THE STOLEN GOSPEL

FOR THE NEW EVANGELIZATION     

God speaks through the cries and the silences of the impoverished of the Earth. The new evangelization will have to pick up that voice; if not, it will only be a new miscarriage.                                                   

    Lazarus (Luke 16, 21) 

EVERYTHING WAS STOLEN FROM THE POOR, EVEN THE GOSPEL      

Nothing can be done about it. The intellectuals, the church people, the biblical experts, the televangelists, the priests, the pastors, the bishops or the popes are not the owners of the gospel. The gospel does not belong to them or to me.  It belongs to the poor.   

That is simply so because the soul of the gospel is Jesus and Jesus was a poor.       

Jesus lived and fought for and with the poor. He stood by the poor. He was the companion, the friend, the brother, the defender of the poor. He suffered for the poor and died as the poorest among the poor.

In the same way that the sun shines above the good as well as above the wicked, and above the rich as well as above the poor, thus God loves everyone, said Jesus. But still, he did not identify himself to the wicked nor to the rich. He identified himself to the poor. Of course, he wanted to touch the heart of the wicked as well as of the rich, but he did it from the poor and through them.  

He identified himself to the poor by becoming one of them. He made his own their groans and their hopes. If he loved the whole of humanity, he loved it with the heart of the poor, with their cry and with their most foolish dreams.  The poor are the ones who inspired him the Beatitudes and also the marvel of the Kingdom. Without the poor, the gospel would simply not exist, and neither Jesus.  

Jesus loved the poor to the point of giving himself totally to the task of giving back to them hope and life. He would show interest in them as being persons with a name and a face. He would give them the opportunity to speak, to cry out their truth. He would listen to the poor. He would open his arms and extend his hand to raise them up. In the footsteps of Jesus, life was flourishing.

And when he would meet on the road rich people who exploited the people, he would not curse them. At times, he would even enter their homes to share a meal. But he would accept to share the table as a poor, the way he was. And he would not alter his discourse to please them. He would even take the opportunity to tell them a few good truths, without hatred, but also without any concession.

If Jesus is the creative Word of God sowed in our soil, that word cannot only be the word of the impoverished. If we want to hear the voice of God, we have to listen to the poor. If we really want to know God, we have to really know the poor. If we want to come near God, we have to come near the poor.

  

But the poor are not all saints. Many among them are detestable, disgusting, beasts, wicked, deceitful, lazy, envious, arrogant and violent. Nearly all of them dream of becoming like the rich. How can God speak to us through that shapeless mass of brave folks among whom are mixed together, like in a dump, so many «rejects» of humanity?

The same question could be asked about Jesus who himself was discarded like a «reject» of humanity. He was excommunicated from his community, subjected to torture as a criminal, condemned as an apostate and a subversive, and crucified as an enemy of Religion and of the Fatherland. Yet, we venerate that «reject» of humanity like the «Savior» of the world.

What that means for us Christians is that it is there, in human misery, that is buried the supreme Word of God which recreates humanity.

We may object that Jesus was «innocent» unlike the poor who are sinners just like the rest of us. True, but that same judgment should apply as well to the poor, since they also are innocent.

They are the creatures of a delirious and perverse system that for centuries produces them by the hundreds of millions with the only purpose of always enriching those who already own everything.

That system is a monster.  It keeps on growing free of worries, thanks to a multitude of good people like us who still stupidly believe in the virtues of the strongest and in the miracles of war and money. Ironically, we pretend to be the pillars of democracy and of Christianity. And even so, it so happens that we pray God to bless all of that.

Still, in a world which overflows with riches, poverty is a heinous crime against humanity whose victims are not extraterrestrial creatures but the very members of our own body.

If only their cry could pierce our heart, and their flaws fill us with horror, their sufferings hurt enough our feelings as to blow up the tedious bubble of our comfortable blindness!

The new evangelization will have to be built on the flagrant expectations of the impoverished of the earth. If not, it will collapse like that house about which Jesus says that an idiot had built on sand instead of on rock, and which at the first strike of the flood was carried away like a wisp of straw. (Matthew 7: 26-27).

                                          Eloy Roy

                                                                                                          

       

Translated  from the French by Jacques Bourdages