Jesus - The Man (Part 1)

JESUS – THE MAN (PART 1)

Mario D’Couto

Christian doctrine teaches that our Lord was fully human and fully divine. While a lot has been said about His divinity, it would be worth understanding and exploring His humanity which is what I intend to bring out in this article.

The coming of God’s Son to earth is an event of such immensity that God willed to prepare it for over centuries. He makes everything converge on Christ: all the rituals and sacrifices, figures and symbols of the “First Covenant.” But yet as scripture affirms that He took up on Himself, our slave-like condition, He became like us in all things except sin.

Our Lord was born in a humble stable into a poor family. Jesus circumcision on the 8th day after His birth, is the sign of the incorporation into Abraham’s descendants, into the people of the covenant. It is the sign of His submission to the law and His deputation to Israel’s worship, in which He will participate throughout His life.

During the greater part of His life Jesus shared the conditions of the vast majority of human beings: a daily life spent without evident greatness, a life of manual labour. His religious life was that of a Jew obedient to the law of God, a life in the community. From this whole period, it is revealed to us that Jesus was obedient to the law of God, a life in the community. From this whole period, it is revealed to us that Jesus was ‘obedient’ to His parents and that He increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man.

The hidden life at Nazareth allows everyone to enter into fellowship with Jesus by the most ordinary events of daily life as noted by Paul VI,

“The home of Nazareth is the school when we begin to understand the life of Jesus – the school of the Gospel. First, there is a lesson of silence. May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of mind, revive in us ….. a lesson on family life. May Nazareth teach us what family life is, its communion of love, its austere and simple beauty and its sound and inviolable character ….. a lesson of work.
Nazareth, home of the “Carpenter’s Son,” in you I would choose to understand and proclaim the severe and redeeming law of human work ….. To conclude, I want to greet all the workers of the world, holding up to them their great pattern, their brother who is God.”  
Jesus obedience to His mother and legal father fulfils the 4th commandment perfectly and was the temporal image of His filial obedience to His Father in heaven. The everyday obedience of Jesus to Joseph and Mary both announced and anticipated the obedience of Holy Thursday “Not My will” (Lk 22:42). The obedience of Christ in the daily routine of His hidden life was already inaugurating His work of restoring what the disobedience of Adam had destroyed.  

Our Lord’s temptation in the desert reveals the way in which the Son of God is Messiah, contrary to the way Satan proposes to Him and the way man wish to attribute to Him. This is why Christ vanquished the Tempter for us as seen in Hebrews 4:15, “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses but one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sinning.”

The finding of Jesus in the temple is the only event that breaks the silence of the Gospels. As mentioned earlier, many things about Jesus of interest to human curiosity do not figure in the Gospels. Almost nothing is said about His hidden life at Nazareth and even a greater part of His public life is not recounted. What is written in the Gospels was set down there, “so that you may believe that Jesus in the Christ, the Son of God and that believing you may have life in His name.” It is in this particular instance in the life of our Lord that Jesus lets us catch a glimpse of the mystery of His total consecration to a mission that flows from His divine sonship as seen in Lk 2:49.

The Gospels were written by men who were among the first to have the faith and wanted to share it with others. Having known in faith who Jesus was, they could see and make others see the traces of His mystery in all His earthly life. From the swaddling clothes of His birth to the vinegar of His passion and the shroud of His Resurrection, everything in Jesus’ life was a sign of His mystery. His deeds, miracles and words all revealed that ‘in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.’ His humanity appeared as a ‘sacrament’ that is, the sign and instrument of His divinity and of the salvation He brings: what was visible in His leads to the invisible mystery of divine sonship and redemptive mission.

Christ’s whole life is a mystery of redemption. Redemption comes to us above all through the blood of His Cross, but this mystery is at work throughout Christ’s entire life as seen in the following instances,

Ø  Already in His Incarnation through which by becoming poor He enriches us with His poverty.
Ø  In His hidden life which by His submission atones for our disobedience.
Ø  In His word which purifies its heavens
Ø  In His healings and exorcisms by which ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases’
Ø  In His Resurrection by which He justifies us

            Christ’s whole life is a mystery of recapitulation. All Jesus did, said and suffered had for its aim restoring fallen man to His original vocation. St. Irenaeus explains this in the following way,

“When Christ became incarnate and was made man, He recapitulated in Himself the long history of humankind and procured for us a ‘short cut’ to salvation, so that what we had lost in Adam, that is, being in the image and likeness of God, we might recover in Christ Jesus. For this reason, Christ experienced all the stages of life, thereby giving communion with God to all men.”

            All in all, we can say that in all of His life Jesus presents Himself as our model. He is the ‘perfect man’ who invites us to become His disciples and follow Him. In humbling Himself, He has given us an example to imitate, though His prayer, He draws us to pray and by His poverty, He calls us to accept freely the privation and persecutions that may come our way. 

Popular posts from this blog

In the world yet not of the world

Image
  IN THE WORLD YET NOT OF THE WORLD MARIO D’COUTO           Being in the world and yet not of it is something that can be a struggle, at least for me and what I mean by that is in as much as we desire to be good and to do good, God is not going to put a glass jar over us and say that just because we choose to love Him and follow Him more closely, that He is going to shield us from the temptations of this world. To make things clear though, this is not to say that the world in itself is bad or evil nor are the things found in the world either but how we deal with it is what will make us or break us. We all have responsibilities and important things that need our attention. If we are not careful though, our hearts and minds can be consumed with the task of keeping them afloat. Rather than centering ourselves in Christ and letting the other elements of our lives take their rightful place around that center, we can end up shifting our attention fr...
Read more

The Gift of Life

  THE GIFT OF LIFE  Mario D’Couto  The above video may seem to put human existence in a rather pessimistic way as if to say that our lives did not really matter and while no doubt there is some element of truth in it, I still feel that if lived well, there is meaning and purpose to our lives and that none of our lives is some sort of haphazard creation.  As I celebrate my gift of life tomorrow, I suddenly began to think that if we compare ourselves to the vastness of the universe and everything else that exists in it, we may perhaps be nothing more than a tiny dot floating on the surface of the earth and yet in as much as such a thing may appear insignificant, the One who created everything chooses to have a personal relationship with that tiny dot, that is, ourselves. This is something truly uplifting, which gives meaning and purpose to our lives and our existence. At the same time, it is also a reminder for us to stay grounded especially in those moments when w...
Read more

Are you creative?

Image
  ARE YOU CREATIVE? Mario D’Couto                         Can you imagine a world without creativity? What would the world look like if there was no creativity? Well, for all we can expect, it would be pretty boring and dull. There would be no speech, no songs, no tools, no ideas such as love, freedom or democracy. It would be an existence so mechanical and impoverished that none of us would want to be a part of.             To achieve the kind of world we consider human, some people had to dare to break the thrall of tradition. Next, they had to find ways of recording those new ideas or procedures that improved on what went on before. Finally, they had to find ways of transmitting the new knowledge to the generation to come. Those who were involved in this process we call creative. What we call culture or those parts of our selves that we internalized from the social...
Read more