By taking on human form, God has violated our sense of the sacred. Since the birth of Jesus Christ we are presented with a God whom we must both adore and embrace. A God who holds all things in being but who is willing to submit to the limitations of our human fragility. An eternal God who has existed in time.
Those who believe in a god usually have a deep sense of the sacred. In the normal run of things they clearly distinguish between the sacred and the profane, the clean and the contaminated, tapu and noa. The distant, majestic and all holy God must not be contaminated by the profane, the blemished and the sinful. They consider it a lack of reverence to bring anything contaminated in to the presence of god. Before they dare to stand in god’s presence, they must be ritually purified.
In Jesus we are presented with a God who is prepared to get dirty with us. A God who eats with sinners, touches lepers, welcomes women of shady character. A God who sleeps on the ground and tramps the dusty road. A God who gets tired, sweats, has dirty feet, gets thirsty, suffers, cries. A God who bleeds, feels pain, dies…and rises again.
How do people cope with the fact that Jesus is truly God and truly human? Many simplify things by embracing one of these truths and rejecting the other. The wide-spread contemporary western view is that Jesus was just an exceptional human being. But it is an unequivocal and ancient belief of the Church that that Jesus is truly God and truly human.
Scripture confirms that He is Son of God and Son of man. In fact, if he was just a very good human being, he was pretty arrogant considering some of the demands he made. If he was not God he was a megalomaniac.
The Nicene Creed, (325) clearly states the church’s belief that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly human. The Creed of Chalcedon, (451) is even more explicit: “Following the holy fathers, therefore, we all with one accord teach the profession of faith in the one identical Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. We declare that He is perfect both in His divinity and in His humanity, truly God and truly man, composed of body and rational soul, that He is consubstantial with the Father in His Divinity, and consubstantial with us in His humanity, like us in every respect except for sin. We declare that in His Divinity, He was begotten of the Father before time, and in His humanity He was begotten in this last age of Mary, the virgin, the mother of God “.
To get both these ideas into our tiny minds at the same time is akin to trying to get two Christmas turkeys into a small domestic oven. So at any one time I tend to think about just one or the other of them. To try to do otherwise causes my mind to fuse and shut down. Did the baby Jesus know about the Big Bang? Could he do calculus? Did Jesus know what was round the corner? Did he know he was going to die? Did he know he would rise again? And… how many angels can party on the surface of the Higgs-Boson? If, of course, it really exists.
Minds finer than mine discuss these things. Me? I am content to accept on faith that Jesus is truly God and truly human. I do not expect or want to be able to understand fully. Why should I? I can’t even understand another human being. Even my cat is a mystery to me! Each day I understand Jesus, and my cat, a little better, but both retain the ability to surprise and disconcert me.
I am not without curiosity. Each day I penetrate mystery more deeply: true God and truly human.
Denis O’Hagan is a Catholic priest and editor of CathNews New Zealand and Pacific