What does the life of Jesus teach us?
If Jesus came back to earth today, would he be followed or simply listened to by those who call themselves Christians? Probably not. Why not?
How is Jesus’ life so different from ours? What can we learn from him?
If Jesus passed into posterity, it is above all because he lived an extraordinary life, different from that of his contemporaries. In this, he resembles Buddha, moreover, he shares other traits with him: itinerancy and stripping. For one, it may be a form of austerity, for the other, it is synonymous with poverty.
There is in the figure of Jesus, that of the poor and that of the wanderer. These two types of individual are today largely despised in our contemporary societies. How can one adore the divine incarnation while despising what it represents? Is there a loss of Christian values or is it simply collective hypocrisy?
We need to take a closer look. Jesus was poor materially, but he had precious assets with him: influence and spiritual capital.
You see, we focus too much on what we would call financial capital, when there is a multitude of capital that can serve us.
The rule is that capital is in itself a leverage that allows us to access other forms of capital. Capitals are interconnected in some way and influence each other. The following is a non-exhaustive list of capitals:
social capital
cultural capital
linguistic capital
symbolic capital
and so on
You should not be proud of appearances, someone may seem miserable to you on the surface, but in his eyes you can detect a great soul containing a great treasure that could move mountains. In the same way, someone may be rich materially in appearance, but everything indicates that he is poor in other forms of capital.
