The Poverty of Christ

Christ's family, the house from which he sprang, was poor. Christ did not make any effort to restore its fortunes. He did not strive to win respect. He was poor – not in the manner of the great ascetics whose poverty reveals a mysterious greatness, but simply and naturally poor. His poverty was, rather, a lack of pretensions. He did not choose important people as his friends. He struggled, but basically it was not a struggle. He was a teacher, but he did not make himself understood (not even among his friends). What he did and suffered had the character of a singular failure. He was solitary, one might even say, deserted. He was misunderstood. His life lacked every element of "being understood". The Gospels give the impression of a bitter (but not embittered) sense of constriction, of a dumbness in the midst of speech: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…He came to his own home, and his own people received him not" (Jn 1:5-11). His work was in vain. God's humility made desolate the existence of the man Jesus. It was a fearsome thing, to be the Son of God. Christ bore within himself a truth that came from God himself, in him there welled up immeasurable love and friendship. He could have set the whole world out of joint. But he chose otherwise. He accepted his pitiless destiny. Everywhere he met an impenetrable wall. This existential experience of not being accepted, and not being recognized, reached its absolute limit in his death when he died forsaken (it seemed) by God himself.

~from In Time of Temptation by Ladislaus Boros, S.J.

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand. ~William Penn