The rejected Christ

He entered from the bottom

Jesus was born to a poor family away from home and laid in a feeding trough because no room was available. The first people told were shepherds working a night shift, whose word carried little legal weight.

While he was still small, his family left the country because Herod wanted him dead. Matthew records it plainly: Joseph took the child and his mother by night into Egypt. Before Jesus could speak, he was a child kept alive by crossing a border.

He grew up in Nazareth, a village in an occupied province with no political or religious standing. John's Gospel keeps the contempt on record: can anything good come from Nazareth? He spent most of his life there, working, unremarked.

He moved toward people others avoided

In the synagogue at Nazareth he read Isaiah's lines about good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed, and said that text was being fulfilled while they listened.

What follows matches it. He touches a man with a skin disease the law said no one could touch. He talks theology at length with a Samaritan woman at a well. He stops a crowd that is trying to silence a blind beggar. He will not join the stoning of a woman dragged out to be shamed. He eats with tax collectors until it becomes a formal charge against him.

He does not require any of them to become respectable first. That order matters: dignity is recognised, not earned.

He was condemned, and then raised

He was arrested at night, tried on shifting charges, beaten, and executed by the method Rome reserved for rebels and slaves, between two condemned men, outside the city wall. His friends ran.

Catholic faith holds that the Resurrection does not erase this. The risen Christ still shows his wounds. What was done to him is not hidden, and it is not the final word about him. The Church reads that as God's verdict over everyone treated the same way.

This is why Matthew 25:40 is not a nice sentiment. The one who says that what is done to the least is done to him had already been the hungry, the stripped, the condemned, and the man held in custody.

What the Catholic Church teaches

The Church teaches that in the Incarnation the Son of God truly united himself with every human being, and that Christ's identification with the poor and suffering is real rather than figurative. From this follow the Church's teaching on human dignity, its preferential concern for the poor and vulnerable, and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

What this means in everyday life

It means you may approach God in the condition you are actually in, and it means the people around you who are being pushed aside are not a side issue in Christian life. They are where Christ said he would be found.

Common misconceptions

“So suffering makes a person holy.”

No. The Church calls poverty, violence, and oppression injustice and asks us to end them. Being harmed does not sanctify anyone, and God does not send abuse as a gift.

“So I should accept mistreatment the way Jesus did.”

No. Jesus went to the Cross freely, once, toward a definite end. Being coerced, humiliated, or endangered by another person is not that. Safety comes first, and leaving danger is not a refusal of the Cross.

“So Jesus was mainly a social reformer.”

That is too small. Catholic faith confesses him as God made man, risen from the dead. His solidarity with the vulnerable follows from who he is; it is not a substitute for it.

Practical next steps

• · Read the nine Gospel encounters in 'Who did Jesus move toward?'
• · Read Matthew 25:31-46 slowly, once, without looking for a task.
• · Look at one saint who lived this: St. Josephine Bakhita or St. Peter Claver.