The dispute between the Catholic Church and the (Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East has been mended. According to the
"Common Christological Declaration" signed on November 11, 1994, by both Pope John Paul II, and Patriarch Dinkha IV, which reads in part:
"The Word of God, Second Person of the Holy Trinity, became incarnate by the power of the Holy Spirit in assuming from the holy Virgin Mary a body animated by a rational soul, with which He was indissolubly united from the moment of his conception. Therefore, our Lord Jesus Christ is true God and true man, perfect in his divinity and perfect in his humanity, consubstantial with the Father and consubstantial with us in all things but sin."
From which perspective, I conjecture:
Doesn't the fact that the Logos needed the help of the Spirit imply that He had emptied Himself (kenosis) of the infinitude of his divine powers (not to say that He set aside his Divinity, He did not) so that He could become human and experience what it means to be and feel human? So that, as He grew up, Jesus did not always have access to the miraculous potentials of God, or else He would never have understood our limitations. But then, as He grew to understand and chose to grasp his vocation and mission to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, then his divine powers came into their fullness. And then, his identity was confirmed to Him, and became observable to those who knew Him. Up until that time, only in small ways, as hints, was his true identity known to Himself and to his Mother (who fully believed from the beginning).
At the Annunciation: an interesting idea
When the virgin Mary accepted her part in God's will, choosing obedience when she might have refused, she "balanced the books" that our original mother, Eve, had left with an indelible debit. By her simple obedience, she cancelled the original sin of disobedience, and thus conceived the Savior of the World. By this act, she crushed the head of the serpent who had tempted Eve in the Garden.
And this acceptance of the Divine Plan brought forth the salvation of each and every one of us, inasmuch as we have faith in her son, who grew up to be the promised Messiah, Jesus, and whom we acknowledge as the Son of God. Indeed, this is our debt of gratitude, which we owe to our spiritual Mother, Mary, and for which we offer our prayers through the Rosary. Thank you, Dear Mother Mary!
Hail Mary, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
This also is why the Church teaches that Mary was born without original sin, because by her agreement to cooperate with the Holy Spirit she erased her original sin for all time, eternally, as ratified by the Holy Spirit in eternity when the Logos was conceived in her womb. By her willing cooperation, Mary became the Mother of God and the first human born without original sin since the Fall.
Her agreement acted to effect, and to confirm, and to show the effect of being born free of original sin. As an act with eternal consequences, it also happened in eternity, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, and thus was outside of the normal constraints of chronology.
In this way also, Jesus was born fully human (and fully divine) but without sin, and therefore not compelled to sin and fall short of God's glory -- which, of course, it would be impossible for the Logos to fall short, because He is God.
As the New Adam, Jesus could say, not "the woman beguiled me, and I did eat," but "the woman freed me, and I was born." Can there be any better accolade for a daughter of Eve, than to be praised for having erased the first disobedience? No wonder she was crowned as the Queen of Heaven.
But what is "original sin"?
I think of it as a stain, left upon our human volition, as a result of our being born human, the children of Adam and Eve. (If you insist on saying that we are ascended from the apes, it hardly makes much difference. It was God who raised us.) The problem lies in the fact that we can't obey the good and right dictates of our own consciences. We know, from the teaching given us by society, what is right and what is wrong. And all too often, we choose the wrong, or we stray as near to it as we think we can get away with. It is the inevitable result of once having satisfied our baser desires, which always reminds us of the pleasure and advantages of choosing what it now suggests. But it need not be the result of our own choices, rather it is ingrained into our ancestral constitution and wired into our minds, from before our birth. It is like an addiction, as if we know the thrill of using a subtle but powerful drug, and just as destructive.
Yet all of this is not to say that we must always be slaves to sin. It is possible to break the addiction, or at least to weaken its hold on us. That is what the Saints have done, with the help of the grace of God. And yet, society always reminds us of how badly we behave, even as it tempts us, and then demands that we follow the right path without any mistakes. The Torah and the Jewish Bible are particularly good as an example to show us the way that we should go, and at the same time shaming us with the guilt of always falling short.
And it is at this point that I must shift gears and assert that it takes a strong degree of faith to find the strength to combat these innate, and basically selfish, tendencies. Mere philosophy does not have the capacity to both inform and train our moral sensibilities, and to forgive and refocus our desires when we fail. If you have no God, your own rationality, and rationalizations, become your god, and you will eventually fail to rise again. But if you have found the One, Best and True God, who has revealed Himself through the scriptures of the Jews and Christians, then you have found the source of the strength you need.
And so it falls to us to adopt the mindset that finds it possible to believe. First, that there is a God, who created us and cares about us. Second, that He gave us the scriptures as a guide for our lives, and it grieves Him when we don't try to follow. And third, that Jesus came down from Heaven to become a man, so that we could know that we are truly understood and forgiven. And finally, that Jesus and the Father, God, can give us the Holy Spirit, to dwell within our hearts as a hope and a promise. Thus we can renew our strength, and pick ourselves up to keep on trying until maybe we will overcome our original brokenness. In this way, we may be transformed into His image and likeness as we were originally created to be, when we were still in the Garden of Eden.
No comments:
Post a Comment