Acts of Solidarity, imitating the incarnation

The incarnation is the ultimate act of solidarity. It is an absurdity that God would make Himself like us. The divine made human so that we would know that He cared, that He feels every suffering with us, for us. Our God is not like the heroes in our fairy tales, He didn’t come in a great display of conventional power. His power is manifest in solidarity, because Christ’s power is not imparted by magic tricks but in an act of solidarity. His great power is not the ability to defy the laws of physics, biology and history, though He certainly has that capacity. The true power of Jesus Christ is His love; felt in sympathy and expressed in pathos and ultimately in an act of solidarity.

The God-Child is His greatest miracle. Greater than every physical healing, more wondrous than stopping the Sun in it’s tracks and the earth on its axis. God’s greatest work was a work of solidarity. Jesus made it clear that He came to preach Good News to the poor, to proclaim the year of Jubilee! His death on the cross was not for the healthy, but the sick. Christmas is about God’s expression of solidarity with the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed. So how do we respond to this divine act?

Well we are told to be imitators of Christ. So if He chose solidarity with the poor, what does it mean for us to choose likewise? Well most of us know how to be friends. We are familiar with the acts of friendship, forging a joined narrative, the sharing of food and shelter. The act of solidarity is an step toward friendship. But it is also more than that, solidarity is also about identification. Jesus changed his very identity, He made Himself like us, staked His very life with ours. By placing his lot in with our own, He ensured that by our closeness with Him, our fate would be altered. In this way we are called to identify with the poor, to put our lot in with the downtrodden.

We must learn to weave our lives so tightly with the oppressed that when someone feels pain or suffering, we each feel it as personally. If there are any hungry or without shelter, we must also endure the same in solidarity. So then we will fight for them as we would for ourselves. Unlike the white knights in our fairy tales who fought to rescue the less fortunate, we would fight for justice for the poor because our own fate has become inextricably bound to theirs. We must begin to share the fate of the migrant, the impoverished, the unemployed and the unloved. We must wind the chords of our destiny so tightly together that if any come after them, they will also come after us.

The socio-political Christian identity must be urgently recast through solidarity with the poor so that the Christian identity is indistinguishable from that of the poor. I know for sure that Jesus came for me, and I know that the proclamation of His Kingdom is good news for the poor. He said time and again, I have come for the poor not the rich, the sick not the healthy, the downtrodden not the powerful. So I know that if I am to pursue His Kingdom, I must stake my fate with the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed, because that is where Jesus has staked his.

At the moment we are exploring solidarity through trips to Calais to hang out with migrants there, and visiting at the prison in Canterbury.