Jesus Christ: The Inexhaustible Treasure

Jesus Christ: The Inexhaustible Treasure | Hans Urs von Balthasar | From Prayer

In this way the person who prays within the Church is already sharing, at the level of being, in the mysteries of the object of contemplation and in the mysteries of the act of divine revelation. Not only may he behold these things from outside: he is privileged to experience them from within. He is privileged to understand that the Father's self-revelation in the Son, through the Son's descent into flesh, takes the form of a sacrifice of love in which the Son makes himself poor (2 Cor 8:9); through his total abandonment of
himself the Son becomes an unmistakable sign of the origin and nature of divine love, which thus glorifies itself.

Consequently the contemplative's gaze continually returns with great attention to the humanity of Jesus. It is the inexhaustible treasure entrusted to us by the heavenly Father. In a true sense he has "despoiled himself" (Jn 3:16) of him to whom he is always pointing: ipsum audite! Listen to Him! (Mt 17:5).

The Son is no floating interstellar body; he is the fruit of this earth and its history; he comes from Mary (who is the exponent of the Old Covenant and of all humanity) just as he comes from the Father. He is grace ascending just as much as grace descending; he is just as much creation's highest response to the Father as he is the Father's Word to creation. He is no God in disguise, acting "as if", simply to give us an example, like the teacher who has no difficulty in writing the solution on the blackboard because he no longer shares the difficulties of his toiling pupils.

No; He is the apex of the world in its strivings towards God, and he cuts a path for all of us, gathering up all men's efforts into himself' the pioneer, the spearhead. He can do this only by being "in every respect tempted as we are, yet without sinning" (Heb 4:15), by bearing our burdens as the scapegoat (Heb 13:11f), the Lamb brought to the slaughter, slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8 AV).

Thus he stands at the summit of heaven and earth. The fact that everyone "recognizes" him as the son of Joseph and Mary (which he himself acknowledges: Jn 7:28) is just as important as the fact that they all fail to recognize him and realize that he comes from above. The Messiah the Jews were looking for as an interstellar body, coming "out of the blue": "When the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from" (Jn 7:27). For them, the fact of Christ's human origin spoke against the authenticity of his mission. By contrast, the Christian will make this whole context the subject of his contemplation.

Here is man, sinless, because he has lovingly allowed the Father's will full scope in his life. Here is a man with an utterly free interior life under the most restricted and oppressive conditions, simply through from the sovereign self-consciousness he prayer, as we see displays in dialogue with his disciples and, even more, with his enemies. Here is a man whose love is perfect, although he often makes of others the same inflexible demands he makes of himself.

Here is the complete man; not a man who fits in with all and sundry, but a strong and distinctive personality, utterly unforgettable, whose words and deeds are unique and inimitable, whose influence on history is supreme. The perfect friend, the perfect leader, whose energy, however concentrated, never distorted his character, who always remained fresh and even childlike, with no false sophistication, loving children (a sure sign!) and commending their outlook on life to those who liked to think themselves "adult". He never reacts in a banal, predictable way; all that he does is original and creative.

Indeed, the gospels and the whole New Testament pulsate with "spirit", in the literary sense as well as the philosophical and religious sense. How empty and relatively poor in imagination, by contrast, are such writings as the Koran or the Speeches of Buddha—once one has the "feel" of them, one can make them up oneself!

Now of course, all these epithets are false to some extent; Liberalism applied them to the gospel in genuine admiration, but felt it had said all there was to say. But it is a fact that the believer, for whom Christ is the Son of God, mostly tends to skip over them in his haste to come to the divine.

Or else (which is even more perverse) he exaggerates them out of all proportion, so that they are no longer human attributes but pseudo-divine (Monophysite) monstrosities. We must not override the human sphere of the Lord in the gospels, even in our contemplative prayer; this would be to fail to see the seriousness of the incarnation, and it would make it impossible for the gospel to have any genuine historical influence in our time.

The Lord desires to be loved and taken seriously as man too; as a man he wants to inspire men and—why not?—arouse their enthusiastic discipleship.

There will be plenty of time to purify the flame, for the young disciples to acquire maturity, which is much easier than trying to transform an undernourished, rancid religiosity into genuine Christian faith. True holiness in the Church, with its influence on history, has always been connected with the straightforward endeavor to take the humanity of Christ seriously, and all the kitsch to be found in Christian life and Christian art arises from the failure to take it seriously. Why do we take the sacraments (which are human realities) so seriously, while we have so little awareness of the human world of Christ—the human side of his love and his commandment of love, for instance? Why do we pay so little attention to this commandment?

For the spread of Christianity depends (and always has) on our taking it absolutely literally, as the sense demands: "I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.... By this all men—all men!—will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

The disciples are never guaranteed that Peter's power of the keys and the institutional side of the Church will convince and convert people. But love can do so; and, wherever it has been taken literally, it always has done so. The saints who genuinely loved even succeeded in making the keys seem appealing and in reconciling those who were distrustful of them, for they are the keys to love and must be used in love.

We only have a right to describe the Church as the total sacrament of salvation provided we take the humanity seriously. For the sign-quality—the rite, the matter, the sanctifying word—is essential to the sacrament. And this is only the case because the whole Christ, with all he has done and bequeathed to us, has genuine, undiminished humanity.

Christ's perfect humanity is the efficacious sign revealing the Father, the language employed by the divine Word in hypostatic union in order to set forth the world of God to man. His humanity, in its totality, is made the vehicle of an even greater truth, an eternal and absolute truth.

What an ineffable dignity this imparts to our nature! What a source of joy, penetrating even to the dreary corners of everyday life! Christianity is not only truth from heaven mediated through human communication: it is the truth of man. it is not an unreal make-believe composed of ritual and mere commandments which has its validity "somewhere or other"—only not in prosaic everyday reality. Christianity is this everyday life as it is conceived by God and given to us.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:

• Love Must Be Perceived | Hans Urs von Balthasar
• Thirsting and Quenching | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• St. John of the Cross | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• Seeking Deep Conversion | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• The Confession of the Saints | Adrienne von Speyr
• Catholic Spirituality | Thomas Howard
• The Scriptural Roots of St. Augustine's Spirituality | Stephen N. Filippo
• The Eucharist: Source and Summit of Christian Spirituality | Mark Brumley
• Liturgy, Catechesis, and Conversion | Barbara Morgan
• Blessed Columba Marmion: A Deadly Serious Spiritual Writer | Christopher Zehnder

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) was a Swiss theologian, considered to one of the most important Catholic intellectuals and writers of the twentieth century. Incredibly prolific and diverse, he wrote over one hundred books and hundreds of articles.

Read more about his life and work in the Author's Pages section of IgnatiusInsight.com.