Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer IV
The Old Testament tells the story of the preparation in history for this event, in the calling of Israel to be the people within which a saviour for the world could be born and reared. We can read of the slow formation and revelation of religious and other traditions from which the ‘good news of salvation’ could be derived. For, if one stops to think about it, the message of salvation could not be proclaimed without actions and words. Further, words and actions need a context, a time and a place, and an audience rooted in that context to become comprehensible. They also need a context within which to become compelling.
It is vital to recall the kind of context that is meant here. It is not simply a matter of an agreed set of words, and a grammar for what they mean in combination. Here is an example to try to indicate what the ‘extra’ element is. It is from a prayer spoken by a prophet eight centuries before Christ:
With shepherd’s crook lead your people to pasture, the flock that is your heritage, living confined in a forest with meadow land all around. Let them pasture in Bashan and Gilead as in the days of old. As in the days when you came out of Egypt grant us to see wonders … Once more have pity on us, tread down our faults, to the bottom of the sea throw all our sins.
Micah 7:14–15, 19
I defy anyone with insight into themselves not to empathize with the hope of that prayer. This is the context I mean, the gradual forming of human history to expect and receive God’s response to our plight. Jesus had a simple proclamation, that in his life the time was fulfilled, and the response had begun. ‘Today these words are being fulfilled, even as you listen’ (Luke 4:21).
Watch my lips
In the course of this chapter I have left quite a few hostages of some importance. The last extract from the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer mentions the virgin birth, the Trinity and social justice, among other things. There was also a rash promise to explain the Incarnation. The latter is really quite simple in the Old Testament context. For we have here the issue of how God can give us his message. Again and again he sends prophets, and tugs at our hope; to little avail. The issue is not just historical, since the salvation history closely mirrors our everyday experience of up and down (or, even worse, just along a flat, uninspiring road). What can he do, to tell us of his love?
An image: my attempts to build a corner unit. There is a need to assemble it so that there will be supper, and also an instinct that I can assemble the thing. It looks easy, and a muddled process of sticking things together results two times out of five in an imitation of the real thing. There is a gradual process of revelation as the various bits and planks acquire a meaning and purpose that I can understand, though much remains mysterious. Then a pattern is provided to copy. So there is the humanity of Jesus, one like us in all things but sin.
Here the analogy breaks down, and we move into the realm of faith. But it is not the open credulity or frenzied legalism kind of faith. In Christ we have our pattern and model. On its own, this just makes it worse. Already we had such things in the law and the prophets, and that did not help. In Peter’s terms (see chapter 1), Jesus is still far off across a forbidding ocean of divine demand and human failure. One uniquely good man is not enough to express God’s message; so much is proved by what we did and do to that one good man and his memory. What else is needed?
In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All that came to be had life in him and that life is our light, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower. The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth … From his fullness we have, all of us, received, grace upon grace. No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
John 1:1, 3–5, 14, 16–18
After centuries of trying to tell us, God the Father decided to show us. Here is the incredible fact at the centre of our faith, that God himself has come to save in Christ. It is incredible on two levels. First, theology: what is the difference between Son and Father, why is the Son called ‘Word’, how are they both God, how can God become man, etc. These are all easy compared to the second level: why would God want to become one of us, hopeless, little betraying things? What a risk, and what a failure, because we did and do not receive him, but slay him on the Cross and in ourselves and each other. Why? We already have the answer, but it is almost too deeply threatening.
God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.
John 3:16–17
The Incarnation cannot be explained, because it is wholly gratuitous. There is no reason on earth for it, apart from you. But we can understand a little what it implies. Remember the Marcionites? Their key fault was to be associated with a group which could not accept that the Word had become flesh. Christ did not really hunger, sleep or suffer. He only pretended to do so, in order to teach us various things, such as the value of a noble steadfastness in the face of difficulty. He did not rise from the dead, because he did not die; he only seemed to. This suggestion is called docetism, from a Greek word meaning ‘to seem’, and the group tend to be called Gnostics, because they thought that Jesus had imparted a saving knowledge (gnosis, in Greek). This knowledge was like a set of passwords that would lead us to God past all obstacles, earthly and demonic.
What Gnostics could not stand was matter, especially bodies. Real reality, they would say, is spiritual, untainted by the flesh. There is no need to spell out the baleful influence of such thinking on Christian life, and sometimes even doctrine. Jesus said once, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matthew 26:42). The Gnostics went further and said that the flesh is bad, evil. Some went so far as to say that there are two powers: God, who made the soul, and a wicked demi-god who trapped us in flesh.
This is not Christian, and we shall see why in later chapters. The Incarnation affirms once and for all the Genesis message that the creation is good, is loved by God. The aim of Christ is not to free us from matter, but to free us for it. It is we who are alienated from ourselves, spirit and body. But, ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ (Romans 8:11).
The reason Gnostics found the Old Testament so difficult was that it is so earthy, so everyday. Pots and pans were not just boring, but revolting to them. The Incarnation says the opposite, that God delights to be with us so much that he became one of us. The Second Vatican Council put it like this (the full passage is given at the end of the chapter):
Christ the Lord, who is the ‘image of the invisible God’, worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved.
Gaudium et Spes, 22; the scriptural quotation is from St Paul, Colossians 1:15
In Christ, the invisible God found an image. God was invisible because he is beyond our imagining, but also because we have forgotten what he looks like. We have lost the image in ourselves. In Jesus, the words of God took flesh, in a practical demonstration. Our assumptions tend to play this down; we assume that at any moment, the divinity was on top. But to take the Incarnation seriously is to say that Jesus could have died at the age of four from yellow fever.
Has it ever struck you how little the Gospels tell us about the life of Christ? There have been plenty of novels and films to fill the gap: most of those in the first few centuries were written by Gnostics, silly stories about Jesus zapping his childhood friends (wish I could), and so were rejected by the Church. In the genuine scriptures of the New Testament we have two nativity stories, and that is it until Jesus is about thirty. There is only one exception, in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus goes missing on a visit to Jerusalem, and is found in the Temple, giving the learned priests a run