In last week’s Bulletin, I introduced the fact that Greek thought originally showed much opposition to the concept of divine-humanity. It seemed impossible to not only conceive of the idea but also to express the idea that somehow Jesus was both God and man. There weren’t even words to express how this mystery could be possible. Two very characteristic expressions of this opposition were the heresies of Nestorianism and Monophysitism which troubled the Christian world for entire centuries and which never ceased to represent two tendencies or inclinations in the attitude of Christians.
Nestorianism expresses our tendency to see in the person of Jesus Christ as only a human being that was endowed by God with special gifts and extraordinary abilities. This tendency survives very widely in a large number of people who speak with great respect for Christ but who recognize Him merely as a great moral teacher, a person who indeed led humankind to very important ethical accomplishments.
Similarly, Monophysitism, expresses our tendency to see in the person of Jesus only an intervention of God in history, to see just simply the God who seemingly appears as a man but who is just a shadow of a man and not man in his true nature or essence. This tendency survives in those people who want to maintain within Christianity a form of philosophical and ethical dualism, to maintain, that is, the unbridgeable polarization between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the material, the eternal and the temporal and the sacred and the profane.
As one can probably imagine, these struggles in trying to find a way to express who Jesus is, led to other misguided notions of who we are as human beings. For a proper understanding of our human condition, we must be able to accept the fact that God IS both God and man in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Church did not struggle for four full centuries over an abstract notion. She did not even struggle for the soul of man. She wrestled to save his body. Can the body of man, the flesh and not only the soul, be united with God without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation?
The Church wrestled for four centuries to save the body of man from the absurdity of death and declare the possibility that humans can be united with God, that the corruptible can truly be clothed in incorruptibility. It is important how and understand who Jesus is for He is the revelation of God’s union with us.
It is an article of our faith that God did, in His incarnation as a human being, made this revelation known to us, namely, that we are united to God by a sharing in His divine life. Because the God-man Jesus is possible, we are possible!