The supreme truth about the Savior, for which the chosen people were wholly unprepared, was that he was God. To effect the redemption of the world, God became man. The inner meaning of God’s plan, what made it redemptive, we shall not discuss yet. When we have seen what he did we shall be in a position to g.asp how it met the situation created by Adam’s first sin and worsened by all the sins with which men hastened to follow Adam’s. We must concentrate our attention upon what actually happened.
God became man. Not the Trinity, but the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, the Word, became man. Re-read the opening verses of John’s Gospel. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” Here we find the fact—that it was the Second Person who became man. And we find the reason—”All things were made by him.”
Creation as a work of omnipotence, bringing something into existence out of nothing, is appropriated to God the Father. But the order of the universe, as a work of wisdom, is appropriated to the Son. The order had been wrecked, and a new order must be made; it was the Son who made it.
To make it, he became man. Read the first chapter of Matthew and the first two of Luke. A virgin, Mary, conceived a son. At the time, she was betrothed, and soon after was married, to Joseph, a carpenter. The child thus conceived was God the Son. The Second Person of the Trinity, already and eternally existent in his own divine nature, now took human nature in Mary’s womb.
His conception was virginal; he had a human mother but no human father; that which in ordinary conception is produced by the action of the father was in this instance produced by a miracle of the power of God. He grew in the womb like any other child, and in due course was born into our world in Bethlehem, near Jerusalem. He was named Jesus, and came to be called the Christ, which means the Anointed.
Of the next thirty years of his life we know little. He was a carpenter in Nazareth, further north in Galilee. Then came the three years of his public life. He traveled over Palestine with the twelve followers he had chosen, the apostles. He preached of God and man, of the Kingdom, and of himself as its founder; by every kind of miracle, of healing especially, he showed that God was guaranteeing the truth of his utterance. He was without mercy for the sinfulness of the religious leaders of the Jewish people. They could only want his death, and he gave them the pretext on which, in the name of true religion, they might kill him. For he claimed to be not Messiah only, but God.
Upon a charge of blasphemy, they persuaded the Roman governor of Judea to crucify him. He was nailed to a cross on a hill called Calvary for three hours until he died. He was buried, and on the third day he rose again. For forty days more he appeared among his apostles, then ascended into the sky until a cloud hid him from their gaze. In his death, resurrection, and ascension mankind is redeemed.
That is the story of our redemption in its barest outline. We must try to see its meaning, or as much of its meaning as is g.aspable this side of death.
The first step is to pierce as deep as we may into the being of Christ our Lord, and for this we must read the Gospels. The newcomer to theology, even if he is not a newcomer to Gospel reading, should at this point in his study do what G. K. Chesterton advised—he should embark upon a reading of the Gospels as though he had never read them before, almost indeed as though he had never heard the story before. He must make the considerable effort to read what is there.
Our Lord As We Meet Him
We must read, then, with the determination to meet our Lord, for ourselves, as he is. A reader coming wholly new to the story, not even thinking he had heard it before, would certainly become aware after a while of what I may call a double stream of both word and action. At times Our Lord is speaking and acting simply as a man—a great man, an extraordinary man, but not more than a man. But at other times he says things and does things that go beyond the human: What he says and does is either a claim to be superhuman or is utterly meaningless. Nor will the word superhuman long suffice. He says things that only God could say, does things that only God could do.
I shall not attempt to illustrate this double stream in detail. To get real value from the experience, each one should live through it for himself in the Gospels. In a way he will be living through the anguished questioning of the apostles in the three years they were with him. At one moment they felt he must be more than man; then the feeling would fade only to return stronger, and perhaps fade again, but always revive.
Our Lord does not tell them at the beginning. The truth that the carpenter with whom they now lived so familiarly, whom they saw hungry and thirsty and weary, was the God by whom all things were made. These men truly believed in God, had God’s infinite majesty as the very background of all their lives. They must be made ready to receive a truth which, presented too suddenly, would have shattered them.
So our Lord does not tell them at once. Yet, from time to time, He did make statements which could only be a claim to be God. Quite early came “No one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son” (Matt. 11:27, Luke 10:22). The apostles heard these things: heard him forgiving sins and supplementing the law God had given to Moses, always as one having in himself total authority: saw the miracles that were the divine guarantee of his message.
Yet they hesitated. Knowing the answer, we may tend to marvel at their slowness. But, as so often happens, what kept them from the answer was that they phrased the question wrongly. They came to ask, “Was he man or was he God?” So much evidence for each possibility, how were they to know that he was both? What indeed does it mean, that one person should be man and God?
The theology of the Incarnation must be our next consideration, what it means that the Word became flesh. Never think of this as mere theology, a proper occupation for learned men, but too remote for us. Until we have entered deeply into it, we shall not understand anything our Lord said or did, we shall not have the beginning of understanding of our own redemption.
Christ: God and Man
Understanding what Christ is—insofar as a beginning of understanding may be made here below—is essential to understanding what he does. We can, of course, decide not to bother with understanding, to build our whole spiritual life upon love and obedience. This attitude may be at best profound intellectual humility, at worst total intellectual unconcern. Either way it is impoverishment, a refusal of nourishment that the soul should have. To be willing to die for the truth that Christ is God is a glorious thing, but there is no glory in holding the phrase simply as a phrase.
Christ was a carpenter, the sort of man whom any of the neighbors could have called upon to make a plough or a doorframe. There was one such in every village of Palestine. What was special about this one is that at the same time he was infinite God who had made all things of nothing. To say as much as this is to speak a mystery. We must begin to know what we are saying.
The key to making the reality our own lies in the distinction between person and nature. The nature anything has decides what it is—to take the example closest to us, we who possess a human nature, a union of spiritual soul and matter, are men. But nature, though it answers the question what, does not answer the question who. In every rational nature there is a mysterious something which says I—that is the person (and this is true not only for man but for angels, and, as we have seen, for God himself). That which says I is the person, is the answer to the question who any rational being is.
There is a further distinction. Nature decides what a being can do; but the person does it. My soul and body make all sorts of actions possible to me, but I do them. Whatever is done, suffered, experienced in a rational nature is done, experienced, suffered by the person whose nature it is.
Left to ourselves, we might simply assume that each person has one nature, each nature (if it happens to be rational) has one person. We have already seen how wrong we should be if we made that assumption; it is simply one more way of treating man as the measure of all. In God there is one nature totally possessed by three distinct persons. This plurality of persons over nature is reversed in Christ our Lord, for in him the person is one, the natures are two.
Because Christ our Lord, uniquely, had two natures, he could give two answers to the question “What are you?”—for nature decides what a person is. And he had two distinct principles—sources we may say—of action. By the one nature he could do all that goes with being God—he could read the heart of man for instance, he could raise Lazarus to life; by the other he could do all that goes with being man—he could be born of a mother, could hunger and thirst, could suffer, could die.
Every single action of Christ was the action of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and this includes every action done by him in his human nature. For natures are sources of action-, but not doers. It is always the person who does them, and in his human nature there was but one single person, and that person was God. There was no human person, for that would have made him two people, each with his own distinct nature. His human nature was complete, but it was united to a divine person, not a human person.
We may make this clearer by glancing at two great Christian truths: Mary was the mother of God, and God died upon the cross.
I remember the first time a street-corner heckler said to me, “If Mary was the mother of God, she must have existed before God. You realize of course, or don’t you, that mothers come before sons?” The immediate answer, though I did not handle the question very brilliantly at the time, is that mothers must exist before their sons are born; and our Blessed Lady did exist before the Second Person of the Trinity was born into human nature; that this one Son already existed in his divine nature does not alter the truth that it was in her womb that he was conceived as man, from her womb born into our world. His eternal existence as Son of his heavenly Father does not by one jot diminish what she gave him. There is nothing received by any human being from his mother that he did not receive from her.
The other truth we shall consider is that God died upon the cross. Here again I am reminded of another street-corner question of about the same vintage: “You say that God died upon the cross; what happened to the universe while God was dead?” The suggestion is made that it was not God who died on Calvary, but the humanity of Christ. But in death, it is always someone who dies, a person; and upon Calvary’s cross, only one Person hung: God the Son in the manhood that was his.
Thus it was God the Son who died—not, of course, in his divine nature, which cannot know death and which holds the universe in existence, but in the human nature which was so utterly his. Death, remember, does not for any one of us mean annihilation. It means the separation of soul and body, a separation that at the last judgment will be ended. Upon Calvary, the body that was God the Son’s was separated from the soul that was likewise his. And on the third day they were united again. In his human nature God the Son rose from the death that in his human nature had been his.
In our reading of the Gospels, it is vital that we should never forget that every word uttered and every action performed by Christ is uttered and performed by God the Son. With the words, perhaps even more than with actions, we shall find sayings we are often tempted to call hard. The one Person said I, in the divine nature and in the human nature, in an infinite nature and a finite nature. He could say, “I and the Father are one”; he could say, “The Father is greater than I”; it is the same Person, uttering the truth of distinct natures, but asserting each nature as truly his own.
We tend to think of the truth “Christ is God” as a piece of information about Christ, and so it is. But we shall suffer loss if we fail to see it also as information about God. Apart from it, we should know God so far as our minds are capable of seizing him, in his own divine nature. We should know him, for instance, as Creator of all things from nothing; although this is true, it is just a little remote, since we have no experience of creating anything from nothing. But reading the Gospels we see God in our nature, coping with our world, meeting situations known to us. Outside Christianity there is nothing to compare with the intimacy of this knowledge. It is a wonderful thing to see God being God, so to speak; but there is a special excitement in seeing God being man.