“What is really new in the New Testament, and is repugnant to any form of humanism, is in fact, the recognition of true God and of true man in the crucified Jesus.  How, however, is humanness to be seen in him?  Compared with the Greek ideal for man of the good and of the beautiful, the exact opposite is to be found in Jesus.  From the beginning of his ministry right to the end of it men come to him with every conceivable illness and fault, from fever to blindness, from demon-possession to leprosy, from treason to prostitution.  Jesus born in a manger and of humble origin, was himself one of these “poor”.  He did  not preach and live out a new ideal of the good and just man, but brought the gospel of the kingdom of God to the poor, sat at table with “sinners and tax collectors”, healed the sick and drove out demons, called blessed the poor, the mourning, those that wept, and the hungry: “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.  He brought God to expression among the godless and the despised.  He preached righteousness as being God’s free gift of grace to the unrighteous.  He embodied the secret, “God with us”, “God for us”, on earth in such a way that he became a brother to the wretched.  For this reason the rejected and the outcasts come to him out of the holes and corners into which good society has driven them.  The poor of whom he speaks and who come to him, are so poor that they can find a place in no human society.  They live unprotected, abandoned to nothingness.  They cannot appear to be other than they are.  They cannot conceal their sickness and defects.  They are not simply oppressed slaves and the exploited proletariat, but are in fact those “accursed of this earth”, out of whom no state can be made, nor any revolution produced.  In that Jesus sees himself in them through his fellowship with them, he can  be called “the Son of Man”.  The Son of Man is he who sees himself in the possessed, in that he drives out the demons.  The Son of  Man is he who sees himself in sinners, in that he forgives their sins.  The Son of Man is he who identifies with those who are below the mean of humanness, in order to call them human.  Because he recognizes himself in the poor, the hungry and those in prison, he calls them “the least of my brethren” (Matt. 25:40).  Already in Jesus’ course this fellowship of God with godless man becomes visible.  Man is revealed as the being accepted and loved by God in the manner of Jesus, and God is revealed through him as this human God.”

     What does this say about how we are to be before  others and with others in our world, if we are to be like Christ?

Quote: Jurgen Moltmann, On Human Being: Christian Anthropology in the Conflicts of the Present. pgs. 18-19