Originally Written April 2, 2009
N.B. My thinking on these topics has developed since I wrote this.
Delving Into Full Humanity
It’s easy to forget that Jesus was human. Really human. Fully human. Movies so often portray Jesus as a stoic, serious, overly dramatic man who stands apart from the rest of humanity, a sort of ultra-non-conformist who has little to do with the real experience of human life. These cinematic portrayals present a Jesus who is more a divine being in human form—someone ultimately conscious of his own divinity—than someone who actually lived the hurts, sorrows, fears, temptations, joys, and intimate moments that we experience. As we approach the great liturgies of the Triduum, which extensively celebrate the fullness of the Paschal Mystery, it occurs to me that the truest, deepest understanding of the Paschal Mystery lies in first understanding—as much as we can—that Jesus was indeed fully human and fully divine.
Although it might seem like a ridiculous point of departure, don’t forget: Jesus pooped. Jesus threw up. Jesus bled. Jesus wept. Jesus faced temptations, not only in a desert encounter with Satan, but in everyday life. Jesus probably had the flu, coughs, sneezes, diarrhea, you name it. Jesus might’ve broken a bone (he didn’t have magic Messiah bone tissue). Jesus walked around barefoot or in rough sandals through hot sand. He probably had blisters on his feet. And he probably smelled bad. He probably didn’t comb his hair. He did not have blond hair and blue eyes; he looked like a middle-Easterner. He suffered, not only the agony of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (double entendre, perhaps), but suffered the loss of friends to death, the betrayal of Judas, followers who didn’t “get it”—like Peter, whom he called both “Satan” and “Rock”—and much more. He drank and ate with his friends. Others accused him of being a drunkard. If we’ve experienced it, Jesus probably did, too. That’s full humanity. If we are going to enter fully into the Paschal Mystery, we have to start there.
And at the end of his life, in the fullness of fullness, Jesus died. Not a “natural death.” Not a painless death. Jesus was executed—it’s capital punishment. Jesus died at another man’s command and at another man’s hand, because of “crimes” he supposedly committed. We humans subjected an innocent man—our Savior—to capital punishment through a “system of justice,” and somehow, we have found the ability to turn a blind eye to the fact that we still do the very same thing when we execute others today. We might say, “Oh, at least lethal injection is more humane than crucifixion.”
But the underlying reality is that we do to others what we did to Jesus. How many other innocent lives have ended in the same way? And if the person is guilty, does it really make any difference? When we consider that we have one command: to LOVE, the act of intentionally ending of another’s life in punishment seems quite out of place. Condemnation is the enemy of love, for as John 3:17 says, Christ did not come to condemn, but to save. Now, before anyone argues that this article is really a rant against capital punishment, I’ll get back on track, but I felt compelled to mention this correlation, one that’s easy to overlook in our climate of politicized religion, one in which being Christian too often means belonging to a particular party or set of ideas (some of which might actually contradict everything we believe!). The important point here is that Jesus’ full humanity led to death, because if Christ had not died as we all will die, he could not have been fully human.
Christ, then, existed fully in the world, but he was not of the world. It’s what my friend Robert Feduccia has said so many times: “The glory of God is man fully alive” and “Jesus could only redeem what he took on.” Christ was “fully alive” in his full humanity, but he did not give in to sin. Why?
A Channel of God’s Love
So, what about the other part of Jesus’ nature? What about being fully divine? What does that mean? I don’t have the answer, but I do have a few ideas on what Christ’s divinity is all about—like everything I write, these are only ideas; they aren’t even necessarily what I think (most of the time, I don’t know what I think, I just think).
Anyhow, understanding Christ’s divinity is necessary if we are to understand the fullness of the Paschal Mystery we celebrate in the Triduum. For about a year now, I have been very interested in the question of Messianic Consciousness or Divine Awareness, the question of whether Jesus actually knew that he was the Messiah. Consider that for a minute. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe, in spite of all the healings and works, words and wonders, he didn’t know that he was the Messiah.
But how could Jesus be the Messiah without knowing it? As the Son of God, perhaps Christ’s divinity manifested in one simple way: through loving surrender. “Surrender” is a popular word in modern Christianity; often, we talk of “surrendering” or “conforming” our will to God’s will. But often, this idea shows up when we talk about accepting things that we don’t want to accept. Like sudden death or national tragedy. “I guess it was just God’s will,” we say, as if God’s will is somewhere “out there” where we can grasp it, or as if God “lets things happen” so that we know him. Quite the contrary, God’s will is clear. Jesus told us what it is: to LOVE. We encounter God really and truly present in our midst every day, in love shared, in conversations, in creation, in the fullness of life. And when we experience that, we encounter what might be the very “stuff” of Christ’s divinity.
Because Jesus is Christ, the Son of God, perhaps the state of “surrender” in which he lived was not something he thought much about. Perhaps the nature of Christ’s divinity is that Christ dwelled in that state of full accord with God’s will of LOVE for our world. In such a state, temptation has no power; sin has no hold, for always choosing love means never choosing sin. Thus, Christ could dwell in the fullness of human experience but always choose God-love—without thinking about it, for he was what he was created to be! In short, he existed in love and called us to do the same.
This line of thinking could explain the so-called “miracles” of Christ, too. Jesus was not a magician. He was not a “miracle worker.” He didn’t say “poof! You’re healed!” Rather, Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you (or healed you)” or “Your sins are forgiven.” It is by the faith of those he encountered that miracles transpired; it is by the acknowledgment of the presence of God so truly in their midst that God was able to “break in” to human experience, to venture beyond the realms of what is rationally “possible” and allow the unexplainable to occur. This is important to consider, because we—as a product of God’s freely given love—have free will. Christ, in his surrender, always spoke and acted in love. But it is only when others could sacrifice their will and humbly and honestly say, “I need you. I want to be well, and I recognize God in you” that it could happen. God is all around us; Christ is the channel by which God breaks in; when we humbly say that we need God, we unite ourselves to God through Christ; perhaps that logical train of ideas explains how Christ’s miracles could have occurred.
By existing in oneness (full surrender) with the perfect love of God, Jesus carried that transforming love everywhere he went; when others recognized it and believed, God entered into our world and worked wonders. And maybe that’s what canonized saints—although sinners—sometimes encountered. Perhaps through their moments of total surrender, they allowed God to “break in” and transform human experience in inexplicable ways. They, for a moment, were as Christ—perfect channels of God’s grace in our world.
Sin, of course, is the antithesis of full surrender, the rejection of God’s will (choosing things other than love) and leads to separation, to anger, to anxiety, to fear, and to all those things that prevent us from living fully as Christ lived fully. When we sin, we create a barrier between ourselves and God, a barrier that prevents God from being able to “break in” as God broke in through Christ. This is the inevitable sin that I’ve written of before, the sin that is a natural byproduct of free will, which is a natural byproduct of love freely given.
And That’s the Paschal Mystery
So, then, Christ was fully human and fully divine, a person who lived as a human but by his divinity possessed the propensity to be sinless, for he lived always in the perfect love in which we were created. Jesus suffered. Jesus died. And he rose again to free us from our sins, to give us access to the sinless divinity in which he was born; he restored us to oneness with God, but our human propensity to sin obstructs that oneness. By subjugating that propensity, we—like so many before us—can become true channels of God’s love; we can be, and indeed we are, the means by which God continually breaks into our world.
The liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday celebrate in absolute fullness the entirety of this, the Mystery of our Faith—the Paschal Mystery. At every Eucharist, the bread and wine—the fruit of the earth and work of our hands—along with our offerings of time, talent, and treasure, are not simply symbols. They are the very “stuff” of human experience. They are the work we do every day. They are the gifts that God has given us.
And when we return those gifts to God and pray over them, when those gifts become the Body and Blood of Christ, we consecrate not bread and wine but our very beings to life in the service of God and all of humanity. We dedicate ourselves to being channels of God’s perfect love.
No comments :
Post a Comment