Vigils Reading

The Altar of the Poor
An excerpt from “The Wellspring of Worship” by Jean Corbon

Poverty is a mystery. It is not to be gauged from outside, in the person of others; it is known in silence by those whom it burdens. And even if we experience its wounds, we are hardly able to give it a life-giving meaning, because it is an absence. Poverty cannot be objectified. Only he who incarnates it can reveal its mystery to us by giving us a share in it. Jesus is the Poor Man. He is more than a model of poverty; he is in his person the mystery of poverty…

When the Word espouses our flesh, he becomes poor in our humanity: poor with the poverty native to man who is made in the image of God and poor with the poverty of sinners who lack the glory of God…

In the final analysis, poverty does not exist; only poor persons exist. If we serve the poor impersonally, we still connive with those who depersonalize them. The evil rich man of the parable is anonymous, like the death that disfigures man; the poor man of the parable is a person with a name: Lazarus, because when all is said and done this poor man is Jesus. He is Jesus not by a juridical pretense or by a pious shift of focus that unites us to Christ without real reference to the poor, but because of the shattering realism of the Incarnation of the poor Son: in him God becomes poor, so that henceforth the poor are God. “What you did to the least of these little ones…”: the final judgment on all of our human behavior is based on the identity of Jesus and this poor person. The suffering of each man is the suffering of Jesus, who makes it his own. It is because of this mystical realism that each man is saved by Christ. Our death is no longer ours but his who died and rose for us…

…In his kenosis the Son of God made his own the suffering of every poor person; conversely, through love he suffers mysteriously in every man – for is there

any man who is not poor… This is what Jesus means when he says, “You have the poor with you always”, just as “I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.” Because Christ in his body really passed through death and destroyed it, he can now incorporate into himself those who are still enslaved to death. The kingdom of God is in our midst because the body of Christ is still with us in this way. Love can spread abroad because the kenosis from which it streams forth is the death in which he was buried with us and for us.

When Saint John Chrysostom was trying to help the faithful of Antioch understand the mysterious unity between the liturgy they were celebrating and the liturgy they were to live out after leaving the church, he told them they were leaving the altar of the Eucharist only to go to the altar of the poor… We must now serve, in the persons of the poor, the same body of Christ that we served in the memorial of his Passion and Resurrection. At the celebration the altar was the sign of the tomb, the nonplace of death, and the origin of the new space of the Resurrection; in daily life the poor are the sign of the risen Christ from whom life-giving love can come.

The altar is also the symbol of the banquet table and the divine hospitality, which all men are invited to share. In the Eucharist we receive everything by sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ; at the altar of the poor we must respond by sharing the Gift we have received and by giving ourselves… It is on the altar of the poor that the passion of God becomes the compassion of his Church for man