TOPIC: CHRISTOLOGY
By Len Mier

The God-Man Jesus Christ and Kenosis

Jesus was the God-Man and He revealed an extreme humility in His earthly life. This is key our understanding the goal of humankind’s salvation. This is also exemplified in the life of the Theotokos. While Jesus’ incarnation had a kenotic dimension of His own volition, His mother’s life was kenotic by the grace of God. (“Kenosis,” has become a technical term for the Son’s emptying Himself of certain divine attributes, especially of omniscience).

Jesus Christ was both God and man. He had a nature that was Divine and a nature that was human, but He was one person. Having both natures in one person was the most important debate in the early Church, taking several Ecumenical Councils to define this teaching of the person of Jesus and His relationship with the Father, along with the nature of Jesus’ relationship with the Holy Spirit.

One question that theologians explored was, how the incarnation of Jesus saves mankind. If He was Divine, did this divinity reside in fullness before His death and resurrection? If so, how does that set an example for us to copy since we are not divine by nature. Saint Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, may help mankind understand this question. I am referring to the following passage in chapter two:

…though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as some-thing to be exploited, but emptied him-self, taking the form of a slave, being born in human form (Revised Standard Version, Catholic Translation).

This passage refers to Jesus’ kenotic life and His life of extreme humility. Father Dumitru Staniloae states, “The kenosis consists in the fact that the Son of God assumed, made His own, the human nature and its weaknesses not imprinted with sin” (Staniloae, Ionita & Barringer, 1944). This kenosis is what makes it possible for Jesus the God-Man to assume our sufferings and our limitations – it is in putting aside His glory that He can show us how to live. It shows us the way of Theosis. By his being empty of the glory of God, but still fully God, man is shown the way to obtain that divine image that resides within us. It is as St. Maximus explains, Christ achieved our salvation because He was able to share in our bodily sufferings as a man, and through signs of His Divine powers in the miracles He performed. It was through His resurrection we are saved from sin and given deification through His grace.

Father Dumitru Staniloae also states “[Kenosis is] to facilitate the direct participation of the Son of God in the strengthening of human nature, in order to make it an active medium of divine love through the manifestation of power and through the bearing and overcoming of suffering” (Staniloae, et al., 1994).
It is important to understand that in His kenosis and the weakness of human nature He was sinless. Jesus’ human nature was so in tune with His Divine nature in the one person that He could not sin or have sin. It is also true that His Divine nature was so much in tune with the will of the Father because they are of the same essence, that sin would be impossible. It is important for us to know that the Church insists that the Savior must be without sin as Saint Cyril of Alexandria states, “that one can enter into God’s presence only in a state of pure sacrifice, and no human being could do this on his own because of sin. Only Christ, as man without sin, was able to en-ter into God’s presence as a pure sacrifice, and only in Him can we do the same.” Without His sinlessness, our redemption and salvation would be impossible.

Jesus’ virginal birth by the Theotokos is a necessity in God’s redemptive plan. Her vocation is to be a vessel in which the incarnation of Jesus Christ took place, without her God could not take on flesh as a human and become man. She is the means along with the actions of the Holy Spirit by which the Son of God saves mankind. This is important because one’s nature is not born, but only that one’s person or physical existence comes into reality. As Staniloae states, “The Person born of the Virgin Mary is identical with the Person of the divine Word, Who also becomes through the Incarnation the Person of the human nature” (Staniloae, et al., 1994), thus bringing about God becoming man. The miraculous and virginal birth is important to the teaching of the Church because this birth does not occur by natural means. Instead, the birth of Jesus happens because God, in the Person of the Holy Spirit, takes over natural events in the same way that, in the creation narrative of Genesis, God’s Spirit gives life to Adam, the first man of creation.

Jesus, as man, comes into existence as a divine creative act in the same way that Adam was created in an act of Divine Love, making Him the new Adam. He does not come into existence through worldly desires or sensual desire or pleasure. It is His outgoing love for mankind that causes this to happen.

The Theotokos has a kenotic life also. Her kenotic life, however, differs from that of Jesus’ kenotic life in one very important aspect. In Jesus, kenosis happened of His own doing. He emptied Himself as St Paul says. The Theotokos, however, could not do this on her own. It is through Divine grace and the incarnation of Christ within her that she was able to accomplish this. The emptying of Jesus paved the way for Him to take up what He gave up in His life, death and resurrection.

This is salvation for us, in the same way that the Theotokos emptied herself with God’s grace, accepting her vocation as the bearer of God, achieving Theosis and salvation. This is the example we Christians must follow. To be self-emptying of those things foreign to the life in Christ and by following the example of the Theotokos, we too gain salvation in living a kenotic way of life.

I would again compliment Len on his essay and thank him for sharing it with us!