Truly, Fully, God! Truly,
Fully Man! What a tremendous combination! Jesus Christ – Son of God. Son of
Mary! So I surmise that if Jesus had wanted to enter the Olympics surely He
would have walked away with every gold medal and would have broken every record! No-one could have had
better qualifications than He, “In him, in bodily form lives divinity in all its fullness and in Him
you too find your fulfilment, in Him who is the head of every sovereignty and
ruling force.” So wrote St. Paul in his Letter to the Colossians,(2.9).
Everything we know about
Jesus leaves us with the firm impression that on those occasions when He drew
upon His Almighty Power it was to lead people to believe that He was ‘From
God.’ Often a surge of compassion moved Him to act miraculously to help those
in distress. Never did He entertain the ambition of being an all- conquering
warrior.
Jesus refused to draw upon His almighty power
to make life easier for Himself. He Himself made the frailty of His humanity
bear the weight of His divinity! St.
Matthew describes to how, as a prelude to His Public Ministry, Jesus was
tempted by the devil three times – twice with the taunt, “If you are the Son of God…” and finally, “If you fall at my feet and do me homage I will
give you all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour,” (Mtt. 4).
Jesus would have none of this!
When He was nailed in
agony on the cross the Chief Priests,
the Scribes and the Elders mocked Him, “He saved others, He cannot save Himself. He is the King of
Israel; let Him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in Him,” (Mtt.27.41).
Though healthy Jesus did steal moments for Himself to relax after daily
spending hours teaching crowds of people, ministering to the sick, walking from place to
place. This exhausted Him. Who would
blame Jesus for sleeping in the fishing
boat while his friends battled with the turbulent waves?
Interesting that His
relatives were anxious about how much He
was being pressured by His work! “He went home again, and once more such a crowd collected
that they could not even have a meal.21 When his relations
heard of this, they set out to take charge of him; they said, 'He is out of his
mind,'” (Mk.
3. 20).
St. Paul would have us
understand, “The
mind of Christ Jesus ...who being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But
He EMPTIED Himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are,”
(Phil. 2.5)
I personally am deeply
moved when I read of what happened when He healed the woman who had endured the
wretchedness of so many years of internal bleeding. She touched His garment
expecting this would be sufficient to heal her. We are told Jesus felt healing
power going out of Him. (Lk. 8.46). I
see Jesus as being ‘emotionally drained’ as He gave to people His full
attention, loving them with all His heart – the heart of a divine person! Jesus
alone knew how much the whole of His
caring ministry was taking out of Him!
In so doing, He, the Divine
Messiah, brought about redemption, salvation, peace with God for
our human family ...His human family.
Every moment of His life on earth
Jesus would have been aware of what it meant to share in the turmoil of
our human family and to share in the tranquility of the Blessed Trinity.
To me it is no surprise that Jesus offered to His disciples a peace that
the world could not give them. And yet
He required of them that they should deny themselves, take
up their crosses daily and follow Him. By the Incarnation Jesus shares the
fullness of our humanity, by the grace of God we share something of
His divinity.
For Jesus and for us a truly mysterious brew of enjoying the Peace of
Jesus that is 'out of this world' and
carrying the Crosses of Jesus that are
very much part of this world!
Peter Clarke, OP
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