Jesus, a human person like us
Roger Lenaers is an elderly, wise Belgian Jesuit, author of books such as Another Christianity is Possible and Although there isn’t a God up there[1], written with intelligence and soul for those who want to go on being Jesus’ disciples without cutting themselves off from today’s world with its worldview, science and language.
Having devoted his life to teaching theology to young university students, he embarked on a different life at the age of 70, by then retired: he went to a small, lost village of 300 inhabitants in the Alps, in the Austrian Tyrol, to serve as its priest. A ‘lost’ village in a manner of speaking, because many of our large inhuman cities with their plush avenues and slums are even more lost.
So, guided by his own light, that is where the wise Jesuit went in search of light and freedom, which he found among the peaceful inhabitants of Vorderhornbach. There he breathed the air of the heights and the depths, the Breath of Life that breathes life into the Cosmos, the Spirit that moans and rejoices in the hearts of all beings. There he lived and coexisted, thought and wrote, preached and heard the message of Jesus right up to the age of 95. Using clear, simple words it was there that he formulated the fundamental keys to talk about and live another possible –and necessary– Christianity in this age of such deep cultural changes: a Christianity free of dogmas and outmoded beliefs, arbitrary interventions by a Supreme all-powerful God, special revelations and choices, virgin births and physical resurrections, miraculous exorcisms and cures, expiatory deaths and eternal hells, moral norms of another obsolete world, ecclesiastical institutions reminiscent of Medieval times.
It was there five years ago that he wrote the summing up book Jesus of Nazareth, a person like us?[2] The Spanish version Jesús,¿una persona humana como nosotros? was prefaced by Manuel Ossa and recently published and presented by José María Vigil and Santiago Villamayor. In it this elderly wise Jesuit, who for the last few months has been living in a care home for the elderly in Leuven (Louvain, Belgium), invites the reader to passionately and freely liberate Jesus from the mythological vestments of the Gospels, and allow him to emerge out of their background as a figure that inspires life and liberation for this day and age.
I would like to refer below to the question formulated by the title of the book: Was Jesus a human person like us? The fact that we are asking ourselves whether Jesus was a human like us reveals just where Christian theology is at in the year 2021, when the Earth is under a greater threat than ever as a result of the human pandemic, with humanity more riven than ever by haste and universal competition, which is more dangerous than Covid-19 with all its uncertainties and anxieties. This at a time when our news programmes should be opening with the most crucial –scientific, philosophical, theological– question of our time as we stand at this alarming crossroads: “How are we all of us together going to achieve a vaccine for this mad, suffocating universal competitiveness?” Lost in byzantine, scholastic questions, with apologies to byzantines and pre-scholastics. But that is where we are at, and the wise Jesuit is right to raise the question, to give back to the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth his prophetic fire, his subversive, consoling beatitudes, his Easter proclamation, his transforming potential for this poor old world of ours.
So, let us return to the question: Was Jesus a human like us? Just to understand it one has to go back many centuries. After 100 years of complicated, interminable arguments that today strike us as outlandish and which came in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon (451) about Jesus being made up of two natures (human and divine) and one person (divine), the 2nd Council of Constantinople (553) established that Jesus was a complete human being (body and mind), but not strictly speaking a “human person (hypostasis)”, because his centre and deep personal subject or his ultimate self was divine, “one of the Trinity”. And the Council assumed that the divine was essentially different from the human.
Roger Lenaers wants to restore sanity or common sense –cordiality or deep sensitivity, at the end of the day– to the way we understand Jesus, so that he makes us more human. However, I do not believe that he is entirely successful. Was Jesus like us? Yes and no, says Lenaers. I agree wherever he says yes, but not wherever he says no. And it is not because I am denying the obvious, namely, that all human beings are very similar, but absolutely unique at the same time, but because I think that the Belgian theologian, under a superficial, formal sameness, continues to imagine an essential and very deep distinctness between Jesus and all other human beings.
He does, however, go beyond the Council of Chalcedon and the 2nd Council of Constantinople, and that’s no small thing: Jesus was not a hybrid being with a dual nature (human and divine) whose “hypostasis” or subject or personal core was the “divine person”. “He was a human like us” (p. 158), and therefore had “the same needs, desires and reactions as we have” (p. 158). He was Homo Sapiens like us. I sincerely hope so.
But that is where the sameness ends. Lenaers asserts that Jesus is not located at the “same low evolutionary level as we are” (p.52). “We are no more than the missing link between Neanderthal Man and the human being as he was supposed to become at some point. With his way of being other, Jesus of Nazareth gives us an idea of what that future human being could be like.” (p. 68). So, for example: “a man like us must have had the same sexual needs as we have, but it seems clear [?] that he managed them differently from the average human being and was not determined by them, but internally free, with the same freedom he demonstrated with respect to money, appearances or the criticism of his adversaries (p. 158). “The human transcendence of Jesus consisted essentially of his being and living totally for others” (p. 162), which is “beyond our reach” (p. 162). Who lives, who can live “totally for others”?
A clear-cut conclusion that is going a bit too far: Jesus “was not a person like us” (p. 162). Sic. It is like throwing oneself off the top of an Alpine peak. So Jesus would have been Homo Sapiens, certainly, but perfect. How do we know that? That is where the wise Jesuit falters, because he restricts himself to saying that “human normality cannot account for the radiance manifested by Jesus” (p. 162).
Is not perfect Homo Sapiens a contradiction in terms? Are we not by definition the offspring, the wonderful offspring, the frail offspring of a basically unfinished, open, random evolution? Could anyone even imagine a human of our species with perfect intelligence, perfect will, and who is emotionally perfect, spiritually perfect…? Are we not defined by “I don’t do what I want to do and I do what I don’t want to do”, because of our limited brain, its congenital dysfunctions, inherited genetics, ecological and economic circumstances, received culture, accumulated means, our whole personal and collective history? And why aren’t we going to imagine that on a distant planet or on our own planet even within millions of years or in just 100 years’ time or less that there could be a human, trans-human or post-human species, more “human” –supportive and blessed– and therefore more “divine” than ourselves, including Jesus?
And why would we have to imagine a Jesus “miraculously” free of that constituent finitude of our species and all species? Can we reasonably imagine a Jesus who had never suffered grudges, bitterness nor resentment, who had never experienced envy, greed or pride, who had never faltered or become dispirited in his confidence, solidarity and hope? If that were the case, he wouldn’t be human. And I can only imagine him as a human person, made like all of us –each in his or her own way and with his or her degree of realization that no one can measure or judge from outside– of vibrant clay full of light and shade. Only in this way, and not because he was perfect or even the most perfect, could he go on inspiring me.
And because of the “Christian” culture that has shaped me and because of my personal history which I cannot erase nor wish to do so, I want to go on being inspired by Jesus, that strong, sweet figure, disconcerting as well as contradictory, who has been recorded in both the canonical and apocryphal gospels, and transmitted from one generation to the next, from goodness to goodness and from error to error down to the present day. So that humanity can rise up and walk towards the peace it seeks.
Aizarna (Basque Country), 17 January, 2021
(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)