Spirituality refers not only to our spiritual life. It refers to man as a whole, in his spiritual and bodily unity. No such division between matter and spirit exists for the Hebrews. St. Paul even mentions “spiritual body,” which sounds contradictory. In the Bible spiritual knowledge is experimental knowledge. Actually, you only know what you experience. The spirit-body division comes to us by way of Greek philosophy, which made inroads on Christian theology starting in the fourth century. The Greeks thought that the more we negated physical, corporal, and material reality, the more spiritual we were. In the Gospels, the totality of the human being is what brings life to the spirit. Thus, spirituality isn’t the way you feel the presence of God. Nor is it the way you believe. Jesus said, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Thus, spirituality is a way of living life according to the spirit. José Martí, outstanding hero and forerunner of Cuba’s liberation, said that “doing is the best way of saying.” For Christians, living is the best way of believing. Faith without deeds is worthless; as James stated, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14–17).
Our way of life is the result of what we believe. Our way of being the church is a reflection of our concept of God. In order to know a church, the best question to ask is “what do your faithful think about God?” It is a mistake to think that all believers believe in the same God. I often ask myself if there is any similarity between the God I believe in and the one in whom Reagan believes. We forget that in the Old Testament the prophets were worried by idolatry, the gods created in accord with human interests. There is still much idolatry. In the name of God, the Spaniards and Portuguese invaded Latin America and massacred millions of indigenous people. In the name of God, multitudes of slaves were brought from Africa to work the land. In the name of God, bourgeois rule was established in this part of the world. Could it be that the name spoken by conquistadores, slave owners, and capitalist oppressors is that of the God of the poor, of whom Jesus spoke? I remember the tragedy of Albert Schweitzer, who was a musician, doctor, and theologian. Influenced by Protestant research works on the authenticity of Jesus, he concluded that the young man from Nazareth hadn’t expected to die so soon and that therefore the conspiracy woven around him had taken him by surprise. Now then, a god is never wrong. If Jesus couldn’t anticipate the time of his death, it was because he wasn’t God, Schweitzer concluded.
A few years ago, an English minister by the name of Robinson published a book that became a bestseller: Honest to God, which was translated in Brazil as A Different God. The author states that we must be honest with God and confess that we do not know him. What we know are sketches, such as the god invoked in official documents, at critical moments in life, and in political speeches. How do you know a person: by what you think about him or by what he reveals? If true knowledge is derived from revelation, we can best know God in Jesus Christ, his historic presence. Even though medieval theology defines God as omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc., what we find when we open the Gospels is a fragile being who lives among the poor; cries over the death of a friend; feels hunger; argues with the Apostles; is enraged by the Pharisees; insults Herod; is aware of temptation; and, when in agony, goes through a crisis of faith when he feels abandoned by his Father.
Perhaps Albert Schweitzer wouldn’t have lost faith in the divinity of Jesus if he had recognized that divinity is not expressed by the fact that Jesus had some kind of a computer in his head enabling him to foresee everything. According to the New Testament, God’s main attribute is love. In his first epistle, John the Apostle is quite clear: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God, and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (I John 4:7–8). For the Greeks, who influenced the medieval definition of God, love can never be an attribute of a god; to the contrary, it is a lack, to the extent to which it implies a relation with the loved object. In this sense, Jesus is God because he loved only as God loves, and therefore he did not sin. He was a man centered not upon himself but upon his Father and the people. This concept of loving God led to the founding of a church based on fraternity, on a community of interests, rather than authoritarianism. It is a concept which enables Christians to discover the presence of God in all those who, though lacking faith, are capable of attitudes of love. God is present even in those who lack faith, and he has identified historically with all those who most need our love: the oppressed. “For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink,” Jesus said in Matthew 25. Love is necessarily a liberator.
Once you have clarified this question of a loving God, a God calling for justice and defending the rights of the poor, it is easier to speak of Jesus’ spirituality. If we consider the Gospel accounts, we can clearly see that Jesus’ spirituality wasn’t one of withdrawal from the world, of moving away from everyday life in order to better serve God, of denying earthly realities. In John 17:15, Jesus asked his Father to keep his disciples from evil without taking them out of the world. Jesus’ entire existence was one of immersion in the ideological conflict, in the arena where different concepts and options for or against the oppressed were discussed. Neither was Jesus’ spirituality that of moralism. That is the spirituality of the Pharisees, who turn their moral virtues into a sort of conquest of sanctity. Many Christians have been trained along these lines and lose strength in their faith because they don’t manage to adjust to the pharisaical moralism they seek. God seems to live on the top of a mountain, and spirituality is taught as a manual for mountain climbing to be used by Christians interested in scaling its steep slopes. Since we are of a fragile nature, we begin our climb over and over again — it is the constant repetition of the Sisyphus legend, rolling the stone uphill.
Now, then, one of the best examples of Jesus’ non-moralism is the story of his encounter with the Samaritan woman. From the point of view of the morals prevailing in those times she was an outcast — for being a woman, a Samaritan, and a concubine. It was to that woman, however, that Jesus first revealed the messianic nature of his mission.
An interesting dialogue took place between them: “The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.’”
“Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’ The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father… But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:15–23).
At no time did Jesus recriminate with her for having had six men in her life. He was interested in verifying that she was truthful. She didn’t lie, didn’t take a pharisaical position; therefore, she was able to adore “in spirit and truth,” in a subjective opening to God and in an objective commitment to the truth. Thus, Jesus showed that Christian life wasn’t a movement of man toward God; before that, there is God’s love directed toward man. God loves us irremediably. It only remains for us to know if we are more or less open to