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Jesus Christ, Life of |
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Christ is God and Man. The faithful soul not only confesses the divinity of Jesus but also honors his sacred humanity. Theology and spiritual life must be Christ-centered. St. Teresa of Ávila says in her Autobiography (ch. 22): “We are not angels, we have a body. . . . In the midst of business, persecutions, of trials . . . in times of dryness, Christ is our best friend. We see Him a man like ourselves, we contemplate Him in sickness and suffering. . . . It is very profitable for us, as long as we are in this life, to consider the God-made-Man.” We can never explore enough the life of Christ and his teaching. Personal and social integrity are to be found only in Christ the incarnate Son, the only mediator, by whom all creation attains its true end and comes to the Father. In the past, theology concentrated on the ontological constitution of Jesus Christ and the interpretation of the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon (451) regarding the two natures in Christ. Later, theologians like St. Anselm (1033-1109) concentrated on the salvific nature of Jesus’ death. The mysteries of the life of Christ were left to spiritual writers, who wrote lives of Christ or “contemplations” of his life. These ignored theology or took it for granted, and developed a moralizing approach that presented Jesus as exemplifying Christian virtue. They also tried to re-create a psychology of the Lord, expanding on the data of the Gospels in a way not entirely faithful to them. Today’s effort at integrating both approaches can afford a richer view of the mysteries of the life of Christ. The Gospels must be the starting point, meditated on by the Tradition of the Church and received by the communion of saints. Jesus Reveals God • Christianity is not the observance of an abstract law or commandments but an attachment to a Person, who is the way, the truth, and the life (cf. Jn 14:6). Jesus Christ is not just a saint, a genius, or a hero whose example attracts us. He is the Son of God, the incarnate Word. What we see in him is not just some set of “values” but God himself: “He who sees me sees him who sent me” (Jn 12:45); “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). His humanity is the sacrament of God. The divine human Person of Christ will only be accepted for all that he is by supernatural faith, which we cannot give ourselves but which we receive from God. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (Jn 6:44). This attraction is the work of grace. Christ is the Son of God who reveals himself and who instructs us. Christ is our Master who has the words of eternal life (Jn 6:68). He teaches as one with authority (Mt 7:29). He lives his teaching and is our model. His authority demands our obedience: To follow Christ is to do what he orders. As a master, he asks us to obey the value he puts into practice before asking it of us. It can happen that the disciple is unable to grasp the value clearly, yet, although he has the duty to obey, his obedience is not blind, since he knows that what Christ asks is good for the very reason that he asks it of us. His values are only values in God; they represent a duty for us because they are imposed by God. Christ our Master is our Savior. The salvation Jesus brings is not only an ethical salvation, calling for a conversion of heart and revealing our own inner law to us; it is a salvation that frees us from sin and confers a new and divine life on us. It is by his death and Resurrection that Christ has acquired us, since he was delivered up for our sins and rose for our justification (Rom 4:25). The saving action of the Lord is for the Christian the principal motive for his love of Christ. This love is not just an attachment to an ideal figure who makes an impression on us, but a response of love to the greatest love there is, which consists in Jesus’ giving his life for his friends (Jn 15:13). “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
For the believer who lives his faith, obedience, and love, Christ is not someone who belongs to the past. True, he was born in the Holy Land, lived and taught there, suffered and died at a given time; and the Gospels, without being exactly a life of Christ and without always satisfying our curiosity, report certain episodes and aspects of his historical existence. But Christ the Lord triumphed over death. The risen Lord is a living Person who lives for ever and ever (Rv 1:17-18), a divine human Person who transcends time. The events of his earthly existence are past in their historical reality, but they are forever present in their spiritual reality, the interior state of the Son of God that they express, in their efficacy and salvific power. In a true sense, Christ the Lord is born, dies, and rises today, as the Fathers of the Church insisted. The mysteries of the life of Christ are always present, and Christ is really contemporary with each one of us. The “Mysteries” of Christ’s Life • Each particular event in the life of Christ participates in the total mystery of his life and cannot be understood without an understanding of that fullness. Jesus’ life is not so much an episode of world history as the Revelation of God in the course of historical events. God “has saved us and called us to be holy” by his own grace; this grace has already been granted to us, in Christ Jesus, before the beginning of time, but it has been revealed to us by “the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus” (2 Tm 1:9-10). The total mystery does not exist by itself, in some way apart from the mysteries of Jesus’ life. The total mystery of Jesus is the succession of mysteries, each with its own meaning and saving effect. In concentrating on one event like the Resurrection or the Passion and death in an exclusive way, one would misrepresent the central event of the Passion and Resurrection by ignoring the rest of the life of Jesus and the rest of the Gospel. The mystery of the Lord’s life has an eschatological meaning: It reveals and brings about the beginning of the realization of the kingdom of God. In Jesus Christ’s preaching and action, the kingdom becomes visible. It is entirely the work of God and revealed by God’s free will to his flock, whose members recognize in Jesus’ works the signs of the beginning of the kingdom. In the Gospels, the life of Jesus is perceived as a sign; its mysteries are the unfolding of the single mystery. They belong to the category of narrative episodes, and, with the teaching of Christ, are set in the unique literary form of the Gospel. In the New Testament, there is a theological reflection on the totality of these mysteries, of such force that at times attention to details becomes secondary. St. Paul uses the word mysterion for this comprehensive shifting of attention from the single to the whole, that is, the divine plan of salvation that God realized by sending his own Son. The New Testament offers several ways of using the term “mystery” about the life of Christ. In the Synoptic tradition and preaching, we find a development of distinct mysteries where “mystery” is applicable to a particular event. Mysteries are the realization of the mystery of the kingdom of God, even if they are called the mysteries of the life of Christ. It is necessary to avoid a double danger in dealing with Jesus’ life up to the time of his Baptism. None of the Gospels wishes to present a biography of Jesus or a chronology or a history in our sense. The Gospels are the fruit of the theological and Christological preaching and the early Church’s reflection on it, grounded on the solid basis of the reality of salvation history. This is the accepted way of looking at all that deals with the presentation of the public life of the Lord and of his Passion and Resurrection. It is also true of the Infancy Gospels. The Gospels do not offer us anything that approaches a merely private life of Jesus. Jesus has a private side, from which the public, revealed life proceeds. Revelation only speaks of his private life when it is helpful for the public sign of Revelation. This makes it difficult to speak of a “hidden” and a “public” life. The Mystery of the Incarnation • The Incarnation is the event in which the Father breaks his silence, as it were, and sends his Son, while the Word assumes our sinful flesh out of obedience to the Father’s will and so comes into history in our human condition. This event is the point of contact between the divine eternity, in which the Son is with the Father and upholds the world as its Creator (cf. Jn 1:3-10; 1 Cor 8:6), and human history. The coming of the Logos into history, a coming that is the beginning of Jesus’ human history as God-man, must be seen as an event and an act of the Logos, his descent and coming among us. The Incarnation has first of all the character of an event and of a mystery in Scripture. Theological questions are secondary, in comparison with the need to proclaim the event. St. Paul considers it the chief mystery “hidden for generations and centuries but now manifested to the saints” (Col 1:26). This is clear especially in Galatians 4:4-5: “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” In Ephesians 3:8 we find Paul saying of the mystery that had been hidden within the eternal Trinity: “To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for all ages in God who created all things.” St. Paul speaks first of the Father’s initiative: “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal 4:4-5). Then he speaks of the Son’s initiative: “Who being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped” (Phil 2:6). The Letter to the Hebrews (1:1) presents with great solemnity the fact of the assumption of human existence by the Son of God: “At many moments in the past and by many means, God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets; but in our time, in the final days, he has spoken to us in the person of his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things and through whom he made all things.” It is completely the Father’s free, personal choice to determine the moment when his Son will come. St. Paul speaks of the “fullness of time.” God fixed this moment from all eternity. However, despite all the preparations in the Old Testament, it belongs to his will to determine the precise moment of history when his Son will assume human nature. No human power could ever determine when in the plan of God the Lord Jesus was to come. We can only know it when it happened. Even after it has taken place, we cannot explain how. We can only confess that God has power and freedom to determine within the era of Revelation, the hour and the moment when his Son will begin his human existence. The Prologue to the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Philippians offer us a way to contemplate the divine mystery itself. They offer a clue to what happened in the divine eternity and what became at a certain moment human and earthly reality. The Self-emptying of Christ • The Son who begins his human and historical existence has his origin proceeding entirely from his Father. The event of the Incarnation unveils for us the procession of the Son from the Father. Without ceasing to be what he is, the Son becomes what he was not yet. The Son’s procession from the Father has such a fullness of obedience and attentiveness to the Father that it permits him to obey the Father in this new way. He was to become man. He was to enter mankind and assume a human nature. That nature has been deformed by the mass of sin. This is what the Johannine word sarx (flesh) expresses. The Letter to the Romans says similarly that the Son was sent “in the likeness of sinful flesh and for the sake of sin” (Rom 8:3). The mystery of salvation revealed in the historical event of the Incarnation is this: God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for the sake of all of us (Rom 8:32). The Father in his omnipotence and love can send his Son into the heart of what contradicts him: He can make “him to be sin” (2 Cor 5:21) without denying his divine majesty nor his own paternal honor and love. God the Son in his filial love and by the force of his obedience can dispossess himself to the point that he becomes for us and in our place a curse for our sins (cf. Gal 3:13). He is removed from his Father in the alienation of his divine glory (Phil 2:6ff.; 2 Cor 8:9), and by adopting the existence of sinners (cf. Rom 8:3, Heb 12:2) he can die a shameful death (cf. Mt 27:46) while holding on to an indestructible confidence in him who could save him from death (cf. Heb 5:7). The reality of this descent by the Son is not only the establishment of a bridge, by means of the hypostatic union, over the abyss that separates Creator from creatures, but also the beginning of the deeper self-emptying of his whole life, by which he lays aside his human and divine dignity. The first phase of the mystery of Jesus in human history is the beginning of the self-emptying that was voluntary on his part and led to the shame of the cross endured in the place of sinners. The coming of the Son into human history entails the necessity of his distancing himself from his Father, laying aside his equality with God, taking upon himself an existence far from God, that of man living under the curse of sin. We find here all that Jesus reveals to us of the Father’s love for us. St. Paul and St. John never tire of calling our attention to the intensity of God’s love. The radical character of the Son’s distancing from the Father and of the abyss into which the Father was able to plunge his Son allows us to gauge the immeasurable greatness of the love of God. St. Paul speaks of it as being his mission to “announce to the pagans the unfathomable riches of Christ . . . that he may grant you to comprehend . . . what is the length and breadth and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge” (Eph 3:8, 18-19). At the beginning of Jesus’ life it is appropriate to affirm that the love between Father and Son is the Holy Spirit, that this love is love in Person. Only because the Spirit is God can he be the link of love between Father and Son, even when the Father must send his Son into the world of sin that is in contradiction with himself (2 Cor 5:21). The sending of the Son finds its term in Mary’s womb. This is revealed as a unique divine event, Mary’s virginal conception. The Lord Jesus is a preexistent Person, the Eternal Word, who draws his origin immediately from the mystery of God. He is already in existence before his human beginning, and takes on human existence by being sent by the Father. The Son of God accepts with his creative power and freedom the human existence that humanity conceives for this unique member; however, this happens not by means of the procreative energy that resides in Mary but in virtue of an event that, in a new and literal way, is the conception of Something and Someone humanity could not produce of itself. The
assumption of our human nature by the Son is followed by a life that is
directed to the cross. The voluntary self-emptying of Jesus plays itself
out in what Jesus did and endured over the years of his life up to the
end (Jn 13:1). We should not try to reduce the content of St. Paul’s
affirmations about the kenosis of the one who is equal to God the
Father. The self-emptying of the Son of God and the adoption of the
condition of slave are not just sentiments nor do they represent some
sort of merely abstract share in the Fall of the sons of Adam. Rather,
we have here a reality whose measure is the way in which God himself is
a real being. This infant was the Son of God, and the Son of God could
not be more than this infant, growing up to take on the task assigned to
him as man to give his life as a ransom for the many (cf 1 Tm 2:5; Mt
26:28). See: Ascension and Parousia; Baptism of Christ; Christological Controversies; Divine Revelation; Fatherhood of God; Holy Spirit; Hypostatic Union; Jesus Christ, God and Man; Jesus Christ, Human Knowledge of; Law of Christ; Mary, Mother of God; Nativity; Original Sin; Resurrection of Christ; Temptation of Christ; Trinity. Suggested Readings: CCC 470-630. John Paul II, “Four Themes of Christology.” L. Bouyer, The Eternal Son. R. Kereszty, Jesus Christ, Fundamentals of Christology. R. Cantalamessa, Jesus Christ, The Holy One of God. H. von Balthasar, Theodrama, Vol. 3. Richard Malone
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