nazareth. Reality received an imprint from the Reign of God he proclaimed and was killed for. We are heirs annexed to these sacred incisions in the bitter but real fabric of sin and corruption and division in this world.

Let us have the zeal of Thomas who said: ‘except I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger in the holes of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.’[12] Reproducing this pattern, both personally, ecclesially, and socially, would show a living faith not only inherited but inhabited. Through the Wounded yet Risen One we could strive to touch the imprints of nails driven into the flesh of God’s oppressed and poor (including Mother Earth itself), remembering that Christ is sacramentally present in them, waiting to redeem those crucified by the sins of history and humanity by rising forth and pouring blessings upon them and those who come to liberate them, in turn confirming our own salvation by this concrete solidarity. In the peace of Christ we could show perfect Christian obedience: ‘put in thy finger here, and see my hands, and put forth thy hand and thrust it into my side, and be not without faith: but believe.’[13] Christ is exhorting all his followers to trace the continuity of the sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth with the Risen One. He expects us to go to the place where wounds abound and to touch them with the hands of an active faith, not standing aloof from the crucified ones of today but going forth to proclaim, in our lives, the Reign of God on earth, for ‘the ongoing passion of the people and paralleling it the historic reign of sin – as opposing the Reign of God – do not permit a reading of the death and resurrection of Jesus removed from history.’[14] This is the radical challenge the cross poses to each of us individually as well as collectively: ‘salvation does not come through the mere fact of crucifixion and death; only a people that lives because it has risen from the Death inflicted on it can save the world.’[15] For those of us here in the West, Death here means death in life via ideological and social toxins. It also means recognising where a risen, transformed – via crucifixion and resurrection – people actually exists and entering into the salvific portals of their wounds: ‘the world of oppression is not willing to tolerate this. As happened with Jesus, it is determined to reject the cornerstone for the building of history; it is determined to build history out of power and domination, that is, out of the continual denial of the vast majority of oppressed humankind. The stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone, stumbling-block, and rock of scandal. That rock was Jesus, but it is also the people that is his people, because it suffers the same fate in history.’[16]

[1] Heeding the counsel of Christ is, as Erik Varden writes, to ‘remember reality as such, to let it be illumined by the light shining into and out of the empty tomb’ (The Shattering of Loneliness, p109). This approach is a valuable antidote against both the epistemic escapism of modern ideologies, and the excessive privatisation of central theological concepts. It might be worth coining the phrase a Christology of doceticide, that is, a Christology rooted in the historic meaning of the Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection to transform and make all things new. Bernard Kelly’s words should serve as a reminder that the holiness of the Catholic Church ‘is not that of an ideal somehow raised above reality, but of reality itself made sacred by the Incarnation, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ’ (A Catholic Mind Awake: The Writings of Bernard Kelly, p127).

[2] This intellectual openness is nothing other than the virginity of those true followers of the Lamb referred to in the Book of Revelation: ‘These follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from men being the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb, and in their mouths were found no guile. For they are without spot before the throne of God’ (14:4-5). Their analytical capacity is free from ideological concupiscence. Their intellectual perspicacity descends and rises from the scent of the Lamb, and it knows the places where the Lamb’s scent stays, haunts, and redeems.

[3] Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, p55.

[4] Revelation 3:19.

[5] Ignacio Ellacria in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p265.

[6] John 21:18-19.

[7] In Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p261.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, p265.

[10] 28:9.

[11] 24:39-40.

[12] John 20:25.

[13] John 20:27.

[14] Ignacio Ellacuria, in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p260.

[15] Ibid, p278.

[16] Ibid.