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Jesus Christ, Human Knowledge of |
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Becoming incarnate in time and space, the eternal Son does not lose his personal identity as eternal Son. He now lives it as the Son sent by his Father into the world. The Gospels offer us glimpses of what this means for him as here and now he lives his relationship with his Father. We see his conformity to the Father’s will, his avoidance of any independent will for himself, his neglect of his own self-honor, his zeal for his Father’s glory, his allowing for the impossibility of protecting himself from arrest and death, his prayer to the Father before all the major events, his aim to reveal his Father’s love and compassion for the sinner, his constant referring of his works and words to the Father. The prayer in the Garden of Olives sums it up: “Not my will but thine be done” (Mk 14:36). Relationship of Father and Son • Instead of asking about Jesus’ way of knowing, “How do his divine mind and will influence his human will and mind?” it is better to ask: “What are the relationships between the mind and will of the Son and those of the Father?” Thus we can concentrate on the eternal and intra-divine movement of the Son toward the Father and the way he expresses this in his human existence. This relationship is a better starting point than the relationship between the two natures and will answer many of the kinds of questions that arise from the relationship of the two natures. It also helps us to maintain Christ’s way of being Son in his divine nature, knowledge, self-awareness, and will. That is all very personal and the source of relationships in creation and in the Church. He expresses this by the way he speaks and acts as a human being. It seems fair to say that Jesus’ personal, metaphysical, and psychological realities are in a relationship within the one Person that can be called intimate closeness and interpenetration while maintaining the distinctiveness of his natures. Jesus’ experience of himself as Son reveals for us his deep personal relationship with his Father and, as a consequence, his relational being: “That they may be one as you Father in me and I in you, that they may be one in us” (Jn 17:21). This is the foundation of his ability to speak to his “Daddy” (Abba), but human words and human self-awareness cannot express it exhaustively. The key way we have of exploring something of this union is by exploring the language that he uses to express his relationship with his Father. All his activities – of knowing himself, of knowing God and the world, of speaking and choosing, of raising from the dead and judging, of forgiving sins and revealing – have to be interpreted in terms of the Son’s relationship with his Father. The Gospels offer us the portrait of Someone who does know who he is and who expresses this in terms of being sent into the world by his Father for our good. Jesus’ Self-emptying • Theologians and biblical scholars have drawn our attention away from an abstract view of Jesus’ human knowledge – In what perfect way should the Word made flesh know God’s plan in his human nature? – to a more concrete view: What effect does the self-emptying of his glory and power have on the eternal Son’s way of knowing himself as sent Son? This concrete way of viewing things can help us distinguish between the kind of knowledge Jesus had in the years of his maturity, as he approached his Passion and death, and the kind of knowledge he now enjoys in the state of glory. The state of glory presupposes a full participation in divine glory after his pain, suffering, and death are done away with in his Resurrection. The kind of knowledge that goes with the self-emptying is more akin to the development that life’s temptations and tests, sufferings and death entail. This brings him closer to us in everything except sin. “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb 5:8). While it is hard for us to give a precise definition to the impact of Jesus’ self-emptying, we can see that the Passion does take place in a spirit of abandonment to the Father different from the kind of total knowing and total control that we associate with the all-powerful God. “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how should the scriptures be fulfilled that it should be so?” (Mt 26:53). Jesus’ self-emptying entails a limitation in his way of knowing his Father’s plan. This is accompanied by a series of decisions made in obedience to the Spirit. Jesus “went down with them to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; . . . And Jesus advanced [in] wisdom and age and favor before God and man” (Lk 2:51-52); “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil” (Lk 4:1); “And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him” (Mk 14:35). Since Jesus came for his mission of Revelation, he certainly had from his Father the knowledge he needed to accomplish the mission. This is closely connected with his own personal awareness as the sent Son: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Lk 10:22). As he speaks of himself and of his Father, we glimpse the depths of this deep personal relationship expressed in the work of revealing: “Father, I thank you for having revealed these things to the little ones” (Lk 10:21). Hans Urs von Balthasar writes: “The task given him by his Father, that is, of expressing God’s Fatherhood through his entire being, through his life and death in and for the world, totally occupies his self-consciousness and fills it to the brim. He sees himself so totally as ‘coming from the Father’ to me, as ‘making known’ the Father, as the ‘Word from the Father,’ that there is neither room nor time for any detached reflection of the ‘Who am I?’ kind. ‘Who he is’ is exhaustively expressed in his being sent by the Father who addresses him as ‘My beloved Son’ (Mt 3:17) – but the Son immediately recognizes this address as a call to be a ‘servant.’ Insofar as, from all time, he fully embraces and affirms his mission (which does not mean that he has a total and detailed view of it), he is perfect; but the mission itself sets him upon a path, and to that extent, he is also a wayfarer” (Theodrama, vol. III, p. 172). Divine “I” in Human Nature • In our reflection on the Son’s relationship with his Father, we can draw on Church teaching about the Divine Person and his integral human nature and human operation. It is the Divine Person of the Word made flesh who knows himself in his humanity according to the capacity of his human nature. We can speak of his psychology because his knowing has a deeply personal and subjective aspect that can be quite like the way we know ourselves as unique and different from others. Jesus’ human consciousness, as the human consciousness of the Son of God, is the awareness of his relationship with his Father and, by that route, an awareness of his own personal identity and mission. The Eternal Word, in his human consciousness, feels (or intuits) in the way that belongs to our brand of consciousness, his divine “I,” that of the Son sent by the Father. In the Gospels, we find that Jesus is aware of who he is. In the Gospel of Luke, the twelve-year-old Jesus says to Mary and Joseph: “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” or: “. . . in my Father’s house?” (Lk 2:49). His teaching and his prayer to the Father, the use of Abba, indicate that he is guided from the beginning by the intuition of his Father that penetrated his conscious states. The substructure of Jesus’ psychological life was a profound level of intuitive knowledge of his Father and of the things of God, exceeding in depth and purity what we can know of ourselves in this life or in the next. He would have formed the conviction of his absolutely singular mission in this world and that this mission could only be the complete reversal of what his people expected of their Messiah. We can be certain that Jesus also learned from absolutely everything in his human experience and from all that was most common to us, so that what was unique to him could be revealed and take form in ways that enabled him to express himself in keeping with his mission. He learned from the children, from the lilies of the field, from the vines and trees, from Joseph, from farmers, tax collectors, and fishermen. He learned from his Mother the Scriptures and the whole religious tradition of Israel. Jesus Knows He Is the Son • The International Theological Commission says: “Before the mystery of Jesus was revealed to men, there was already in the consciousness of Jesus a personal perception of a most sure and profound relationship with his Father. From the fact that he called God his Father, it follows by implication that Jesus was aware of his own divine authority and mission. Jesus knows and is conscious of being the Son.” John allows us to glimpse something of the process whereby the Son is initiated into the Father’s mysteries. Not all the relevant passages refer solely to the Son’s preexistence; they can also be interpreted as events in the earthly life of Jesus, particularly where it is said, in the present tense, that the Father “shows the Son all that he himself is doing” (Jn 5:20). It is not enough to say that at this point the evangelist is speaking in a received apocalyptic mode, according to which a person initiated into heavenly mysteries when in ecstasy hears and sees things he must subsequently proclaim on earth or at least write down. Jesus does not come forth as an apocalyptic figure among others, to testify to secret things and events as the prophet Daniel or Joseph in Egypt did. He testifies to himself. Jesus really understands the Word he hears from God to be identical with himself. He receives himself from the Father – both once and for all and in an eternal and temporally ever-new “now.” He is the Word proceeding from the Father. And in his temporal consciousness he experiences this gift of himself (from the Father’s hand) as timeless (as the absolute “I am” statements make plain). Nothing prevents us from understanding this process as taking place through time, according to his personal maturation (cf. Lk 2:40, 52). We must maintain that such development is an unfolding of the original identity of his “I” and his mission – to be the Father’s Word. The ultimate horizon can remain hidden for part of the journey. The immediate horizon is the preparation and fulfillment of Israel, seen as the program for Jesus’ public ministry. The all-embracing ambiance of his consciousness remains his readiness to respond to whatever concerns the Father (even to the extent of losing all tangible contact with him, all experience of his will to forgive), his readiness to pay all that is necessary so that he may proclaim this forgiveness to men. Once we understand his very personal way of knowing his Father, then we have the basis for speaking of other forms of knowing, such as experience-based knowledge that corresponds to what he learned from those around him. This is in total accord with his self-emptying and his nature as incarnate Son. These foster his ordinary human way of knowing that was like everyone else’s. Jesus’ relationship with his Father as lived in our world does not abolish his ordinary human way of knowing but enhances it. See: Hypostatic Union; Incarnation; Jesus Christ, God and Man; Jesus Christ, Life of; Temptation of Christ; Trinity.
Suggested Readings: CCC 471-474. International Theological Commission, The Consciousness of Christ Concerning Himself and His Mission. J. Guillet, The Consciousness of Christ. F. Dreyfus, Did Jesus Know He Was God? Richard Malone |
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