The scene unfolds in what I still consider the greatest novel ever written: The Brothers Karamazov. The tempestuous Dmitri—ardent, volatile—tilts back glass after glass of vodka in a tavern in a nameless Russian town. Into this tavern walks old Snegiryov, a retired captain, a poor man who lives in a wretched izba, a peasant’s hut. He owes money to Dmitri, who shows no mercy. Dmitri seizes the old man by the beard and drags him across the tavern floor, out into the snow-covered street, hauling him along while shouting, “Pay me what you owe,” yanking at his beard until blood begins to flow.

Snegiryov’s ten-year-old son runs after them, weeping, dropping to his knees before Dmitri, begging him not to humiliate his father. They laugh—inside the tavern, out in the street. The child then turns to his father, urging him to find courage, to answer back, to defend himself—after all, the father is physically stronger than his tormentor.

Later, Alyosha, Dmitri’s gentle brother, visits Snegiryov’s izba to offer him money as an apology from the Karamazov family. Snegiryov throws the money—money he desperately needs—onto the floor. Red with indignation, his chin trembling, tears welling in his eyes, he tramples it underfoot and walks away. The offense is unforgivable. Dmitri, meanwhile, by the very next day no longer even remembers the humiliation he inflicted on the poor captain.

Why did the captain not react to Dmitri’s violence, even though he was stronger? And why did he carry this wound as an eternal offense, when he could have settled the matter with two punches to Dmitri’s face? For the same reason a German shepherd fears the household cat that has claimed the territory and rules it, despite lacking the dog’s physical strength. Power resides chiefly in the mind. Dmitri has what we might call a “strong” personality; the captain’s is fragile. He cannot confront Dmitri. Within him settles a weight—fear—that he can no longer shake.

Freud, for whom The Brothers Karamazov was also a masterpiece, argued that whenever two people meet, a vertical distance immediately forms between them: one is always “stronger,” the other more “humble.” This happens to all of us. There are people we instinctively respect more, and others to whom we assign less importance. The former can wound us deeply. The latter we can wound without even noticing—because we matter more to them than they do to us. Freud called this chain reaction a “mechanism of projection”: the boss lashes out at the employee; the employee quarrels with his wife; the wife scolds the child; the child hits the dog; the dog tears the trousers hanging on the line. This hierarchy of relationships—which sociologists say allows solid power structures to form within a community—is also what produces the world’s greatest injustices and inequalities.

Jesus came to overturn this entire logic. The parable of the Poor Man Lazarus is a perfect example. The rich man spends his days at lavish banquets, clothed in fine linen—nothing extraordinary in itself. The scandal is Lazarus: covered in sores, accompanied by dogs, waiting for a merciful crumb that never comes, because the rich man does not even see him. It is this indifference of the rich toward the poor, of the strong toward the weak, of the great toward the small, that ultimately leads the rich man to his own ruin.

When Jesus says that the first shall be last; that whoever humbles himself will be exalted and whoever exalts himself will be humbled; that he came to serve and not to be served; that we should not call one another “masters” but brothers; that the poor and those who weep are blessed; that whoever wishes to be great must be the servant of all; when Jesus, in his final gesture before the Passion—knowing that the Father had given him all power—exercises that power by kneeling and washing the feet of his disciples, he stands in radical contradiction to what we mean by “the world.” The world of today, and the world of always.

In this light, one can perhaps understand Nietzsche, for whom Christianity was a creed for the weak, the decadent, the poor—renouncing the elemental force of a fully lived life, embodied in the “overman of the masses,” who triumphs by his own inner strength, without law or morality. Two visions of humanity and of the world, brutally opposed.

For me, quite simply, Jesus—who is Truth—is right. And that truth is revealed with infinite beauty in chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew, in the passage about the “least of these.” There, Jesus tells the blessed that they will be saved because he was hungry and they fed him, thirsty and they gave him drink, naked and they clothed him, a stranger and they welcomed him, sick or imprisoned and they reached out to him. To Jesus? Yes. Jesus is each one of the “least of these.” By identifying himself with the smallest, Jesus turns our logic inside out—a logic that, two thousand years later, remains deeply corrupted. Jesus came above all for the “least,” and the Church exists above all because of them, so that this Messianic Kingdom might be restored on earth, where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion shall feed together, and a little child shall lead them.”

The final question posed to us—to the Church—is how far we are willing to go in this radical turning of the world inside out.

Father José Júlio Rocha is a priest in the Azores. He is a contributing writer for the Diário Insular newspaper and collaborates in many cultural and literary events in the Azores and beyond.

Filamentos is a bilingual arts and letters platform where diaspora and origin speak to one another—and to the wider world—through shared cultural inquiry and creativity, lived diasporic experience, and common humanistic values-Bruma Publications, PBBI-California State University, Fresno.

Filamentos é uma plataforma bilíngue de artes e letras onde diáspora e origem dialogam entre si — e com o mundo — através da partilha da investigação e da criação, da experiência diaspórica vivida e de valores humanistas comuns. Publicações Bruma-PBBI, Universidade do Estado da Califórnia em Fresno.