Читать книгу Our December Hearts - Anne McConney - Страница 10

I was once seriously taken to task by a woman for suggesting, in a sermon, that Jesus might have had a purely human reaction. “He was God,” she said, presumably meaning that God would not have been irritated by interruptions, would not have tried to turn away the Syrophoenician woman, would not have lost his temper with the moneychangers, would not have snapped at one of his most loyal followers and, since scripture records that he did all these things and more, there must have been Some Other Purpose, deeper and more mysteriously hidden in the divine will.

She shares this opinion with some of the evangelists, notably Matthew with his incessantly repeated “He said this so that the prophecy might be fulfilled….”

Human nature, simple and direct and understandable, is an easier explanation. It is, after all, just as much a heresy (if we can still use that old and venerable word) to doubt Jesus’ humanity as it is to doubt his Godhood.

As Dorothy L. Sayers points out in her introduction to The Man Born to Be King, these concepts tend to occur in cycles, with one era stressing the eternal, cosmic Christ, another era the human Jesus. And yet, whatever era we may live in, we must do our best to balance the two. And there can be no better time than Advent, as we prepare for the great Feast of the Incarnation, to examine exactly what we mean when we speak of “true God and true man.”

I recently led a small discussion group in which we asked: “What would it be like to be both God and human?” The only thing we agreed on completely was that our minds were indeed boggling!

After all, God and human would seem to be exact opposites. God is all-wise, all-powerful and all-knowing, living in an eternity without beginning or end, holding all creation in being. A human, on the other hand, knows neither the future nor, in any true sense, the past, is pitiably vulnerable to all the chances and changes of a dangerous planet, and even with the best of intentions muddles and blunders from one end of life to the other. How can these two forms of consciousness exist in one being?

I think that, first of all, we must begin by insisting on the full humanity of Jesus, simply because a being who could know and control all things before they happened would have few points of contact with the human condition; he would not, in fact, be human in any real sense at all.

To be incarnate is to be a spiritual being in a physical body, to be subject to all the limitations of time and place and culture.

Incarnation is almost unbearably precise. Even a few years’ difference in our birthdates would mean a different set of schoolmates, a different relationship with our siblings and perhaps with our parents. It would mean the influences of our culture, changing constantly as they do, would strike us at different ages as we were growing up. (The first big, breaking story I worked on as a budding journalist was the Kennedy assassination; it had a quite different influence on me than it would have had at, say, age twelve.)

All the things that affect us, then, would have affected Jesus as well and yet, as Sayers also insists, “his consciousness was the consciousness of God.”

How could this be? How can the consciousness of God and the consciousness of a human being ever touch and be one? When we put it in those terms, the answer becomes strikingly clear: we must find the place or places where the human and the divine mind are not different but alike.

And again, the answer stands out for us: the human mind and the mind of God are alike in the passion and the will to love—even to love sacrificially. The God-mind loves because that is its nature; the human mind loves because it was created in the image of God.

This is the point of contact beyond which nothing more is needed. It is the reason for the baby in the manger, the reason for celebration, the reason for thanksgiving.