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Jesus’ resurrection is a personal triumph
intended as
a permanent sign and personal guarantee.
The uniqueness
of Jesus Christ
By John Navone
n All the first Christians were Jews. In fact, this is so true that in the early Church the question arose about the possibility of a Gentile becoming a Christian. Cornelius, a Roman centurion of the Italian cohort stationed at Caesarea on the coast of Palestine, was sympathetic to the Jewish faith and customs. Following a vision, he sent for Peter who told him about Jesus Christ and baptized him and his household. This epoch-making decision of Peter to baptize a Gentile represents the inauguration of the Christian mission to the Gentiles (Acts 10).
Not only were all the first Christians Jews, but for decades before the first writings of the New Testament the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament) were the Christian Scriptures. The psalms were the prayers of the Jewish Christians. In all the Synoptic accounts of the death of Jesus, Jesus dies with a psalm on his lips. The prayers of Israel were the prayers of Christians.
The first Christians—all Jewish—believed that they were truly Jewish and that Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel. Jesus was God’s promised Messiah. His messianic mission to Israel was at the heart of his entire life story. What, then, led to the rupture between Judaism and the followers of Jesus?
One answer to that question is hermeneutical. The way that we interpret reality depends on the kind of person we are. The more endowed with intellectual, cultural, moral, spiritual and psychological gifts, the more equipped we are for understanding our human experience.1 Inasmuch as Jesus Christ, according to Christian faith, is the Son of God, a divine Person equal to the Father, he brought to his reading of the Jewish Scriptures something that no human person could bring. As the Son of the living God, Jesus was uniquely endowed to interpret the God-given meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. He understood them in their true and ultimate context: his heavenly Father. (There is no true understanding of anything out of context.) In that context, he truly understood himself to be the messianic fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures, of God’s promise to Israel. No other human being is/was existentially equipped with the authority to make such claim. He alone, Christians believe, is the divine Son whose connaturality with the divine Father enables him both to recognize and reveal the God of Israel for what he truly is: the Father of Jesus Christ, his Son.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus makes seven “I am” utterances which imply his uniqueness in human history and his equality to the God who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush theophany as “I Am who Am” (Exodus 3:14): the bread of life (John 6:35); the light of the world (John 8:12); the door of the sheep (John 10:7); the good shepherd (John 10:11); the resurrection and the life (John 11:25); the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6); and the true vine (John 15:1). Jesus’ seven “I am” utterances affirm that he is a divine person with a divine purpose in human history. In this context, he is the unique and ultimately authoritative interpreter of the Jewish Scriptures and the promises of his heavenly Father to Israel.
Jesus’ self-interpretation becomes a sign of contradiction and division for the community of Jewish faith. Those who accept his self-interpretation as the ground of their Christian faith become the primordial Christian community. For the greater part of the Jewish community, Jesus’ self-interpretation is both mistaken and blasphemous, a form of self-idolatry.
Jesus Christ is definitively the true offspring of Abraham (Matt. 1:1), however greater than Abraham (John 8:53). Among the descendants of the patriarch, he is even the only one to whom the inheritance of the promise comes in its plenitude. He is the offspring above all others (Gal. 3:16). It is toward the coming of Jesus that Abraham, from the time of his calling, labored, and his joy was to see that day through the blessings of his own life (John 8:56; Luke 1:54-55, 73).
The concentration of the promise to Abraham in one single descendant is the condition of a true universalism, which is also defined according to God’s plan (Gal. 4:21-31; Rom. 9-11). All those who believe in Christ can have a part in the blessings of Abraham (Gal. 3:14). Their faith makes of them the spiritual offspring of him who has believed and is from that time “the father of all believers” (Rom. 4:11-12). “All of you make only one in Christ Jesus. But if you belong to Christ, you are then the offspring of Abraham, inheritors according to the promise” (Gal. 3:28-29).
The Jesus of the Gospels does not speak as God spoke through the prophets, but in himself. Whereas in the Jewish Scriptures it is the word of another, the word of the Lord, which will last forever, Jesus says that his own words will not pass away, and will outlast heaven and earth (Mark 13:31). Whereas, in Judaism, “amen, amen” is the covenant response of the people to the Lord’s word, Jesus prefaces with it his own word. By inference, the man who speaks and acts as this man spoke and acted is not merely man—and the “I” focus should indicate that he is not a human person, one for whom such utterance would be blasphemous arrogance.
To appreciate the difference between our own personal experience as human persons and Jesus’ human experience as a divine person, beyond the measure of our experience, it may be helpful to consider the difference between his death and the death of a human person. Our existence as human persons is radically unstable. Jesus’ existence as a divine person is indestructible. His person is wholly present even in death, and he can by the Father’s creative power take up again that which by his own accord and as this man and by the Father’s creative power (to be the Good Shepherd) he lays down (John 10:17-18). No mere man can come back from the dead by his own uniquely communicated personal right (his “authority,” exousia, to use the biblical term).
Though Jesus truly died, the death of this man is not the death of a divine person. It is indeed the death of God, for this man is God, but it is the death of God by reason of the fact that all this man is united in a person who is God. But the one who genuinely exists has not had his existence or power diminished. Though the Son of God, true God, underwent death, his personal existence was not destroyed. The incarnation itself was not destroyed, even by death, which rent only this man in his weakness, not the divine person, and which affected the divine person really, but only as one with this vulnerable and temporary way of existing, in which the Servant role is paramount. The new covenant comes precisely in this, that the Lord and his Servant are one and the same person; the one God, without ceasing to be beyond his creation and his people, becomes one of them by personal communication. The Father sends his Son to be the perfect servant and thus re-form his people from within, communicating to their inmost being, “their hearts,” (Jer. 31:31; Ezek. 36:26-28) as a result of his own lived and transformed existence among them the divine Spirit of understanding and effectively holy action. The union which the Son effects transcends the formula of a personal covenant agreement between a spatially and temporally delimited people on the one hand and, on the other hand, the divine Sovereign of the whole earth (Exod. 19:3-6). All that made up the life of God’s people in the Old Testament is achieved in the lived experience of the one person who is both Servant and Lord.
Accordingly, the resurrection of Jesus is a unique personal experience. It is not a temporary sign, subject to a second call by death, as was the case with everyone whom Scripture says Jesus or his disciples raised from the dead. In Jesus’ case, resurrection is a personal triumph intended as a permanent sign and personal guarantee. By the act of his own authority as the shared authority of the Father Jesus returns to life with a dynamically renewed way of existing which he can personally guarantee in himself as Son. He has proved his relationship to the Father as the one who can personally guarantee everlasting life for all mankind.
The Gospel writers afford their readers a meditative sweep of the unique life-experience of Jesus the Son of God. He is not represented as one who searches for the truth, or who undergoes a conversion-experience by which he becomes what he simply was not before, namely the revealer, or who gropes to find the will of God and do it by human power.
In his struggle in Gethsemani, his human will recoils at the horror of death, for it is a serious privation of what is good and the ultimate human affliction. But he has himself predicted what must happen if a greater event is to take place. His prayer is conditioned on the power (dynaton, Matt. 26:39; Mark 14:35: what is able to be done) as the personal power of his Father, and on the personal plan (ei boule, Luke 22:42) of his Father. The conflict here is a conflict between this man and death, not between this man and God or between a human will and a divine will. Jesus speaks as this man in speaking personally to his Father about the conflict which looms before him. He personally defers to the Father. That his will is not at odds with God’s will is shown precisely by his deferring it to the Father’s will. Jesus acts as a person whose existence is defined in relation to another person. Jesus wills what is beyond the thing offered (“this cup,” namely, of suffering and death) to what will become possible by the Father’s intention and personally effected power, of which Jesus is the personal agent. Jesus, the Son of God, has no appetite for death, and would not drink the cup but for the Father’s personal purpose to be achieved through doing so. He does what he does not feel like doing or will to do of himself, and could do so freely only because he knows his Father in a uniquely familiar way (Matt.: “My Father,” Mark: “Abba”).
Jesus’ humanity is humanity totally possessed and creatively at work because he is a divine person, one who can point out to human persons the way for them to be and act simply by being and acting himself in a way of living and suffering which is quite concretely typical of theirs. Human nature, being “as human persons are,” is only fully realized by being most authentically as man the image and likeness of God. Without the spirit of God, the “likenesses” are dumb idols, not living persons; they have no breath of life. Without the genuinely personal presence and operation of a divine person in a uniquely experienced human life, the fully personal Spirit of God cannot be personally transmitted from within mankind—uniquely, by one—to other human persons. Unless there is one man who is really God, we cannot become truly Godlike through personal communication in our unique idiom, our way of being and doing, our “nature.” The “Good News” that is the Gospel is that mere human beings can become united to the one God, their Father, by a personal communication effected uniquely in their own way of being by the only authentic Son. The Christian revelation of the one God is the one God as personally communicated through one only Son, by whom God is personally and effectively one over all, the Father of all human persons (Rom. 3:29-30), and in the Son through whom one personal Spirit, coming as one by the personally enunciated love of both Father and Son, is communicated to them. No merely human person can effect this. The Gospel is lost if Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is the Good News is not himself accepted, even as this man, as being a divine person and effecting a unique communication by what he uniquely knew and willed, said and did.2
- Bernard Lonergan, S.J. rejected the hermeneutical principle of “The Empty Head” as the sine qua non for an objective or true understanding of a text. According to this presupposition, the text speaks for itself. The presuppositions or cultural background of the interpreter preclude an objective and true understanding of the text. One must, therefore, bring an “empty head” to the text for an objective and true reading of the text. Lonergan affirmed that there is no such thing as the presuppositionless understanding of a text or uninterpreted data. In fact, an hypothetically “empty head” would leave a person absolutely unequipped for understanding/interpreting any text or human experience. It is clear that, in this context, religious education is indispensable for a true understanding of Scripture and the Christian tradition.
- Jesus’ human operations cannot be measured by our experience as mere human beings. His “likeness” does not mean egalitarian identity. Though Jesus spoke the language human beings speak, no one spoke as he spoke (John 7:46)—for no one knew as he knew. The measure of the truth of Jesus’ humanity is the correspondence between what he uniquely said and what he uniquely knew—the correspondence between what he said or knew and what mere human beings say or know. We cannot read our own personal experience as human persons into the unique personal experience of Jesus Christ.
Reverend John Navone, S.J., is professor of theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. He has written scores of articles for various publications, and is best known for his contributions to narrative theology. The author of thirteen books, his most recent is Enjoying God’s Beauty (The Liturgical Press, 1999). His last article in HPR appeared in the August-September 1999 issue.
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