“We divide in thought what is undivided in nature”
–Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God
As part of a class assignment, I was asked to submit a written reflection to the following question.
What most appeals to you, Jesus’ humanity, or divinity?
As the professor was walking out the door, I asked him, “Do we have to choose, one over the other?” He answered, “Yes.” His assignment was due in two weeks, and this is a version of what I wrote:
God is not divisible.
I am unable to offer a response to your line of questioning. Jesus is not “part God and part Man,” …available to me as an object that I can break apart then pick and choose which most appeals to me. This is a path toward imagining a (false) god created in my own image. I will only contemplate holding the mystery of Jesus’ humanity and divinity as “both/and.”
Rather, what is most appealing to me; is to experience daily life “aware and receptive” of God’s Holy Spirit living in me, and I in it. And to recognize my identity “With Christ, In Christ, and Through Christ” as a reality and invitation to participating within the divine life of the Most Holy Trinity. My spiritual path is to seek and patiently await God’s Wisdom and Understanding in the joys and hardships of my life.
As it turned out, the professor was absent for the next class and never picked up our reflections. I did not learn his purpose for the assignment.
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Granted, the mystery of the Incarnation is difficult for our intellect. It takes conscious effort to suspend the mind’s intent on judging, controlling, and analyzing what it means to be fully human and fully divine (at the same time). Even when Jesus walked the earth, most of his contemporaries saw him only as a human being and missed who he was and most of them were religiously observant people.
So much depends on our idea of God. Our intellectual tendency is to split and divide Jesus’ humanity and divinity but, doing so has consequences. No idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. When we are unable to balance humanity and divinity in Jesus, we are unable to balance it within ourselves distorting our own identity.
Jesus came to model the full integration for us and, in effect, told us that Divinity looked just like him – while he looked ordinarily human to everybody! Consider, (1 Cor 15:45-47)
The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
As Christians, when we fail to honor the incarnate mystery of Jesus “fully human, fully divine” at the same time, …we fail to honor that same mystery inside ourselves or in one another.
Let us not desecrate our own natural unity by dividing ourselves, soul against body, as if the soul were good and the body as less so. If the two are separated from one another, we can no longer self-identify ourselves as a subsisting reality made in the image and likeness of God.
Suggested Reflection
An all-loving God who only desires union with man would not hesitate to offer himself to bring us back to Him.
Imagine what society, your belief systems, and your personal life would be if Jesus; fully man, fully divine had never come to earth.
What do you think would be different?
The featured image was done with egg tempera on watercolor paper in the style of manuscript illumination.
ps. My resources for this reflection is from Scripture, the Catechism and “The Naked Now, Learning to See as the Mystics See, by Richard Rohr.
