Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Under any and every political domination people get crucified. The Ukraine war is collective crucifixion of humanity. It is a war between two factions of Christians who convert the cross as a weapon of domination and subjugation. The vocation as a Christian, and deeper still as a human being, is in terms of a specific service – to take crucified people down from the cross. St John says: “Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one, because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body” (Jh19:39). Tradition says his body was laid in the lap of his mother. Every mother deserves that last wish.
The defence of subjectivity of the Christian is dispossessed in relation. Thus, discourse as relation with the other demands justice for all humanity, which is sermon, exhortation, the prophetic word. And prophetic in the classical biblical tradition is the cry for justice. “To hear his destitution which cried out for justice is not to represent an image to oneself, but is to posit oneself as responsible… the Other, who dominates me in his transcendence, is the thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan to whom I am obligated,” wrote Levinas. His point becomes emphatically prophetic: “Speech is not instituted in a homogenous or abstract medium, but in a world where it is necessary to aid and to give.”
But who and what is a Christian? The subject as called elected – the chosen people. It means all human beings – not only the Christians. Each individual of all the peoples is a chosen one, called to leave the concept of the ego, ‘here I am’, to lose his place… “I am for others. Nothing less is needed of the little humanity that adorns the world” is about restoring the meaning of all experience to the ethical relation between men to call on the personal responsibility of man, in which he feels chosen and irreplaceable, to realize human society where men are treated as men. This realization of a just society is ipso facto an elevation of man to the company with God. It is itself the meaning of life: This amounts to saying the universe is sacred. But it is in an ethical sense that it is sacred. Ethics is an optical instrument to the divine. The Divine can only manifest itself in relation to one’s neighbour. Its bottom is there where everything becomes nothing; hence, “the depth of God is my depth, and my depth is the depth of God.”
Coincidentally, “God doesn’t ask anything else of you other than for you to come out of your creature-like way of being and to let God be God in you. Always and everywhere in the history of religion, the fact that God is identified with success is the greatest obstacle to a steadfast religious life. Magic operates wherever one celebrates rites without being turned to the Thou and really meaning its presence. In magic, God becomes a bundle of powers, present at man’s command and in the form in which man wishes them
The striking metaphor ‘option for the poor’ ultimately places a claim on the universal Church. The whole project could be described as an attempt to show how followers of Jesus are drawn into a mystical “analogy”’ between the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the struggles of the crucified people to believe and to survive the world of poverty today. This final point takes us into what the Greek Fathers of the Church called “theosis,” which, implies that following the historical reality of Jesus draws the disciple into a transformative participation in the divine mystery of the inner life of God. This is emblemized by the disciple who responds to the grace-filled call to take the crucified people down from the cross becomes a living sign of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the sending of the Spirit, and the ongoing work of the Trinity in the world.
“This spirit was not merely the necessary accompaniment of Jesus’ practice, but shaped it, gave it a direction and even empowered it to be historically effective. The spirit that suffuses Jesus’ practice cannot be captured by what is simply debatable in space and time. In fact, he argues, the historical is… what sets history in motion.” And this is precisely what has been “handed down to us as a trust in the New Testament as narratives published to keep alive through history a reality started off by Jesus.”