Jesus - The Man (Part 2)

JESUS – THE MAN (PART 2)

Mario D’Couto

            It could very well happen that Our Lord could have saved the world with a sigh or a blink of an eye or some other way for He was God after all. But, as it is said that the best way to teach is through example, Christ took upon Himself our slave-like condition. Part of this was already dealt with in the previous section. In this part, I wish to elaborate and penetrate deeper into understanding Christ’s humanity.

            To begin with, Christ is not God in fancy dress. He has showed with us, in His sinlessness, the condition of an unredeemed world. This is why, He reached out, especially toward the end, to the ‘other world,’ this is why He longed to go home to His Father, to put off this present condition of the flesh in which He humbly walked for our sake. It would seem legitimate to depict Christ in our teaching as a son wanting to go home, even as a little child longing to be welcomed into the joy and security of His Father’s home or depict Him as refugee or an exile desirous of returning to the land of His birth.

            The point is that it is too easy to use the phrase, “Jesus is God” to sum up every idea about who our Lord Jesus is. Fr. Schillebeeckx, O.P, explains this in His book called, “Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God”,

“The incarnation of the Son of God is a reality which grows. It is not complete in a matter of movement, for example, at Jesus’ conception in Mary’s womb or at His birth. The incarnation is not merely a Christmas event. To be man is a process of becoming man; Jesus manhood grew throughout His earthly life, finding its completion in the supreme movement of the incarnation, His death, resurrection and exaltation.”

            Yes, indeed Jesus is God for how could He have revealed God perfectly if He were not perfect Himself in His response to God? But, in a way, Christ suffered from our imperfect condition. Sounds strange? It’s true. In this condition, He was not fully at one with God, even though He gave Himself to God always in utter obedience and whole hearted love. Moreover, suffering the unredeemed condition of humankind, He was not perfectly one with us either. He was Himself the grain of wheat alone until He died. This is to say that He was one with us in our diversity until He became the first born of many brethren by reason of His resurrection.

            In a more simplified way, it was through Christ’s death and resurrection that He restored humankind to what it was meant to be. Thus keeping this in mind, the Scriptures and the writings of various Christian authors make sense. As it is written in Philippians 2:6, “Jesus did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped ….. He took upon Himself, the form of a slave being born in human form,” the words of Fr. De Rosa, Bishop Fulton Sheen and other great Christian authors resonate with what is found in scripture. What is important is what we understand from the incarnation of Christ. Coming to know about Christ’s facticity does not diminish our love and reverence for Him but rather it gives us a new meaning, a new hope and a reason and a purpose to live for. Fr. De Rosa says it best in the following words, “None of this will lessen our respect for our divine Redeemer. Rather, it will endear Him to us all the more, for we will feel closer kinship with Him and appreciate for better the humiliation He endured by taking upon Himself our slave – condition. It is by seeing how He reacted as a Man in that condition that we know how much God his Father loves us.”

            Human life is teleological. We always act towards a particular end. Hence the success or the downfall of a person’s life depends on what one lives for. It could be anything, your family, your convictions or something else. If one’s goal is only limited to money, power, fame or popularity, there is something wrong. Our Lord did not live a high profile life.

            We put up with the condition of this world convinced that Jesus has triumphed over its godlessness, taken the poison out of it. We bear the pain of it in company with Jesus our Lord and King. The very meaning of sorrow, anguish and death is changed for us now. Our world is a redeemed world. Our pain, loneliness and death are always, as it were diluted and sweetened by the redeeming Christ. Jesus alone bore sin, whereas we are never alone, because He is triumphant and risen. For us, the devastating solitude of sin is over. Jesus died to sin on the Cross. In a world of disobedience, He was perfectly obedient; in a loveless world, His was a flawless love.

            Thus God’s justice is not so much about getting even with us but it is through those times when we hit rock bottom that we see where we stand. Adversity introduces a person to himself/herself; it urges one to introspect one’s self more closely.

            It is important to understand the historicity of our Lord. Let us not forget that our Lord was human in as much as He was divine, which Christian doctrine teaches us. Too overtly emphasize on the divinity of Christ is to ignore His humanity. Thus as Fr. De Rosa would write, “We must, therefore, consider Christ as a Man among men, appearing at a particular point of time that was long prepared for; He emptied Himself into the condition of men which sin had brought about; He chose freely and lovingly things at variance with divinity all along the line, weakness, pain, the condition of a servant, mortality, even a shameful death upon cross,” it is when we look at our faith from this perspective that we will begin to appreciate it. Instead of viewing, experiencing or understanding a God who stood and watched His children suffer, He became one of us, shared our pain and misery and died a shameful death ….. all for no fault of His. This is why it makes sense to say that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life for what He did, we will never be able to pay back.

By looking at our faith this way, it makes sense to say that through the sacraments, the ever – living Christ the Lord of history, draws us and our whole historically, unfolding existence into His own passage through death to life. Christianity, in this way, is seen to be more than an assent to doctrines, it is discipleship, where we walk (or are called to walk) in our Lord’s footsteps.

It takes courage to look squarely at the Scriptures, to behold, without theological planks in our eyes, the Man. In the Gospels, we see Jesus humanity, as someone born of a poor village girl and living in a despised provincial town called Nazareth, from which nothing good was expected to come. Since God’s Son is truly a man and since He was destined to express God through His human nature, Mary by Her fashioning and guidance of Christ has a special role in revelation itself.  It was She who taught Jesus how to pray in His earliest years where His human consciousness first awoke to God his Father.

When Jesus began His ministry as depicted in Mark’s Gospel, the earliest account we have, He showed Himself to be capable of surprised wonder, mighty anger and tears. He had to learn as all teachers do, how difficult it was to ‘get through’ to His disciples. He claimed to not know certain things. He often tried to get away from the crowds to find a bit of peace, to be in the quieter, more relaxed atmosphere and in the company of friends.

Here was a Man, who, because He was a man, was in need of men. He needed them to love Him and to love them in return. Unless He loved them He could not have come to His own full status as a man; He could not have fulfilled Himself. He was truly a Brother among brothers.

He found parts of His life a trial and a burden and as His days moved on, He yearned deeply for happier times. He wanted keenly to be glorified, to be with His Father. His relation to His Father is the key to everything. Christ could be the perfect Servant because He was truly humble before God, accepting God’s will gratefully. It is because as Man, He accepted everything from God as ‘a gift’ that He did not ‘lord it over others’ but served them with a total dedication.

He knew too the sweetness of answered prayer. He was confident that His prayer, was always heard and this is why He tells His followers that their prayers in His name can never fail. By doing so, their prayers become one with His own filial prayer to the Father, in Whom He wholly trusted. Yes, He trusted in His Father even in the darkness when He experienced utter abandonment, which was, the hell of death.

All in all, as noted before, we cannot know God except through Jesus. When we look at Jesus, we see not a static ‘nature’ but an emergent personality, a man like ourselves with a history with a life to be lived through. It is in our world that He walks, a world of imperfection and godlessness. Here he comes to know the loneliness and darkness of our condition of sin. Here He obeyed perfectly and flawlessly loved His Father. And when His hour had come for which He had longed, He greeted the Cross which was to be the means by which he terminated His life history. This termination was a consummation, for by death He passed over from this world to His father, was perfected (Hebrews 5:9) and glorified (John 17:5). Christ died for us ‘while we were yet sinners’ (Romans 5:8).

The purpose of this article is to have a more in – depth knowledge of who our Lord truly is. By coming to know His humanity, it brings us closer to Him; it helps us to realize that we have Someone who has left everything and become one of us, Someone who has gone through the pangs of life and has taken out its sting, which is what gives us a reason to live for as Viktor Frankl would put it, “He who has the ‘why’ can cope with any ‘how’”. My prayer and wish is that we may never give up in our love for our Lord, that in realizing His humanity, we may draw closer to Him.