 |
| Mary and Joseph Selfie |
For starters, every culture thoughout history has had its own archetype or ideal, that individual or
set of individuals who embody all we desire to be. Rome had her warriors,
Florence her artists and Britain her royalty.[1]
In America, it is the celebrity, and more importantly, the unending desire to
become one, even if we are only famous for being famous. Technology and social media provide the channels to
achieve notoriety, as we project and pimp ourselves to as many people as
possible. But is
this really what it means to be human; spending our lives flaunting a
distorted version of ourselves to the world in a search for meaning? Most of us are terrified to allow friends and family to see the whole picture, the one with the wounds, scars, addictions and pathologies that make up our real, total self. Because somewhere deep down we still believe in the delusion of human perfectability, and "although we may not know what it means, we are disgusted with ourselves because we
are far from it.”[2]
But God is not into Selfie's, He is into us. So much so that he became one of us, and took on the same shriveled vulnerability we all share. His skin, his flesh was identical to ours in every way. Over the last few centuries the church has
unwittingly projected onto Jesus a human perfectibility that is incompatible
with the human condition. Jesus was not
an ‘uberman’, or a fleshy version of some angelic being. He was fully human and
fully divine. And because we do not accept
our own concrete humanity with all our flaws, we are less
capable of appreciating the limited, human Jesus. The writer of Hebrews reminds us, “He had to
be made like them, fully human in every way”.[3] So much so that “He didn’t
look like anything or anyone of consequence—he had no physical beauty to
attract our attention.”[4] Contrary to our high
Christology, Jesus did not embody the magnificence of Michelangelo’s David.
Anthropologists now know that the average male height in first century
Palestine was all of 5’ 2’’ tall. Are we
comfortable with this picture of Jesus? A Jesus who may have struggled with his
weight, who may have been bald, and according to Scripture, was not above
being tempted to subvert his own life’s mission and purpose?
It is only in learning to accept the limitations
of this perfect human being that allows us the capability to accept our own human deficiencies, and the limitations of others.[5] That Christ assumed human
weakness is critical to our salvation and our search for significance, since
“what was not assumed was not healed.”[6] Therefore, what was assumed
was made whole. Jesus came into the
world not simply to make known the nature of God, but to disclose what it means
to be a human being. He unveils not only
the divinity to human persons; Jesus reveals humanity to itself.[7] The humanity of Jesus is the mirror through which we see our own
humanity as it should be, not the false self we parade through social media.[8]
Therefore, if we keep in mind that Jesus reveals both the nature of God and the meaning of the human person, what does it mean that he spent the majority of his life in complete obscurity? Or, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.”[9] In a time when celebrity Christians require a platform to serve God, when athletes are canonized for their all to public prayers and mega-church pastors star in their own reality TV shows, Jesus demonstrates the path of downward mobility by reminding us that “whoever is least among you—he is the greatest”.[10] As Henri Nouwen explains:
Therefore, if we keep in mind that Jesus reveals both the nature of God and the meaning of the human person, what does it mean that he spent the majority of his life in complete obscurity? Or, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.”[9] In a time when celebrity Christians require a platform to serve God, when athletes are canonized for their all to public prayers and mega-church pastors star in their own reality TV shows, Jesus demonstrates the path of downward mobility by reminding us that “whoever is least among you—he is the greatest”.[10] As Henri Nouwen explains:
“The one who was from the beginning with God and who was God revealed himself
as a small, helpless child; as a refugee in Egypt; as an obedient adolescent
and inconspicuous adult: as a penitent disciple of the Baptizer; as a preacher
from Galilee, followed by some simple fishermen; as a man who ate with sinners
and talked with strangers; as an outcast, a criminal, a threat to his people.
He moved from powerful to powerlessness, from greatness to smallness, from
success to failure, from strength to weakness, from glory to ignominy. The
whole life of Jesus of Nazareth was a life in which all upward mobility was
resisted…The divine way is indeed the downward way.”[11]
Yet, we who share the same skin Jesus wore secretly despise our daily, conventional life. We long for significance, even celebrity status to validate our human condition. But in Jesus we see the fullness of the divinity enfleshed in the ordinary. We come to know a God who experienced the divine humiliation of becoming fully human in order that like Him, we too could discover the path of downward mobility. Only then will we have room in our hearts to cease looking at ourselves, and finally see Jesus in the daily. Loving God more than self is not some abstract ethic, it is overwhelmingly physical. "It means seeing in every person the face of the Lord to be served, and to serve him concretely." Recognizing the poor, insecure, normal face of Jesus in the eyes of the broken and marginalized frees us from our narcissistic selves, while allowing each one of us to tangibly identify with the living Jesus enfleshed all around us. And in so doing, we may just find that in losing our life, we might actually find it. Then and only then will we know what it means to be fully human as we seek the divine.
[1]
Casey, Michael. Fully Human, Fully Divine.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Hebrews 2:17.
[4]
Isaiah 53:2.
[5]
Casey, Michael. Fully Human, Fully Divine.
[6]
Nazianzen, Gregory. 4th Century Letter to Cledonius.
[7]
Kavanaugh, John. Following Christ in a Consumer Society.
[8]
Casey, Michael. Fully Human, Fully Divine.
[9]
Philippians 2: 6.
[10]
Luke 9: 48.
[11]
Nouwen, Henri. The Selfless Way of Christ: Downward Mobility and the
Spiritual Life.
No comments:
Post a Comment