The Entire Thought

Mystery of Jesus

Jesus, the God-human, is a great mystery. Human beings are also mysteries: Humans are comprised of both body and spirit. But if we emphasize the bodily aspect of our humanity too much, we can become
bestial. If we emphasize the spiritual side too much we can become angelic. It is best to recall that we are not one part body and one part spirit; we are one person, an inspirited body or an enfleshed spirit. That way, we realize that even at our most animalistic, there is room for recovery, and even at our most angelic, we are
liable to crash.

In a similar way, there are two possible approaches to the God-man. They are fancifully called “ascending” and “descending” theology. The usual approach is “descending,” or God becoming a man. This is reasonable, since God is more decisive in the mixture than man. However, if we stress the divinity of Jesus too much, then he looks a lot like God in a Sears suit. Not a real human, but merely God disguised in a human body.

The “ascending" approach is friendlier, easier, more natural. We look at the human Jesus, learn as much as we can about his earthly life, and then add the fact that he was also God. This is very appealing, since it brings him closer to our human experience. The danger is that we tend to think of Jesus as really just a very good human whom God adopted as a son. Therefore, not really God, but God’s human instrument, God’s robot.

In order to bring God and human together in the mystery of Jesus, we must first observe their
independent existence.

We spontaneously think that God created the world good. And when sin happened, God decided to send the son to earth to atone for sin, to make God forgive us and love us again. We see it that way because we look at it historically. But God is beyond time, outside of history. Creation and sin and Jesus all happened at the same time in God’s life.

We also see the Incarnation wrongly because we forget who God is: love. God did not send Jesus to bail out humankind, to fix his Father’s imperfect creation so God could once again love us. No, God, who is love, always loves us. That is the purpose of creation.

Which means that God did not invade human nature, God did not distort human nature and twist it into a shape fit to house God. No, God originally created human nature as open-ended, open to God, accessibly to God. The Incarnation is that point where the best that humans have to offer, Jesus, meets the best that God has to offer: Jesus. And the breathtaking idea is that, since every human is at their core open to God, the
Savior of the world might have been you or I!

We are grateful that it didn’t happen that way, as great an honor as it would have been. We are
thankful that someone else took on the evil of the world and was crushed for it on a cross. But meditating on the mystery of the God-man helps us appreciate both God and humans.

Just imagine how wondrous we are, so close to God, a little less than angels, so like God that one of us actually is God! And imagine how much God must love us to create a whole cosmos for our home, and then send his divine Son to grace our earth so God could love us more.


Fr. James Smith
Celebration, September 14, 2008

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