Why did God become man in Jesus Christ - Essay Example

Why did God become man in Jesus Christ? God became man in Jesus Christ for reasons both comprehensible and incomprehensible to human logic. This paper envisages searching for the comprehensible reasons involved and experiencing the sublime and divine signs that lead to the incomprehensible part of it. The coming of Jesus Christ, the son of God and yet a mortal in body and flesh has been an event, a divine intervention, unparalleled in human history. According to St. Athanasius, it was to remove corruption from the human creed by traversing the mortal path of death to resurrection that the son of God became man, the perishable body that is prone to all those very corruptions that were to be removed.1 St. Athanasius has elaborated this point through the following words, in the second chapter, The Divine Dilemma and Its Solution in The Incarnation, of his book, On The Incarnation: The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection.2 How the death of Jesus Christ, as a man, could become an act of redemption for all human beings is further explained by St. Athanasius.3 It is revealed that “in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.”4 And this became the completion of a circle that started when man was banished from the Garden of Eden with the cure of death fallen upon him. And this is why as Corinthians 15:22 says, “in Adam, all die” but in Jesus, all resurrect. 5 Such an intervention by God became imperative just because man had once “shared the nature of the Word” but the same man was now the slave of corruption, made so by the “deceit” of the devil.6 As the second coming of Jesus as indicated in the Messianic prophesy, is to impart the “final death blow” to Satan, this second coming in all possibilities will not be in the form of man again.7 The Revelation 001:007 of the Bible has made a record of this second coming and has said, “behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, including those who pierced him.”8 From the allusion to the clouds, it is clear that Jesus is not coming the second time as a man, a mortal. Hence it has to be concluded that only the first coming of Jesus is the first and last instance in which he is coming as a mortal. This is the real rarity of the situation. It is in this backdrop that this paper likes to theorize that God becoming man in Jesus Christ is an act undertaken by God as the last chance of redemption for the human kind. This is so also because in all the depictions of the second coming, there is no allusion to redemption and salvation. According to Lewis, God became man so as to help humanity become one with the nature of God.9 The “voluntary nature of Christ’s death” also is supposedly an indication that his mortal life as a man was different from the lives of other men.10 By being born to a virgin and by choosing his death as if it was inevitable, Jesus has revealed enough miraculous signs regarding the importance of his death and his being God and man at the same time. When Jesus said, “I and the Father are one”, in John 10:30, the very same fact is alluded to.11 All these show that though being a mortal, Jesus was not comparable to other mortals at all. This distinctness of the mortality of Jesus becomes more meaningful when it anchors itself in the notion of resurrection. And this is why St. Athanasius has observed that “through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection.”12 The limits of human knowledge are considered by St. Athanasius as yet another set of reason why God had to become man in Jesus.13 According to this point of view, Jesus Christ was a reminder of God, sent in the form of a mortal. This is why it is said, “God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law."14 Jesus showed an example that proved the high level of virtues that men were capable of having. All the same, it was also reminded that humans had a responsibility to act keeping in mind the likeliness that he has with God, and this is what Philippians said about Jesus: Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also bath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father The way Jesus had to go through all the phases of life as ordinary men do and also the way in which he was tempted just like how ordinary people are tempted, are all indicative of the responsibility that each human being has to work for his own atonement. But it has to be remembered that for Jesus, “his body was […] not a limitation, but an instrument, so that He was both in it and in all things, and outside all things, resting in the Father alone.”15 This can be considered as a model to all humans to surpass the limitations of their body and its petty emotions like selfishness. In this way, God was finding a possibility in Jesus Christ that even His own tools of teaching could not accomplish. This dilemma faced by God Himself is what gives the greatest meaning to Him becoming man in Jesus Christ. He wanted to deal with his creations in his own image, on their own terms, in the backdrop of their failure to seek salvation. In the Jewish religious theology, where God had always been a distinct entity from humans, the risk of sending the Son of God as a weak mortal could not be imagined. It is the ambiguity that surrounds the existence of Jesus Christ as a man that would provide him as a savior to the whole world. The dichotomy of death and resurrection had a strong element of faith associated with it. To believe in the possibility of a resurrection is indeed an act of hope. In this way, Jesus provided an example of hope to the whole of humanity. Banishment of death along with the revelation that a mortal was possible even in the realm of divinity, were the main lessons that came out of Jesus-the-man phenomenon. It was also revealed that the incomprehensible and “invisible” character of God was given a facelift and brought closer to the common man through the happening of Jesus Christ as a man. God becoming man in Jesus Christ is also an unvoiced declaration by God that humans were his favorite off springs. The knowledge that Jesus took the resemblance of humans rather than any other element itself is highly inspiring. It can have the potential to raise the level of human atonement. But all the above-mentioned aspects would also reinforce the belief that God becoming man in Jesus Christ was a last resort as far as salvation was concerned. It is in this fag end attempt to help humanity achieve salvation that the help of miracles were sought. There were enough visible powers in Jesus to show that He was God but also enough pitfalls and drawbacks to prove that He was human. It is the rarity of this situation that prompts us to imagine that Jesus Christ was the last chance for atonement that was offered by God to the ordinary man. Jesus has been described by theologians as the “last messenger of God.”16 He is supposed to be speaking the “final word.”17 To correct the erring men, nothing would have been more effective than the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ succeeded where even God in His pure divinity had not succeeded, just because He Himself was man among men. It was because men were immersed in sin that the incarnation had a task of becoming the deliverer from sins. Until Jesus came, Satan was an abstract concept. But once He was persecuted by the society and the authorities, Satan got concretely defined in the minds of the masses. Everything, and everyone that was against Jesus came to acquire the image of Satan. In this way, Jesus not only brought God closer to human experiences but Satan as well and instilled a clear sense of good and evil in the minds of the people. This was a way to define sin and evil, as Jesus became the new reference point for that act. The purpose of incarnation was culminated in the death of Jesus Christ over the cross. The fact that Jesus, who had the ability to work miracles, did not use his powers to escape from the death on cross, again suggest that his death was intentional. Death was a prerequisite for resurrection. 18 The fact that Jesus did not age naturally once he attained his youth (because he was not allowed to) and did not die as an aged man is also crucial. By dying young, he was once again defeating the cycle of death which made it necessary that all human beings who have a normal life would die as aged persons. Last but not least, the extremely painful bodily experiences suffered by Jesus Christ linked him to the whole of humanity which had a constant preoccupation with pain, arising from sympathetic and empathetic mindsets. The pain thus became the common link between Jesus and the downtrodden. To conclude, God coming as man in Jesus Christ was to become the greatest communication possibility between God and men. His mortal life did not end with his life or with his resurrection but carries on its legacy into the present and the future. But as St. Athanasius has pointed out, humans will not be getting a second chance as that was provided by Jesus.19 Athanasius has seen with his Christian theological upbringing that in the second coming of Jesus, “he shall come not in lowliness but in His proper glory, no longer in humiliation but in majesty, no longer to suffer but to bestow on us all the fruit of His cause- the resurrection and incorruptability.20 This passage also rules out the second coming of Jesus as man and this is why it can be concluded that Jesus as man was the last chance imparted to humanity by God so as to realize their real spiritual potential. References Cloete, G.D., D.J.Smit and Gereformeerde Sendingkerk in Suid-Afrika, A Moment of Truth: The Confession of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1984. Rosado, August, The Serpent, the Seed and the Second Coming, Maitland, FL: Xulon Press, 2011. Saint Athanasius (Patriarch of Alexandria) and St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, Los Angeles: OrthodoxEBooks, 1996. Lewis, C.S., Mere Christianity, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009. Read More