Читать книгу Being Catholic Today - Laurence McTaggart - Страница 25

Then I shall give you the gift of my love.

Song of Songs 7:13

The last two chapters contained a lot of ideas and perhaps you found them rather abstract. That is a challenge with doctrines, and an important fact about them. No teaching of the Church is meant to stand alone. Each one is meant to be applied in life, each one has a bearing on our need of God and his answer to that need. If you are becoming impatient for answers to pressing questions of ‘real life’, please bear with me a little longer. Life will get real soon enough, and we must gather enough resources to cope with it.

It is a little surprising that the Church has not attempted to define how we are saved by Christ. You can find plenty of models and theories, but no formal definition in the same way as the Trinity or the nature of Christ is defined. Most of the doctrines we have were evolved to support the claim that we are saved in Christ. For example, the dogma of the Assumption is all about Mary as Mother of God. This ancient title was thought up to bring home the divinity of Christ in popular Marian devotion. By bearing the God-child, Mary’s body was made specially holy. From earliest times, some Christians had believed that Mary was assumed into heaven (hence the marked lack of Marian relics), and Pope Pius XII chose to promulgate this officially at a time when many people were coming to wonder if Jesus was anything more than a gifted guru, a very holy man with good ideas. The special status of Mary was intended to underscore the very special status of her son.

The Assumption can seem to non-Catholics, and indeed to some Catholics, to be a bit of window-dressing: not really necessary, and a matter of taste to take or leave. But not so the claim of salvation. This is central to our faith. In fact, it is our faith; everything else is just corollary. Yet Christians have never been able to do more than come up with images and stories to try and describe this most important part of our religion. In some ways this is a failure, but in other ways it is quite encouraging. The reconciliation between God and human beings in Christ goes deeper than words can. It penetrates our human nature beyond sin and fall. Our doctrines are like the symptomatic description of a cold: sneezing, temperature, a tendency to be other than our usual, pleasant selves. Invisible to us is the action of the virus, and of the antibodies. The analogy breaks down because we can now describe viruses and antibodies. Perhaps it is more like trying to convey the meaning of a sentence without saying the sentence; we can never get behind words and symbols.

The earliest images and metaphors were very simple. The Cross was seen as the location of a great battle between Christ and the devil. In the resurrection we see the victory of Christ, who, like a modern marine detachment, has attacked the terrorist hideout and freed the hostages. The devil attacks Jesus, fooled by his human nature, only to be overwhelmed by the divine power concealed within. Such a way of thinking appeals to us strongly, since we naturally identify with stories. Writers such as Tolkien, Lewis and Stephen Donaldson give us the same myth in different terms. It closely relates to our own experiences of life as a struggle, sometimes with forces within us we do not understand or like very much.

The idea is sometimes more subtle. To say we are captive to the devil accords with part of our experience. But our sense of freedom and of choice leads to the idea that we also are in rebellion against God. As such, we incur the need for forgiveness so that we can escape due punishment. The debt we owe is too great for us to pay, and so God pays it in Christ taking upon himself the just deserts of our offences. It can be put more acceptably by saying that Jesus makes the sacrifice necessary to all true forgiveness. We also, however, have a sense of helpless choosing; that we know we will do the same bad thing over and over again. This is so despite all we know about God, Christ and ourselves. St Paul puts the problem in a way almost everyone can relate to from time to time:

I cannot understand my own behaviour I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate. When I act against my own will, that means I have a self that acknowledges that the Law is good, and so the thing behaving in that way is not my self but sin living in me … with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want … In short, it is I who with my reason serve the Law of God, and no less I who serve in my unspiritual self the law of sin.

Romans 7:14–25

Paul’s predicament is that of someone who would dearly love to be able to swim the English Channel. Exercises, practices, diets cannot alter a basic inability to swim for twenty-odd miles. He just cannot do it. Nor can I, and nor can you, I would guess. Such a way of thinking leads to saying that there is something damaged about our very human nature. We know perfectly well what we are called to by God, but our daily experience can be more like that of fish trying to build a space rocket: just not what we are made for.

A more theologically respectable way of putting it would be to say that the image of God has been wiped out, or at least defaced, in us. Where we should reflect a true picture of God’s love, we produce a dim and scattered chaos. It is possible, though, to get this very wrong. One can think, for example, that the spirit is willing, while the flesh is weak. This truth is taken too far if we mean that we are good spirits trapped in a body of sin. St Paul sometimes says things like this, but not in this meaning. For him, the whole human, soul and body, is fallen; not something anyone with honest insight into themselves would dispute.

If our whole nature was fallen, our whole nature is restored in Christ. This is why the Church has always insisted on the full and real humanity of Jesus. The idea is that by contact with his divine nature, the human nature was revivified and restored. Some thinkers took this further to say that we become divinized in Christ, though it is never easy to say what that means. Christ became what we are, so that we may become what he is. Pressing the idea leads us to horrible complexities about Christ’s human soul, and how to square his real human knowledge with his real divine omniscience.

Fortunately we do not have to solve any of these; my money is on those fish beating us to it if we try. Each of the views outlined has its own problems and inconsistencies. The devil does not seem any less vigorous now than he was before; indeed, advancing human technology seems to give him a positive advantage. That God should slay his own Son to satisfy his just vengeance does not encourage one to approach the throne of grace. Jesus bearing the pain of our forgiveness is touching, but not always relevant if we ignore it, while his exalting of our nature seems to make our actions irrelevant. But I hope it is also clear that each of the views contains insight into our condition. For example, the satisfaction ‘theory’ in itself shows our reluctance to take seriously the parable of the Prodigal Son.

A problem these views have in common, perhaps, is that they are quite abstract. Undoubtedly we have a human nature, but it is not very tangible in itself. What is tangible is our collection of broken loves and fallen promises. Troops mopping up resistance after the decisive battle are just as vulnerable to individual bullets as they were before the victory. Knowing our forgiveness, we still sin. The question of what incarnation, death and resurrection have to do with us today still needs to be asked.

Part of an answer can be gained from looking at where we start. Most of us live more or less scattered lives in less or more satisfactory relations with other scattered livers. What do we miss? One vital thing is the realization of our state. I have described this state as one of need, of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of fear, frustration, boredom, loss, sorrow, whatever. The acknowledgement of this state I have called faith, though it so often looks like doubt. The second thing is the sense that the emptiness is not all there is, or all there might be. We still try to get on with each other, and regret the times when we do not. This sense is called hope. The last ingredient is a foundation to both, a still point against which we can rest whatever may happen. It may not surprise you if I call this love.

Imagine that you are the cook for a large group of people. They live in the middle of a desert and are very hungry. You are sorry for them and do your best to feed them. It involves spending most of the day gathering the small plants and roots that grow in the rocks, and the nights digging for water in which to soak them so they are soft enough to eat. There are just enough stringy weeds, but only just. You do your best, but it is still not what they need, let alone what they want. So relations are strained. You have come to resent their demands as much as they resent your failure to satisfy them. One night a mysterious stranger appears and puts in your hand a cardboard box full of cheese and pickle sandwiches. You are so famished you eat them all, and then the box. He comes the next night, and you wolf the lot. Now you can have sandwiches, you don’t want roots and plants, and you eat the box only to hide the evidence. And so you no longer find food for other people with the same zest; you are not hungry like they are. Some time later, now you are better fed, you spare a glance for the nocturnal stranger. He has changed recently: more haggard about the eyes, thin about the wrists. This will not do! You cannot have him starving to death, worn out with fetching food; no more sandwiches if he dies. You offer him a sandwich: ‘Why don’t you have one?’ He looks at you and answers, ‘Because they are for you.’ And then you understand. It is the same with our lack of love. We cannot love as we should, as others need. We do not love ourselves even. But this is exactly where we are made in the image and likeness of God, in our ability to relate to other persons; or, more precisely, in our inability not to interact. The blessing has become a curse, as our inner loss spreads. We do not have enough for ourselves, still less for others. But then, in the middle of the fallen world a man speaks words the like of which men and women were created to speak:

I am the bread of life. Anyone who comes to me will never be hungry; anyone who believes in me will never thirst … Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that you can eat it and not die. I am the living bread that has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.

John 6:35, 50–51

Jesus offers you love, for you, and for you to pass on. He gives what was lacking, the real food we long for from God and from each other. He stands in the middle of the human race and hands out his bread to all who will take it. Thus we can talk of the raising of our nature; there is a relating ‘I’ among us who loves as we should love. We can take his food, gorge on it, and then learn to imitate his sacrifice.

It is not simply a matter of example. Let us think a little about that sacrifice. The bread is not quite how we would like it; not in nice soft white slices. It is a rough and broken bread, ‘my flesh for the life of the world’. The agony of the Cross is not an obvious sign of the love of God. But Christ’s love is so full, and so different from ours, because it was taken even to the last resort: ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.’ We have to appreciate the depth of choice involved in the Passion of Jesus. At any point he could have answered his taunters and saved himself. At any point he could have summoned the power that stilled storms and gave sight to the blind. At any point, God could have intervened in tiny, invisible ways to prevent the situation becoming humanly inevitable.

He did not, for the same reason that he will not just punish us, or scrap the whole world and start again. Christ resisting his Cross would have been an act of self-defence, of aggression such as we do every day. He could have defended himself, with swords or thunderbolts, but at the expense of those around him. This is what makes the difference. His love consists of a total giving of himself, unmixed with anything else, any other interest, any other motive. It is the love which the Father and Son share in the Holy Spirit, the same love which overflowed in the creation of you and me and the whole world, and the same love we were meant to show to each other in him and to him in each other. But we say ‘no’ to God and to ourselves and to others in a thousand little ways each day. Christ fulfilled the will of God, gave to the Father a total ‘yes’ because at each stage he responded with the gift of love. At last, there was a part of creation which no longer held up God’s grace with resistance.

All we have to do is get in touch with Christ, and keep in touch. The Church exists simply as a way of doing this, so that Christ walks with each person the path of life. In some senses, it is the way of doing this. Catholics believe that in the Church, God gives us the love of Christ, and a community in which to share it. The theological term for this is ‘sacrament’. Before we think about sacraments, however, it is time to make concrete some of the doctrines we have looked at. We now have sufficient resources to make some sense of everyday life.