CHAPTER 2

WHO WILL BREAK THE CYCLE OF DESTRUCTION?

There have always been calamities and crises. Over the ages, the tides of human brokenness have come in and gone out. Sometimes there have been periods of flourishing when the inner darkness has seemed less stark, then there were times when our dystopian woundedness has shown itself more clearly.

On and on it goes, round and round in circles, seeming to have no end. People attempt to chronicle human history, and usually end up with a catalogue of great leaders and personalities who have massively influenced their times; historians describe cultures and world-views which were dominant for a time and then were replaced. Although there seems to be progress in certain ways, the age-old round of frustrated human efforts carries on.

Who will break the cycle?

The cause of the brokenness

Let’s define the cause of this brokenness. We human beings were made in the image and likeness of God. He gave us his friendship and free will so that we may deliberately grow and mature until we are capable of living for ever in the family of God, the Trinity. We broke that arrangement by choosing to plot our own path rather than be guided by our Father. We separated ourselves from him who alone is our guide, and in that way wounded ourselves grievously. Now we are incapable of achieving our destiny, and are trapped in the endless efforts to create alternative destinies, which never satisfy.

The answer to the question of who can break the cycle is: only God can repair our broken hearts, and it can only happen when we freely consent to follow the path of restoration that he lovingly marks out for us.

Of great heroes

Each nation has its heroes; some people have dominated whole regions of the world. They fascinate us, and we always learn of their vices as well as their virtues. Not one of them has proved crucial to humanity achieving its destiny.

Only one man is crucial to our healing. Jesus of Nazareth. All history revolves around him. All humanity is centred in him. The majority of people on earth may proclaim this person or that as the greatest, but Jesus is the “way, the truth and the life” of the world. As he said: “no one can come home to the Father except through me” (John 14: 6).

All other human enterprises are vain and wash up like tiny waves against the colossal person of Jesus. He is God’s plan for our return to his family.

These writings are an attempt to illustrate the phenomenon of Jesus, the saviour of the world.

 maybe here another chapter????

The person of Jesus

Who is Jesus? He is God the Son who has become a human being. There has never been a human being like him. He is the first complete, unbroken human being.

It is difficult enough for us to understand what is going on in humanity. It is far more difficult to grasp the inner workings of God. But God has shown us that the one God is a Holy Trinity, a perfect union of three divine persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each person is infinitely unique and individual, yet they are so bonded in perfect infinite love that they live within each other and act as one. They are Three, but they are unity. They are love.

Some scientists ask us to imagine the beginning of the universe as a Big Bang, where a black hole of infinite dense matter exploded outwards forming the universe as we know it. First of all, there is no infinite material entity, black hole or otherwise, but the Big Bang image conjures up forces of such power and scale that our minds are blown. That image would be a speck of dust compared with the eternal Trinity, one God who truly is infinite. We are incapable of comprehending God with our human minds; but we draw out some understandings from the worlds God created, and the revelations which he has given of himself.

When Moses encountered God at the burning bush, he asked his name. The reply was “I AM”. The family of the Trinity is the ultimate being, uncreated and all-powerful. It is comforting to grasp that all they are and do is love. The love of God is so generous that it pours love out in all that he creates. Everything that exists is created by him. This truth is borne out in our experience of ourselves whom God created in his own image and likeness: we long for love and we seek family life.

The Son from within the Trinity became a man in order to reveal God to us, and to lead us into the embrace of the Father. He is Jesus. We call this the Incarnation, when God became flesh. Let us look more closely at the unique person of Jesus.

The psychology of Jesus

How did Jesus’ mind work? How did he function as a person? We are dealing here with a mystery so outside of our grasp that it is incapable of describing in human terms. Yet we are given the historical records of Jesus’ life so that we can learn about him and understand him to some extent. Furthermore, our faith makes us thirst to know him as fully as possible.

St Paul in Philippians 2: 6 tells us that he was divine, but laid aside his godhead to become as we are. Let me suggest a way of explaining that.

Imagine you became a fish. There are two ways of doing that. Firstly, you can keep your human mind and have a far greater understanding of your situation than any other fish. You would learn a lot, but it would always only add to what you already know. Looking above the water, you would know what the sky is and the stars. You would recognise people on the shore and be aware of threats within the water itself. You would not be a real fish, just a human being who has taken the form of a fish.

Or, secondly, you could put aside your human mind and know as fishes know. Then there would be no prior knowledge or warning of danger; you would have to learn from scratch and learn fast. In some way which only God knows, Jesus did the second. He had a human brain which had to learn everything as we do.

The difference between Jesus and every other human being (with the exception of his mother, Mary) was that his humanity was as complete as that of Adam and Eve at the beginning of human creation. It was not impaired by original sin. The first human beings did not know everything and had to grow and mature, but they had an intimate connection to God. As they knew him and conversed with him, their development was to be timely and smooth. Through the original sin, they severed that connection and so wounded our humanity that all the evils we know have developed.

In turning from God, they condemned themselves and their descendants to disfunction. Jesus did not inherit this disconnect from our Father as we do. He was a normal human being as God intended. We are the ones who are abnormal. [Here refer to chapter in book about original innocence of Adam and Eve]

As a baby he had to learn through making sense of his experiences, and learned to relate to other people. A baby’s first relationship is normally with its mother. He senses her and grows to trust her. In the case of Jesus, he also sensed his Father, God. This would have been in an infantile way, but gradually developing. As a baby develops a sense and intimacy with its mother, Jesus sensed and gradually became intimate with the Father.

As he grew, he would have learned the nature of things profoundly due to his converse with the Father who would be helping him to increasingly penetrate to the depth of things. We should not be surprised that it took him only three days at the age of 12 to learn all that he could from the leading teachers of Israel in the temple of Jerusalem. That would have taken the best of us years.

His explanation to Joseph and Mary for his unexpected failure to accompany them home was that he had been about his Father’s business. It is obvious that he was growing in understanding of who he was, The Son of God. And the growth of his intellect and emotions were on a scale exponentially greater than ours in our fallen state.

As he listened to the scriptures in the synagogue, he would have quickly realised that they spoke of him personally. He would have gradually come to understand what this meant, but the details of how this was to work out each day would have only been revealed to him through continuous conversation in prayer with his Father. We see several instances of his going aside to seek his Father’s guidance as when he was about to select the 12 apostles.

It is impossible for us to know how his divine and human minds interacted, but it seems to be the case that they functioned separately until after his passion and death. It is futile to speculate about this immense mystery.

What is striking is his remaining in relative obscurity until the age of 30. To us it seems counterintuitive that working as a carpenter in an ordinary town would be seen by his Father as the ideal environment for him to penetrate to the great depths of meaning in our existence. But we are dealing here with uncorrupted wisdom at work.

Jesus stepped into all our brokenness

At the age of 30 he had comprehended human beings and our world profoundly. Only one aspect of our existence will have remained closed to him – sin which is the separation from God. He would have experienced dreadful pain as he witnessed the pain of broken humanity in his brothers and sisters that he loved so deeply, but the inside of sin he did not know. In order to break the hold of sin, he had to make the decision to enter into that darkness and, without sinning, become sin as St Paul states: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5: 21).

We are faced here with an awesome mystery. But that is what he was doing when he went to the Jordan to be baptised by John the Baptist. John, recognising Jesus as the sinless one, protested that Jesus did not need baptising. Jesus replied:  “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” (Matthew 3: 15). In this way Jesus opened himself up to all the sin of the world in order to take it away and bring rightiousness to us (See John 1: 29-34). He began to know all our sins from inside through personal experience as we know them.

The immediate result was that he received in his humanity a fresh inpouring of the Holy Spirit to assist him, and we are given a glimpse of the delight of our Father as his “beloved Son” began to draw all us human beings into himself to save us – the Father longs for our return. The next result was that the Spirit led him into the desert for 40 days to begin to experience our temptations and remedy them.

Jesus knew all people

There are many instances of some people who have intuitive understandings. Examples are: telepathy in identical twins, the rare ability to predict the future, and an uncanny ability to understand others. These are remnants of the spiritual gifts lost at the fall of mankind. In Jesus they were fully active.

He knew people. St John gives us an instant of this in Jesus’ meeting with Nathaniel (John 1: 43-51). Jesus proves to Nathaniel that he knew him by telling him what was going on in his mind before they had even met. This astonished Nathaniel so much that he immediately moves from being a sceptic to trust Jesus fully, and to sense his divinity. John later tells us that Jesus  “knew all men and needed no one to bear witness to a man, for he himself knew what was in man” (John 3: 25).

What we are witnessing here is human love and knowing in its uncorrupted beauty. We should all have experienced this if the Fall had not happened. I suspect that each of us would have been gifted with it in our own unique way. In heaven we will know and love everybody in all our beauty. At present we are in the state of hiding from each other, as Adam and Eve did on experiencing their nakedness. Jesus is the perfect human being and came throughout his life to know each of us intimately as only a true lover can.

By the time of his crucifixion, Jesus had come to know and love every human being that ever lived or would live, and he knew us from the inside. He felt all your experiences personally: your fears and hopes and particularly your guilt. It was us who hung on the cross unawares, contained in his loving heart. What Jesus was doing was opening up to our Father each of our wounded hearts trustingly, knowing that our Father would forgive and remedy each and every sin as it was humbly exposed in trust.

It was as a human being that Jesus saved us. His godhead was still laid aside. Here was perfect natural humanity struggling tenaciously to accept and drain the chalice of iniquity perpetrated by broken humanity in every dreadful detail, all the time clinging to the Father in trust that our Father would heal us. We cannot imagine how this process crushed Jesus. We get a glimpse of the agony of it in his sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane as it was reaching its crescendo, and his terrible cry from the cross,  “My God, why have you deserted me?”

Our part in the redemption of humanity

Our Father created us to be like him in all his splendour of righteous activity. He would not insult us by denying humanity the right to retrace the crazy steps that we have taken away from his love. Here, Jesus, the Son of God, after laying aside his godhead to be the Son of Man became, in his perfect humanity, our saviour. Here was not a miracle which contradicts the natural order, but the natural order restored.

This whole plan for our redemption was something that had to be learned by Jesus. It must have perturbed him as he began to comprehend the prophecies of his suffering and death. St Paul tells us that  “During his life on earth, he offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard.  Although he was Son, he learned to obey through suffering” (Hebrews 5: 7).

We can see Jesus developing in the gospels. Look how his honeymoon period in the first months of his public ministry gradually turned sombre as he realised that, despite the signs and wonders he gave and the profundity of his preaching, people were incapable of truly following him because of sin. For a while, he even hid himself because they were only interested in miracles or wanting to make him establish an earthly kingdom. It must have been a very lonely feeling as he grasped that he would have to deal with our sin on his own in the agony of his passion and death with only one human helper, Mary.

The new age

The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus is the central event in human history. It was the moment when all history turned round. The age of human disfunction is ended and the age of the humanity living in the Spirit of God has begun.

At the Last Supper, Jesus emphasised to his people, who dreaded losing him, that he had to depart from them physically and go back to the Father so that he could return among us spiritually. They would know him in a more immediate way – in their hearts. Now we know him in that same way. This equips us for the next stage of redemption.  [Here refer them to the chapter in book about knowing Jesus]

Once he had played his part and broken the power of all sin, it would be the time for us to play our part as his sisters and brothers, the children of God who reclaim the wholeness and restoration of humanity. For that to happen we needed to relate to him in a more mature way. We need to joine in his very life, by letting the Spirit reveal Jesus to our hearts.

Jesus had drawn all of us into himself to redeem us. Now it was time for us to draw Jesus into ourselves to complete the redemption. The final age in the story of humanity began – the restoration of all things in Christ with our full participation. Jesus called this process his “Kingdom”.

The functioning of the Kingdom

In the Trinity there are three absolutely individual persons. At the same time they are one: they live and move and have their being within each other in the mystery of infinite and immaculate love. The Kingdom of God functions in a similar way. Each human being is required to individually take up their role, and, at the same time, they become united in a mysterious communion formed by the Holy Spirit.

God revealed this new two-fold dynamic when the Spirit descended at Pentecost: All those who gathered to hear the apostles heard in their own individual languages the one message spoken by the apostles in Aramaic. God was beginning to replace our hopeless division with his gift of unity.

We are told that on that day about 3000 people “were added to their numbers” (Acts 2: 41). The process they went through was “to repent, be baptised in the name of Jesus”, and  “receive the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2: 38). This was a two-way process. Each had to turn away (Repent) from their previous orientation and give their trust to Jesus; then the Holy Spirit would come to them to empower them to live in communion sharing the life of Jesus.

We are being formed into the Mystical Body of Jesus

The Holy Spirit had formed the physical body of Jesus in the womb of Mary. He is now forming the spiritual (mystical) body of Jesus in the womb of the world. He is drawing mankind together into one mature humanity. This process was first given the name, “the Gathering” using the Greek word “ekklesia”. The English term for it is “Church”.

Jesus said that the Church is like a tiny mustard seed which grows into the biggest bush where all the birds of the air find a home. The Church is growing and developing through time. As the mustard tree sends its tap root burrowing deep down into the nourishing earth, the tap root of the Church is people burrowing down into intimacy with Jesus. 

Just as Jesus called his apostles individually, he calls us individually to know him. The more we grow in his friendship and are inspired by him, the more we mature into who we individually really are, and the renewal of the face of the earth advances. It is a process which is developing over time. We should not be surprised if some of the development seems slow; the Spirit works deep on the interior of humanity, not superficially.

God writes straight with crooked lines

We should not be surprised if there are parts of his work which seem as yet incomplete, because the breath of the Spirit acts through human brokenness. All genuine Christians are sinners who will constantly get things wrong. Our work will always be imperfect, but God accepts our efforts when we try our best, and uses them as stones in the building of perfect humanity.

Anybody looking for perfection in the Church is bound to be disappointed, but if we look at the Church over time and its influence on the development of humanity, we will see the steady progress that God is directing using very unfinished persons. They will also find a continuous flowering of heroic holiness. The frequency of its occurrences are unequalled outside of the Church – proof that here is the epicentre of God’s activity in the universe.

The spectrum of how people are connected to Jesus

We have to see a spectrum of how people are connected to Jesus. At one end, there are the people of good will that the angels sang of at Christmas who do not know Jesus personally, yet, in pursuing goodness as they perceive it, they are in a hidden way uniting themselves to him. They will recognise him when the time comes for the scales to fall from their eyes.

At the other end of the spectrum there are the great saints who shone with divine life. The spectrum is never static, always developing as the Spirit, who blows where he wills, is intricately fashioning the new humanity. [Here refer to section in book about Jesus being the only way to the Father]