On Christ: Fully Human, Fully Divine

I wrote this in March, 2019 for a Diocesan class on Christology, In retrospect, this paper was my impetus for applying to Ave Maria. So, special thanks to Deacon Bob Laquerre for requiring a written paper if you missed a class - even if I did have to ultimately sit in his office to make him read it.

As Catholics, we deal with mystery all the time.  We believe, by grace.  We have faith.  Bread and wine turns into the Body and Blood of Christ.  The mystery of transubstantiation takes place every day, innumerable times throughout the world, and we witness it ourselves each time we are at Mass.  We express the mystery of the Trinity each time we bless ourselves and say “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  And we express our belief in the mystery of the Incarnation every time we say the Creed, and pronounce the words “and became man.”

But what does all this mean?  Our human minds cannot fully understand these mysteries.  The most learned among us can perhaps glimpse the truth, but none can claim to completely comprehend these truths.  The priest says the words of consecration, but consecration is not a magic trick.  It’s not an “abracadabra” moment; it’s a moment when the veil between earth and the Kingdom of God is pierced, and Jesus Himself enters into our midst, body and blood, soul and divinity.  We can know this, believe this, proclaim this – but our minds are not able to truly comprehend this.

We know the Trinity is Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  But we can’t claim to understand what this truly means.  How can we comprehend one God, three persons?  We try to explain it using a shamrock – but that’s not really right.  I once explained it as a three person partnership, where each partner could make an agreement binding all three – but that’s not right, either, if for no other reason than the three partners, no matter how much in agreement, would not have the same will, the same desires, the unity that the trinity has.  We can know the Trinity is Father, Son, Spirit, we can believe this, proclaim this – but our minds are not able to truly comprehend this.

Then to the Incarnation:  this is just packed with mystery.  The Annunciation, an angel appearing to a young girl and asking her if she will be the Mother of God; that young girl becoming pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit; the birth of Jesus, who is God the Son, the second person of the trinity, born as an innocent baby boy over 2,000 years ago, not in a palace, not in a temple, but in humble circumstances.

And became man.  Three words we take on faith, and that are exceeded only by the words “on the third day, He rose from the dead.”  But think of the implications of these simply put words of the Creed.  He became man, and he rose from the

8dead – not something man has the power to do.

In one translation of St. Thomas Aquinas’ God With Hidden Majesty, the third verse is “God lay stretched upon the cross, only man could die, here upon the altar, God and man both lie; this I firmly hold as true, this is my belief, and I seek salvation, like the dying thief.”

If (and who am I to question Aquinas?), if God is on the cross, then Jesus is God; if Jesus died on the cross, then Jesus is man; and therefore it must follow that Jesus is both God and Man, and it also must follow that in Communion, we meet both God and Man – body and blood, soul and divinity.

And if Jesus is both God and Man, then he is both fully God and fully Man.  He’s not sometimes one and sometimes the other, he is not part one and part the other, he is God and Man.

On page 1 of Michael Casey’s Fully Human, Fully Divine, he states “humanity and divinity coincide in a single person so that the actions of Jesus are simultaneously the actions of a human being and the action of God.”  Again: mystery.  We cannot comprehend this.  We can attempt to explain it, in analogies that only permit a small glimpse of the truth.  For example, I write these words as a person and as a woman.  But while this might seem to be a helpful explanation, it’s really empty, for by definition, to be a woman means to be a person.  But to be a man does not mean to be God, not does to be God mean to be a man.

And Jesus is God-became-Man.  When he changes water into wine, his action is simultaneously the action of a human being and the action of God.  Okay, that makes sense; he performs miracles because he is both God and Man.  But Casey does not limit his statement to the miracles of Jesus; rather, he states “the actions of Jesus” (without any qualifiers) “are simultaneously the actions of a human being and the action of God.”   Jesus is always, at every moment of his life, both God and Man.  He didn’t set aside his divinity to be a man; he didn’t pretend to be a man, he wasn’t sometimes God and sometimes Man: he is always God and Man.

And just when I think that maybe, just maybe, I have a glimmer of an understanding of what this all means, on page 13, Casey tells us that as “a rural villager living in the first century, Jesus probably assumed the earth was flat.” 

But wait, how can that be?  God is all knowing.  Jesus is God.  How can he not know the earth is round?  But he is also man.  Therefore, what he knows is what a man knows.  Does that deny his divinity?  Does it clarify it if we consider that he thinks with a human brain, that while he is not limited, his brain can only comprehend what can be comprehended by a human brain?

Perhaps part of the problem is that we cannot factually state what the divine is.  But we are not called to understand God; we are simply called to know God, to learn, understand, and live his teachings.  The Bible is full of salvation history, but not of scientific lessons on the universe.  It tells us how to gain eternal life, not how to rule over the earth.  It does not tell us the secrets of the world, much less explain the divine.  We know God is all knowing, infinite, eternal, unchanging.  But we don’t know, can’t know, what it means to be Spirit; we don’t know, can’t know, what it means to be Trinity.  We can’t even truly understand eternal, since we have no experience with anything that has no beginning and no end.

In the beginning.  All of us of a certain age remember the old Mass, and the Last Gospel, which began “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  This concept was so important to the Church that until the late 20th century, that opening of John’s Gospel was read at every Mass.  The passage goes on the say “He was in the beginning with God.  All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.  What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.”

Long before the Trinity was defined and understood, John’s gospel gives us Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the beginning of creation.

Matthias Neuman, in his book Christology: True God, True Man, states the image of the “Sacred Heart represents Jesus Christ as both divine and human” and that this visualization “highlights the infinite love of God shown through the human love of Jesus.”  Clearly, being able to visualize things helps us to understand them.  Neuman holds that the Sacred Heart image moves us to feel a “reciprocal love” for God.  Many of the images we have of Christ come from great works of art in the Renaissance period.  But I’m not sure these classic paintings, wonderful as they are, speak that well to us in today’s world, where larger than life human images regularly greet us each day as we watch television – or perhaps live in miniature form in our pocket on our smart phone.  And perhaps we don’t need to see Jesus in truly human form.  In the Sacred Heart image, Jesus is clearly human, but we humans don’t actually walk around with our hearts outside of our bodies.  Neuman quotes Alyward Shorter, saying that the task of evangelization is “to enable the one who is evangelized to recognize the presence of Jesus Christ…”

Recognizing the presence of Jesus can be hard, especially when we let ourselves get bogged down with trying to decipher which picture is the right one, and does that picture look more like Jesus than another one.  Yet we do not need to know what Jesus looked like to understand his actual humanity.  I have never seen a picture of any of my great-grandparents, all of whom died long before I was born, but I still know that they existed; that there was a place and time when they were living humans.

We struggle to know, to see.  But it might be easiest to see the Trinity and to understand Jesus as Word of God through an image, but through an image of our mind and imagination rather than a painting or portrait.

Here’s one image that works for me.  It owes more to animation than to Renaissance art, but it speaks to me:

Imagine God the Father speaking.  Personally, I picture the Father in a rather classic sense, the old man with the white beard looking at us from a fluffy white cloud.  Okay, God is a Spirit, not an old man with a beard, but to understand, I need to start with words and images that I am familiar with.

So, the Father – how ever each of us sees him – begins to speak.  And you don’t hear him as much as you see words coming out of his mouth, letters rushing, swirling, a tornado-like jumble of words, forming into a person, forming into Jesus himself.  And between and around Father and Son, a jumble of ribbons of red light, surrounding them, joining them, being one with them: the Holy Spirit. 

Fully human, fully divine.  Christ does not leave his divinity behind at the Incarnation.  That second person of the Trinity came to earth, lived as one of us in our world.  And, ultimately, he died, a violent, painful, and humiliating death, not to proclaim his own glory and majesty, but to pay amends for our failure to honor that glory and majesty.

Fully human, fully divine.  The Council of Nicea stated that back in 325 AD.  Other councils have built on that.  It’s a truth the church has proclaimed for close to 1,700 years.  Learned books on it would fill libraries.

We walk by faith.  It is by the grace of God that we believe, that we have faith.  We ponder mysteries, but we in faith accept the truths they contain.

Faith – another mystery.  I was at a Catechist Retreat once, and the priest opened his very first talk with a simple sentence:  “Jesus did not have faith.”  He was greeted by stunned silence.  After a brief pause, he continued: “Jesus did not need faith, because he had knowledge.”  Fully human, fully divine:  in ways we cannot understand, Jesus, even while he was a helpless infant, was also divine.  If we accept that, if we then accept that he had knowledge, not faith, we have a tiny piece of understanding of Jesus being fully human and fully divine.

As Neuman points out, someday “[e]ach of us will have to give an account of our lives, according to the example of Jesus.”  That account will bear more on how we lived our lives, to what extent did we follow his teachings, than on whether or not we can draw a picture of him.  The more we know about Jesus, the more we understand his teachings, the better we can follow him.

We have a tiny piece of understanding of what a gift of grace faith is: we do not, we cannot, know the divine.  But, by faith, we know all the truths which Jesus came to reveal to us; we have access to the words of eternal life, and, by faith, we can live our lives in a way pleasing to God, so that we will one day be united with him in the Kingdom of God.