Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions of the Baby Jesus - XVI Vision of the Prophets, The Shepherds and the Magi

Susanna Pagano, piano

It's noteworthy that Messiaen puts the prophets, the shepherds and the wise men together because there is nothing more egalitarian than the visions of the Jewish prophets, the vision of the shepherds is as important as those of the prophets (many of whom were also of humble backgrounds) and the sages.  That is why the living symbol of an ignorant, helpless baby is so important in Christianity, its foremost prophet said that salvation only comes to those who are like little children, the humble and the outcast*.   That is something which my favorite works of recent theology, The Gospel in Solentiname, Black Liberation Theology, other liberation theology assumes.  In some modern sources, Jesus is presented as an illiterate peasant.   I'm a bit skeptical that he was illiterate but if he were that would only make the miracle of his understanding more instead of less amazing.   The secularist-atheist line ignorantly deriding the prophets as "bronze age goat herders" is a product of the opposite of the Jewish tradition, the thing which makes it despised by elites from far right to pseudo-left, it is the most radical programs of social and economic leveling there is.   Nothing I've yet read in Eastern philosophy or religion matches it for that.  Even Buddhism which rejects so much of the social and familial inequality built into other philosophic-religious traditions has a hierarchy on the ladder to enlightenment, fixed by karma only to be resolved progressively in other lives instead of the one and only one we have to work with now.

Nothing in Western philosophy or theology which departs from that radical egalitarianism, the radical insistence on equal justice is true to that radicalism.  That so many who profess Christianity ignore and even hate that egalitarianism is evidence that narrow is the gate.   You've got to be small to pass through a narrow gate, if you're swelled up and full of yourself, you'll never get through.

*  Today's gospel reading in the Catholic church is the passage in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 21 which says to the priests and elders,

Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you,
tax collectors and prostitutes
are entering the Kingdom of God before you.
When John came to you in the way of righteousness,
you did not believe him;
but tax collectors and prostitutes did.
Yet even when you saw that,
you did not later change your minds and believe him.”