Here is one part of the redemption in Christ, the teaching and example which reveals the love of God, whose full depth is shown in the sacrifice of the Cross. He is like someone coming into the dysfunctional family who dares to eat food from the mother’s hand. But in order for the example to persuade, he has to be like them. There is no use having an exemplar whom we suspect of being immune to the poison. This is why the docetic Gnostics mentioned in chapter 2 were so dangerously wrong when they thought that God could not really have become human in Jesus, that there must have been some special ‘get-out’ clause or immunity for Christ. It is the same point that lies behind the temptation of Jesus in the desert: ‘If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into a loaf’ (Luke 4:4). Precisely because he is the Son of God, Jesus was prepared to lay his power aside so as to convince us of his love.
But sin goes deeper than that. Traditionally, the Church has talked about Original Sin, an idea which is understandably unpopular. The story is that the first sin of Adam and Eve was passed down all the generations as a hereditary curse, rather in the same way as big ears or a snub nose like mine. Theologians, especially St Augustine, noted the rage of tiny infants when disappointed of food or attention, and saw this as a mark of the fatal inheritance. But once it was realized that Adam and Eve may not have existed as such, the doctrine began to lose credibility. Nobody would put much research money into a quest for a putative ‘sin’ gene in human cells.
The language surrounding original sin may not hold much water any longer, but the central idea, the faith the doctrine attempts to express, has something going for it. Anyone who has undergone any form of psychotherapy discovers how basic and elemental are some of our destructive impulses. We learn more each day about the subtle interactions of genes and environments, behaviour and cognition. If you think that is all hocus-pocus, then I would point to the fact that very few of us get close to imitating Christ. We may start to take God’s love, but what do we do with it then? Take the Sermon on the Mount: ‘be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48). How are you doing? How much longer will you need? Our fallen state is a universal experience.
The radical Christian message is about how deep that fall has gone. We know this because we know how far God has gone in Christ to restore us to his image. The full damage of sin happens on the level of our basic nature. This is the basic content of the doctrine of Original Sin. All of us are damaged in nature, and pass that on. We know this, because the Word became flesh to rescue us. The remedy is on the same scale and level as the disease.
One way to put it is like this. Our nature is relational, we are persons. In denying ourselves the love of God, we deny ourselves the material with which to love each other. In doing this, we block off part of God’s creative love from the whole world, as though we are standing in each other’s light causing mini-eclipses. The love which most reflects God’s, that of woman and man creating a child, is also affected, and thus there is a lack in the creative power passed on by them. It is like a dry field. Each of us is standing holding an umbrella, so that no matter how much it rains, the field remains parched. It may as well be drought. After a while, weedy, malnourished seedlings give rise to malnourished plants. That is what we have done to ourselves, to each other and to the whole creation. And so we become imperfect copies of the image of God.
What happens in Christ is that God takes on our nature. So what? So two things. First, human nature is exalted by the exchange. As the Vatican II passage already quoted makes clear, ‘Human nature, by the fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare’ (Gaudium et Spes, 22). For the first time in many years, there is a human being living in love with the Father. Jesus relates fully to the Father, so he can relate fully to other human beings. Because our nature is relational, connecting us all together in chains of love or of hate, Jesus’ nature affects the rest of us. In him, the human and divine meet in amity and in union, and so if we relate to Jesus, we also relate to the Father. One such relationship can begin to leaven the whole world, because of the fact that we are all interacting across space and time. That is our shared nature, now shared with him.
But secondly, a human being has at last said a full ‘yes’ to God. This is not just an example, it is an opening of the world to the power of the Creator. It is also a ‘yes’ said by the Son of God, a loving return of love for love that is the Holy Spirit unleashed on the creation to mend and to heal. The purpose of creation is at last fulfilled and man and God are made one. Nor is this simply a unity at a level where nothing goes wrong. It is easy to live in love when all is rosy and bright. But Jesus plumbs the full depths of human misery, as well as sharing our joys. For this reason, the Cross has central importance in Christianity. Note, as well, what love it is of which we are speaking. On the Cross the Father and Son exchange the love of the Trinity; it is this image to which we are restored. Our life, from now, can be part of the life of God. To paraphrase St Paul:
Out of the Father’s infinite glory, he has offered you the power, through his Holy Spirit, for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted on love and built on love you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:16–18
God has done what we could never do, but in such a way that it was done by one of us. This is, perhaps, a better idea than punishing you. We now have to ask how it actually comes about in our lives, and try to discover how to avoid stopping it.
Here are some texts which further illustrate some of the ideas contained in this chapter:
The light does not fail because of those who have blinded themselves; it remains the same, while the blinded are plunged in darkness by their own fault. Light never forces itself on anyone, nor does God use compulsion on anyone who refuses to accept his artistry.
St Irenaeus, Against the Heretics, VI.39.3
Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, became our reconciliation with the Father. He it was, and he alone, who satisfied the Father’s eternal love, that fatherhood that from the beginning found expression in creating the world, giving man all the riches of creation, and making him ‘little less than God’ (Psalm 8:6), in that he was created ‘in the image and in the likeness of God’ (Genesis 1:26). He and he alone also satisfied that fatherhood of God and that love which man in a way rejected … The redemption of the world – this tremendous mystery of love in which creation is renewed – is, at its deepest root, the fullness of justice in a human Heart – the Heart of the First-born Son – in order that it may become justice in the hearts of many human beings, predestined from eternity in the First-born Son to be children of God, and called to grace, called to love.
John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 9
In his intimate life, God ‘is love’, the essential love shared by the three divine Persons: personal love is the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Therefore he ‘searches even the depths of God’ (1 Corinthians 2:10), as uncreated Love-Gift. It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine Persons, and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is the Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person-Love. He is Person-Gift. Here we have an inexpressible deepening of the concept of person in God, which only divine revelation makes known to us. At the same time, the Holy Spirit, being consubstantial with the Father and the Son in divinity, is love and uncreated gift from which derives as from its source all giving of gifts vis-à-vis creatures (created