Having reached the midpoint of this second half of the book, it may be helpful to take stock of where we have gone so far, and where we have left to go in that second half. After a chapter that both illustrated the importance of big-picture beliefs for innerworldly practices, and offered a summary picture of Christian big-picture beliefs, we launched into chapters on the theological virtues and particular elements of that Christian story. Chapter 11 on faith relied on Fides et Ratio to demonstrate how believing in answers to big-picture questions is the sort of thing human persons do, and explored how Christian faith as a theological virtue is a distinctive way of believing, based upon a Christian understanding of the way things are. Chapter 12 explained the important role that sin plays in the Christian story, and further examined the nature of human sin. Chapter 13 explained why the theological virtue hope is crucial given our human situation, and offered a brief synopsis of what the nature of the destiny it is that we hope for, namely, union with God in complete happiness.

Notice that so far we have presented the content of Christian faith and the nature of Christian hope. In other words, it should be more evident both why we are here, and where we are called to by God. We also saw how sin, as alienation from God, keeps us from that destiny. Sin is a main reason why what we are destined for is at present only a hope, rather than a present reality. Yet to this point there has been no attention given to how we get to our destiny from our broken sinful condition. We have explained the hole, or problem, we are in, and where we are called to. But there has been no discussion of any ladder to get out of the hole, or bridge to get us from this state to the next. This chapter begins that task, one that will continue over the following two chapters as well.

This bridge, if you will, is Jesus Christ. It is fitting to have a chapter on Jesus at the center of this half of the book, since Christ is literally the center of the Christian life. It is through Christ that we have the faith we have, that we are aware of the depth of our sinfulness, and have any hope of full union with God. It is also Christ who lifts us out of the depth of our brokenness and vivifies us to live virtuous lives centered on God, or, as St. Paul says, to “live in Christ” (e.g., Gal. 2:20, Rom. 8:2). Thus this chapter, which has two sections, explores the starring role of Jesus Christ in the Christian story. The first examines the theological question of what God accomplishes in Jesus Christ. The second attends more directly to moral theology and explores what God’s work in Christ has to do with how particular people live their lives today. It should go without saying, but will be said anyway, that writing a single chapter on who Christ is and how we live in Christ is akin to answering the question who are you? in one sentence. Interesting and accurate things can be said, for sure, but they will be far from the whole picture. The same can be said of this chapter.

It is tempting to begin this first half of the chapter by examining a question posed repeatedly in the gospels by Jesus: “who do you say that I am?” But in order to emphasize the moral importance of that question, such discussion is reserved for the second section below. Instead, this first section explores what God has accomplished through sending his Son Jesus Christ, and how Christ accomplished it. First, we will state succinctly the hole, or problem, that we people had gotten ourselves into that necessitated God’s action in Christ.It is C. S. Lewis who uses the term “hole” for the human situation of sin in his Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), a book that has influenced this chapter enormously. Of course, Lewis himself purports to be simply presenting the basics of the Christian story in his book (hence “mere” Christianity) and so this material is readily found elsewhere. For another succinct and penetrating exposition of the claims of this section, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 456–63, 595–623, 651–58. Second, we will examine what God becoming man in the incarnation achieved in response to that hole. Finally, the last part of this section will address the challenging but essential Christian claim that Christ “died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3).

The Hole We Had Gotten Ourselves Into

This brief part will simply repeat and slightly expand a claim made in chapter 12 on sin: the Christian story of God’s decisive action in Jesus Christ only makes sense if you have an adequate understanding of human sin. There can be no salvation if there is nothing we need saving from! The consistent witness of the Christian tradition is that God sent his only son in order to free people from sin, to reconcile them to himself. It is sin that alienates people from God, and thus sin which must be overcome in order to reunite, or reconcile, humanity and God into right relationship. Without an adequate understanding of this alienating sin, it is impossible to understand God’s saving action in Christ to overcome that alienation.

Sin is not simply something that happens to people, something that we fall into. It is something that we perpetrate. Our sinfulness is a stance we voluntarily adopt. It is a stance of resistance against God. Lewis describes sinful humanity as rebels who need to lay down our weapons.See Lewis, Mere Christianity, 56–57. The Christian claim about human sin is not simply that it is imperfection, or that there is room for improvement in all of us. Who could contest that? The claim, you recall, is that we tend to pridefully put ourselves first. As Lewis says, we “set up on our own as if we had created ourselves,” we try to be our own masters and we “invent some sort of happiness for ourselves outside of God” on our own terms.Ibid., 49 (pronouns have been altered to the first person plural). Even though people may not consciously understand their sinfulness as active resistance to God’s love and sovereignty, this element of pride is always at least implicitly present in our sin.

What is required for right relations to be reestablished with God, Lewis explains, is not simply some subtle change in direction in our lives. To continue the rebel analogy, it is not simply a change in how we fight or whom we target. It is a radical surrender, a laying down of our weapons. It is “unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will we have been training ourselves into [as a human race] for thousands of years.”Ibid., 57. This is what it means to repent, which you recall from chapter 12 is the first word spoken in the synoptic gospels when the kingdom of God is announced at the time of Jesus’s public ministry. Repentance is hard. It is a sort of death of an old self. In fact, given the sorts of persons that rebels like us have become, repentance is not even a feasible option for us without help. As Lewis explains,

It needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.Ibid. (emphasis added).

We now see why Lewis entitles this chapter in his book “The Perfect Penitent.” We are also ready to explain how God responded to humanity’s situation of being in the state of obstinate resistance to God.

The Incarnation: God’s Loving Response to Humanity’s Sin

The term incarnation derives from Latin and literally means coming “into flesh.” The Catechism calls the incarnation the “distinctive sign of Christian faith.”Catechism of the Catholic Church, 463. It is the belief that the ever-living and transcendent God became a human person in Jesus of Nazareth. Why this is the central event in the history of humanity, according to Christians, should be clear from Lewis’s depiction above of the hole we had gotten ourselves into. Prideful humanity had alienated ourselves from God, and needed to repent in order to be back in union with God, a union for which we are destined, and which is our complete fulfillment and happiness. However, the very pride that necessitated repentance also made such repentance impossible for us on our own. A perfect penitent was needed (who would not, ironically, actually need to repent for himself) to live out what we could not. And so God becomes a man in Jesus. He lives a life in perfect loving obedience to God his Father in order to reestablish right relationship between humanity and God (in other words to “save” or “redeem” humanity). “For our sake he [the Father] made him [Jesus the son] to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). This is what Christians mean when they profess together the Nicene Creed (the classic summation of their faith stated by Christians for centuries): “For us men and for our salvation, he [the Son] came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary and became man.”

What did the incarnation of God’s only begotten son as the human person Jesus accomplish? Before examining this question, we should note Lewis’s distinction between believing what God accomplished in Christ, and understanding how what God accomplished in Christ works. The former is necessary for Christian faith. The latter is not. Lewis uses a helpful example to illustrate the difference.See Lewis, Mere Christianity, 54–55. When you are hungry, you know you need to eat, and that if you eat you will be satiated. Eating when you are hungry is necessary to live. It is not necessary, however, to understand why it is that eating satiates our hunger. Lewis observes that we now have a theory about how food provides vitamins for our nourishment. Long before people understood what vitamins were, however, they ate and sustained themselves. Even today there are plenty of people who have never heard the term “vitamin” and do just fine! What is necessary is to eat. Of course, understanding how eating sustains us may enable us to eat more healthily, and so such knowledge can be useful. But it is not necessary in order to actually live well.

Lewis says the same is true of understanding the theology of the incarnation. Christians have always professed, even before the words of the Nicene Creed were formulated in the fourth century, that for us and our salvation the son of God came down from heaven. He died for our sins and reconciled us to God in fullness of life. Affirming that this happened is fundamental to Christian faith. Understanding how and why it worked to save humanity, however, is not. Nonetheless, understanding this further may help us in living our lives in response to it, so we turn to that task here.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers four reasons why “the Word became flesh” in Jesus Christ (John 1:14).See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 456–60. The four reasons given here appear in 457–60, (italics original). The four are actually mutually affirming; in other words, they are four different claims about the same event, each of which on closer examination actually entails the others. Listing them may help us better understand the incarnation. First, the “Word became flesh for us in order to save us by reconciling us with God.” Jesus is the “Lamb of God,” who “takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). Jesus takes away human sin by overcoming humanity’s alienation from God, and that is what reconciles us with God. Second, the “Word became flesh so that thus we might know God’s love.” God’s saving act in the incarnation is the perfect revelation of God’s love for us, since “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, that we might not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Indeed, the fact that God became a person to save us reveals that God loved us first, reaching out to reconcile us to himself even though we were obstinate in sin (Rom. 5:5–12; 1 John 4:19). Third, the “Word became flesh to be our model of holiness.” Christ not only taught this love—“love one another as I have loved you”(John 15:12)—but more importantly lived out this love most perfectly in his sacrificial death for humanity—“no greater love has man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends”(John 15:13). Finally, the “Word became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature’ [2 Pet. 1:4].” In other words, God became a person to enable human persons to know the fullness of life that only God (who is love) lives to the fullest. As the early church fathers were fond of saying, God became man so that men might become gods.See Ibid., 460, for a sampling of quotations from Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Augustine on this point.

The irony in this last claim should be clear. The origin of human sinfulness is a prideful striving to become like gods. Yet fullness of life in union with God, understood radically as a very partaking in God’s nature, is exactly what God has been leading us to all along. Thus, on the one hand we pridefully exalt ourselves to become like gods, seeking happiness on our own terms, while actually alienating ourselves from God and the very happiness we truly seek. On the other hand, God sends his only son who “humbled himself,” “being born in the likeness of men,” “obediently accepting death, death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6ff.), precisely to make us “partakers in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), which is the fullness of life tasted in this life and known fully in the next. In sin we work against the very happiness and fulfillment we seek. In the incarnation God makes what we seek possible through the self-giving love that constitutes fullness of life.

Thus, in the incarnation God accomplishes something. God becoming man in Jesus Christ is essential in enabling humanity to once again be able to live in right relationship with God, a relationship we had spurned in our pride and were unable to restore on our own. Christ restores it. Through living in Christ, humanity is once again able to live in the self-giving love that constitutes fullness of life in union with God. All humanity, conscious of Christ or not, has been impacted by this event.

Christians may notice something important missing from the above discussion of the necessity of the incarnation for God’s salvation of humanity. Though everything said there is affirmed as true, Christians do not just think that God accomplished salvation, or reconciliation, between himself and humanity by becoming a human person in Jesus Christ. The further claim is made that Christ died for our sins. There is a clear sense in scripture and tradition not only that right relationship has been restored (reconciliation), but also that some price was paid by Christ’s sacrificial death. It is impossible to overestimate how central a claim this is for Christian faith. As Lewis states

The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. . . . We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity.Lewis, Mere Christianity, 54–55.

No discussion of God’s salvation of humanity in Christ can fail to attend to this central Christian claim. But what does it mean?

First, note what it does not mean. Christians do not believe that God the Father is some vindictive bully who has to hurt or punish someone, and if humanity is going to get off the hook—well then—someone else will just have to pay. Christ’s suffering and death for our sins should not be understood in this crude sense of scapegoating, as if Christ stepped in to take the punishment that God would not withhold from someone.

Though this affirmation of faith is always challenging to understand, a far richer understanding of it is available through the notion of sacrifice.For a helpful discussion of this difficult discussion of Christ’s death being an atonement for our sins, see Richard John Neuhaus’s Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 187–228. Neuhaus’s text was formative for this treatment of sacrifice. A sacrifice occurs when someone gives up something for another. As it concerns God, a sacrifice is an act of worship by a creature (like a person) to the Creator. It testifies to the truth of the proper relationship between humanity and God, namely, that God is God and we are his creatures. Such an act makes amends for breaks or strains in that relationship by putting it back on track. From this perspective, Christ’s death for us was a sacrifice putting humanity back on the track of right relationship with God. By becoming a real human person in Jesus Christ, the Son of God took on creatureliness. Being a creature should mean dying to one’s self, being perfectly obedient to the Father, and being willing to lays down one’s own life. Because Jesus Christ was fully human, he was called to live this out. Because he was also fully divine, Jesus Christ was able to live this out.

You may wonder why a sacrificial death was necessary. Couldn’t Jesus have been fully obedient and restored our relationship with God without having to actually die? But Christ’s death was not some price that needed to be paid in addition to restoring right relationship. Repentance is simply dying to one’s old self in turning toward God and, in doing so, ironically finding one’s true self. Death to one’s wayward self is simply what going back to God is like.See Lewis, Mere Christianity, 57. Jesus Christ was fully human; in fact, he was the perfect exemplar of what it means to be truly human. Thus, even though he was without sin and not in need of repentance, as representative, if you will, of the human race he who was without sin gave himself up in the most perfect and complete obedience to the Father, “humbly accepting even death, death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). Jesus’s death was the perfect and complete act of sacrifice, a testimony to the right relationship between humanity and God. This act was vindicated in his resurrection, where God the Father raises up the Son, revealing that sin and death no longer have hold over him and, by extension, his fellow humanity for whom he died. It is for this reason that Christians affirm that Christ’s death definitively changed humanity’s relationship with God by reestablishing right relationship between God and humanity, or saving humanity from the hole we had gotten ourselves into.

As Lewis noted, understanding how this works theologically is ultimately far less important than affirming in faith that it happened. This mystery does not defy—it transcends—our full understanding and hence requires faith in the manner discussed in chapter 11. It should now be clear why Christians believe Jesus Christ is far more than simply a great moral teacher. He was that, and his injunctions on forgiveness, love of others, and the like are powerfully true rules for us in how to live our own lives. That said, Christians worship Jesus Christ as God incarnate, and celebrate and remember (especially in the eucharist) how his life, death, and resurrection effectuated a change in human history that goes beyond whether or not individual persons follow his moral guidelines.

At this point one might wonder what any of this has to do with moral theology. After all, aren’t we talking about things stated in the Nicene Creed that Christians hold to be true, like that Jesus is the Son of God sent to save humanity? What has this to do with how we should act, especially if Jesus Christ’s moral guidance is not the central reason why Christians follow him? Well, if one of the central claims of this book is true, namely, that living virtuously is living in accordance with how things really are, then it makes all the difference whether or not one has an accurate grasp of how things are. If the claims made in the first section of this chapter are true, then what ramifications are there for how we live? Answering that question is the task of this second section of the chapter.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

One of the more haunting questions that appears repeatedly throughout the gospels is when Jesus asks, “who do you say that I am?”See Mark 8:29; Matt. 16:15; Luke 9:20. Why haunting? The question is far from an abstract one. Notice, Jesus does not say “who am I?” which presumably one could answer distantly and nonchalantly. He asks, “Who do you say that I am?” How you answer this question will not only indicate something about Jesus, but also something about you. The wording of the question makes it clear that who you say Jesus is demands a response. As Lewis puts it while making a point described below (that Jesus was not simply a great moral teacher):

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 52.

Who one claims Jesus is demands some decisive response.

Christology is the name for the study of who Jesus Christ is. The point of the previous paragraph is that studying who Jesus is should not merely be some theoretical and abstract exercise. It is simultaneously the study of discipleship, or what it means to follow Jesus. After all, who Jesus is dictates how we respond. For example, if Jesus is indeed the Son of God, we should follow him. If he is not, we should not. More specifically, even if we grant that Jesus is the Son of God, we must further determine what that means. How Jesus reveals what it means to be in right relationship with God, what is means to live most fully, will dictate how we should follow Jesus.

The main purpose of Jesus asking his disciples in the gospels, “who do you say that I am?” is not merely to see if they believe him to be the Son of God, the messiah sent by God to deliver humanity. Jesus also asks this question to see what kind of messiah sent by God they believe him to be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Gospel according to Mark. A close look at a crucial section of that gospel will help us see how Jesus instructs his disciples as to who he really is.The following discussion of Mark 8:27–10:45 is heavily indebted to Werner Kelber’s Mark’s Story of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 43–56, a text I have enjoyed teaching for years. Kelber does an outstanding textual analysis of this part of Mark. He actually focuses on Mark 8:22–10:52 to include healing stories at the beginning and end of this section, but those are not addressed here.

This section of Mark (8:27–10:45) begins with our title question, as Jesus asks Peter, in particular, who he says Jesus is. Peter answers, “You are the Messiah” (in Matthew Peter adds, “the Son of the living God”), and Jesus confirms that this response is true. End of lesson, it would seem. Peter has accurately identified Jesus. And if Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, presumably this is all we need to know. However, then Jesus oddly instructs his disciples “not to tell anyone about him” (Mark 8:30). Why is this? It surely cannot be to keep Jesus a secret; the whole point of Jesus’s ministry (and of Mark writing this gospel) is to proclaim the good news of what God has done in Jesus! What can explain this theme in the first half of Mark, often called the Markan secret, whereby Jesus instructs those who recognize him as the Son of God not to tell others who he is (1:34; 3:11–12; 8:30)?

Perhaps it is because knowing Jesus is the Son of God is not enough. It is an important start, and the first half of Mark (which ends at this passage) is largely the story of Jesus’s disciples coming to learn this about him. But that is only half the story. The next half concerns what sort of messiah Jesus is. Or better, if Jesus is the Son of God and thus we can learn truly who God is by looking at Jesus, what does Jesus reveal about who God is? This is also necessary to know in order to truly follow Jesus. And in Mark the fact that the disciples still have some learning to do at the time of Peter’s response could not be more evident.

Notice that the two chapters following Peter’s right answer concerning Jesus are rather repetitive. This section of Mark basically contains three similar claims by Jesus, followed by three similar responses by the disciples, followed again by three similar responses by Jesus. There are other important stories in these two chapters, for sure. In fact, here one finds the story of the rich young man asking Jesus how to inherit eternal life, a crucial story for moral theology, and one examined closely in chapter 2 on freedom. But the basic structure of this part of the gospel is a threefold pattern repeated three times. What is Mark trying to accomplish here with this obviously intentional structure?

Immediately after Peter’s correct answer, Jesus informs his disciples that he will suffer and be rejected, be killed, and rise after three days (Mark 8:31). Jesus repeats this claim two more times in the ensuing chapters (9:31; 10:33–34). Why is such repetition necessary? Because though the disciples know Jesus to be the Messiah, they clearly do not get it fully. They do not understand what this entails, namely, that Jesus will lay down his life for others. This lack of understanding is evidenced by their reaction to each of these predictions.

After the first prediction, Peter rebukes Jesus. The term “rebuke,” according to biblical scholars, is no mere admonition. Thus far in Mark it had been used only toward an unclean spirit (1:25). Think of how amazing Peter’s rebuke is. Just lines earlier Peter had accurately identified Jesus as the Messiah. Now he is telling Jesus that what Jesus thinks that means is all wrong. The brazen absurdity! In response, Jesus rebukes Peter with the famous, “Get behind me Satan! You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (8:33). Here we see in Peter the perfect portrayal of how the disciples in general both get it (that Jesus is indeed the Messiah) and yet do not get it (in terms of what sort of messiah Jesus is). Peter thinks as broken human beings do, and not as God does, which is why Jesus has repeatedly insisted that others stay quiet about who he is (the Markan secret). Though they have part of the picture, they are missing important parts, without which they would only be spreading an inaccurate view of who Jesus is.

Who is he really, then? Or what understanding of who the Messiah is reflects how God thinks rather than how people think? In the very next lines Jesus goes on to say that “whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it” (8:34–35). The disciples were clearly not expecting that sort of messiah! Peter rebuked Jesus for saying he would suffer and die. (Interestingly, Jesus also says he’ll rise again, which we would think the disciples would take note of—this is a rather radical claim! But it goes right over their heads.) After Jesus’s second prediction of his suffering, death and rising, the disciples “did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to question him” (9:32). In fact, they then go on to argue who among them is the greatest (9:33–34)! Clearly they understand Christ’s lordship to be one of worldly power and glory; they are still warped by the very sin and pride that Christ comes to overcome.

After Jesus’s third prediction of his suffering and death, James and John have the nerve to ask, “Teacher, we want you to do whatever we ask of you” (10:35). Is this for real? Here they are talking to the Messiah, and they only want to receive him on their own terms? It gets better. Their request is to sit on his left and right once Jesus enters into his (they must think “earthly”) glory. Jesus is saying he will suffer and die, and James and John, much like the other disciples, are only concerned with status and positions of power, much as a volunteer on a politician’s campaign might ask for a cabinet position if the candidate wins. The other disciples are indignant at this, but one has the impression it is because they too would want such positions, and not because of the foolishness of the request. In each of these three responses to Jesus’s prediction of his suffering and death, the disciples show that they indeed do not fully get it; in other words, they do not understand the sort of messiah that Jesus is.

But Christ the teacher instructs them each time. After enjoining them to take up their crosses and follow him after the first prediction, Jesus corrects them after the second prediction (when they were afraid, and still arguing over who is greatest) by saying, “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and servant of all” (9:35). After the third prediction and James and John’s self-interested request, Jesus replies

Whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. (10:43–45)

In these three responses to the disciples’ misunderstanding of what sort of messiah he is, Jesus states clearly what his lordship is all about, how God thinks, and what truly following Jesus (rather than some false and worldly image of Jesus) means. Christ came to take up his cross, serve others, and lay down his life for them. Anyone who wishes to follow him must do the same.

Some may read this scathing portrayal of the disciples and think it must not be an accurate portrayal of them. Yet we must keep in mind that it is clearly not Mark’s intent to besmirch the disciples’ reputations. After all, any audience who would be reading or hearing this text (written a generation after Jesus’s life) would know full well what happened to the twelve apostles. Peter went on to be crucified as Christ was, though upside down. In fact, all the apostles who witness the resurrection of Christ (except John) were martyred. And anyone who hears James and John’s request from a perspective after the resurrection might chuckle at what they ask for, to sit at Jesus’s left and right. There were three, not one, crosses on the hill at Golgotha when Jesus was crucified. Being at Jesus’s right and left is not exactly what these two had in mind. They are indeed granted to drink of the cup of suffering from which Jesus drinks (10:39; cf. Luke 22:42), and in James’s case this includes martyrdom. We need not fret about protecting the disciples’ reputations from Mark. Instead, we must recall who the real target of Mark’s passage is: we, the readers, the hearers. The disciples eventually learned the lesson of who Jesus really is after encountering the risen Christ, and they followed him accordingly. That part of the story is over. How we will respond, however, remains to be seen. The real target here is us. “Who do you say that I am?”

Thus, by proclaiming who we think Jesus is, we simultaneously state what it means to follow Jesus. If Jesus is God’s only begotten son, the path to fullness of life in union with God, then how the incarnate word of God lived as the human person Jesus is the clearest sign of what it means for us human persons to live as God’s children. Jesus makes it abundantly clear what sort of messiah he is: a suffering servant who lays down his life for others in love. He is the opposite of, and antidote to, that anti-God state known as pride and sin. And if one calls him “lord” and understands truly who he is, then we can only respond by taking up our crosses, serving others, and following him even to the point of laying down our lives in love.

Living/Participating in the Incarnation Today

The basic message of the previous section seems rather innocuous: love and serve other people because that is what Jesus did. You probably did not need to read a chapter in a book to tell you that! Of course, living it out is another story. If people genuinely tried to live this out the world would be a much different place. But just to be sure that what needs to be lived out is clear, this part of the chapter relies on two examples of such loving, selfless service to further illuminate what is means to live the incarnation today; what it means, in other words, to live as God’s sons and daughters in a manner most perfectly exemplified by the Son of God, Jesus Christ.For more on this theme of living the incarnation today as a basis for Christian spirituality, see Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 73–81.

The central claim of this chapter is that Jesus is God’s definitive response to human brokenness and sinfulness. Note that God conceivably could have responded otherwise. He could have ignored humanity. Or he could have snapped his fingers, if you will, to just make all the sin go away. But neither was his response. “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, that all who believe might have life eternal (John 3:16).” Out of love God acted definitively to save humanity from its sin, not simply by making it go away, but by entering into our broken condition, healing it, and enabling humanity to live more fully. That is what the incarnation and Christ’s death accomplished. Unsurprisingly, we see in Christ’s own life the exact same approach toward people in their brokenness and sinfulness. Whether it be people with physical disabilities, people with unclean spirits, or simply people captive to their own sinfulness, Jesus repeatedly encounters them in such states, loves them, serves them, and enables them to live more fully. He does not dismiss or avoid the poor, the sick, or sinners. He encounters them where they are and seeks to give them a richer life. And this is exactly what is expected of his followers.

In the classic Matthew 25:31–45 passage, Jesus speaks most directly about the final judgment. “When the Son of Man comes in glory” (that is, the Second Coming) he will assemble all nations before him and separate them as a shepherd separates sheep and goats, the sheep to eternal reward and the goats to eternal punishment. What determines whether or not one is a sheep (which is what you definitely want to be in this story)? The sheep fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, sheltered the homeless, visited those in prison, and took care of the sick. This passage is, of course, the basis for the Catholic tradition’s seven corporal works of mercy.The seventh traditional corporal work of mercy is to bury the dead. There are also seven spiritual works of mercy: teach the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, correct sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive wrongs willingly, to comfort the afflicted, and to pray for the living and dead. In this extraordinary passage we have from Christ’s own mouth what is necessary to attain eternal life, which, as we know from chapter 13 means life in full union with God.

This may seem to be no surprise. Sure, we are supposed to be good people and do nice things like these. Yet the messiness of what it means to actually live the works of mercy is easily misunderstood. This is not naïve idealism, or some sentimental idealization of what it means to help those in need. Robert Barron tells a classic story of Dorothy Day, an early twentieth-century American woman who was tireless in her service to the poor and hungry. Reportedly she would tell young idealistic volunteers who arrived with romantic visions of helping poor people at her soup kitchen in New York City’s Bowery, “there are two things you need to know about poor people: they are ungrateful, and they smell.”See Robert Barron, The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path (New York: Orbis, 2003), 152. Her point was not to insult the poor, which should be obvious once one knows she devoted her life in service to those in need. Her point was that living the works of mercy is not the stuff of Hallmark cards. It is difficult and messy business. It means encountering those in need in their brokenness, entering into their situation just as Christ entered ours. It then means laying down our lives in service to them, in order that they may have life more fully. Obviously in our time this rarely means literally dying. But laying down our lives can be just as difficult for us—and just as life-giving for those served— when we let go of our own safe distance, comfortable presuppositions, and self-protectiveness to actually put our lives in service to others in a manner that is guided by what is genuinely best for those served. This means even when doing so is uncomfortable for us, and when others smell. It means even when others are ungrateful (or perhaps sinful in some glaring way), we still encounter them where they are (just as Christ loved us first) and serve them.

Note that though direct service to those who are not well-known to us is an obvious and necessary way to live out the works of mercy, these works of love certainly apply to those closer to us. A parent can sacrifice her own desires to put the needs of her family (say, feed the hungry, clothe the naked) first and thus live in Christ. One can “lay down one’s life” in service to a sick friend by putting his needs (even when he smells, and is ungrateful) first. Anyone who has had a loved one lose someone close to them knows that the work of mercy—to“bury the dead”—means far more than putting a body in the ground. It means bearing with a grieving one in her pain, supporting her in her time of weakness, and doing what is needed for her to live most fully even when it means sacrificing one’s own desires, even when she may be ungrateful or difficult. In all these ways, and countless more, we can live in Christ by participating in the incarnation, where God reached out most personally to those in need, joined them in their suffering, and laid down his life to give others life. When we do these things, then we are truly living in Christ through the works of mercy.

Consider a second helpful way to understand how to live out the self-giving love of Christ. In an insightful article on this topic entitled “Wholesomeness, Holiness, and Hairspray,” M. Cathleen Kaveny, like Robert Barron, tries to dislodge from our heads more idealistic or wholesome understandings of what it means to follow Christ.See M. Cathleen Kaveny, “Wholesomeness, Holiness, and Hairspray,” America, March 3, 2003, 15–18. Too often, she says, we think following Christ means being wholesome, by which she means tidy and orderly. In wholesome lives there are no addictions, no debilitating disabilities, no pregnancies out of wedlock, no ravaging diseases, no vicious arguments, no messiness. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with a life marked by none of these. (Indeed, full union with God in the next life will include none of them.) But wholesomeness becomes a problem when one begins to seek orderly appearances rather than what is truly life-giving to those in need. When we hide our disabled children, ignore blatant problems that are corroding our family life, send away pregnant teenagers, fail to face the real weakness and suffering of those who are sick, then we have made wholesomeness more important to us than true holiness. True holiness, exemplified in Christ, reaches out to people in their messy brokenness and sinfulness, always to serve them and enable them to live more fully. When things are indeed orderly—when our parents genuinely love each other, when people live chastely, or when we are fully healthy—the holy person is grateful. But never does a wholesome concern for orderly appearances lead the holy person to fail to see or avoid serving where there is brokenness, be it sinful or otherwise.

Kaveny’s main point is that what people frequently describe as “Christian values” is really wholesomeness. It is too often a thin veneer of tidiness masking the real brokenness so prevalent among us in our current condition. Jesus Christ was not concerned with wholesomeness. He ate with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. He touched the blind, the hemorrhaging, and dead. He endured a bloody, unjust death out of love for his own in the world whom he loved. Of course, this is not to say any of these states are good in themselves; indeed, Christ came to free us from them. But he did so by reaching out to us in these states (rather than ignoring us or the wretched states we actually are in), so as to genuinely bring us healing, reconciliation, and fullness of life. When we do the same to those around us—loved ones or strangers—then we, too, are living in Christ.

The purpose of this chapter has been to describe what God has accomplished in Christ, and then to explain what difference that makes for how people who follow Christ live their own lives. It may seem at this point that these two issues are unrelated. In fact they have everything to do with each other. There are two common errors to avoid in understanding how the incarnation and Christ’s life, death, and resurrection impact how we live our lives. Looking at these will help us understand the proper relationship between the two issues.

The first error is thinking of Christ primarily as a great person, even our lord, who both gave us moral teachings to follow and even provided a model of how to live them out. In this view, we could not be saved without Jesus Christ. But salvation, in terms of our being back on track in our relationship with God, is accomplished when we follow him.

The reason this is inadequate is summed up in an expression that was a favorite of late twentieth-century theologian John Howard Yoder: noster agnus vicit! It is Latin for “our Lamb has conquered!” The lamb, of course, is Jesus Christ, and what is conquered is sin and death. But the crucial part of the expression for our purposes is the past tense of “conquered.” The righting of the relationship between humanity and God is already done. We do not save ourselves. The hard work of salvation has already been accomplished in Jesus Christ, and his death and resurrection not only occurred; it definitively changed things for humanity, regardless of whether or not one follows His moral teachings.

There is an opposite and yet equally erroneous way to understand how the incarnation and the way we live are related. It is perfectly seen in the movie Dead Man Walking, where death-row inmate Matthew Poncelet assures his counselor, Sr. Helen Prejean, that she need not worry about him. “I know Jesus died for my sins, and is going to welcome me in heaven when I die,” he tells her. She sternly corrects him by telling him that salvation is not some magic trick that simply happens to us. We need to respond and participate in it. Though the hard work has already been accomplished in Christ, salvation is not simply a clearing of the slate between us and God; it is also a transformation that enables us to be partakers in the divine nature. The train that is humanity has been put back on the right track in its journey toward union with God. But we must allow ourselves to be taken aboard that train in order to reach the destiny described in the previous chapter on hope and eternal life.

This is what life in Christ is: being taken up in the reconciliation between God and humanity achieved by Jesus Christ. When we follow Christ in the ways described in the second section of this chapter, we are not accomplishing the work of salvation, but rather: a) acknowledging Christ the lord who accomplished our salvation, and, b) living in accordance with how he accomplished it. For Christians Jesus Christ is the central event in human history. Though this event definitively changed things, this event is not only backward looking. Nor is living in Christ simply a matter of looking to Jesus as a role model or teacher. As chapter 16 on grace explains, God’s action is ongoing through Christ to help us live as sons and daughters of God. In the second section of this chapter, we have started to see how we can live in Christ with God’s help. The next chapters on love and grace will continue to illuminate that life in Christ.

1. What hole had humanity gotten itself into that necessitated the incarnation? Why couldn’t we get out on our own?

2. Define incarnation and give several reasons why it happened.

3. Why do Christians believe Jesus died for our sins?

4. Why is Jesus’s question, “who do you say that I am?” more than some abstract intellectual exercise?

5. How do the disciples demonstrate their lack of full understanding of who Jesus is? Give three examples.

6. What sort of messiah does Jesus say he is? Give three examples.

7. List the (corporal) works of mercy and state where they come from. How are they an example of living in Christ?

8. What is the difference between true holiness and what Kaveny calls “wholesomeness”? When is wholesomeness bad? How can true holiness be unwholesome?

9. The concluding section describes two opposite and equally erroneous understandings of salvation in Christ. Describe each and state why each is erroneous.

incarnation, sacrifice, christology, Markan secret, (corporal) works of mercy, wholesomeness vs. holiness, noster agnus vicit!

1. How would you respond to someone who asked, quite simply, why Christians think Jesus Christ was so important?

2. If someone told you their central idea of Christian faith was asking, “what would Jesus do?” what could you tell them so as to help them avoid the error of seeing Christ simply as a great moral teacher?

3. Werner Kelber says: “It is sometimes claimed that religion is a case of an escape from the realities of life, a denial of the brutalities of suffering and of our common destiny of death. Whoever makes such claims must not be familiar with the texts of the New Testament” (Mark’s Story of Jesus, 51). He was referring explicitly to the text discussed here from Mark (8:27–10:45). Why does he think that text disproves that view of religion? Do you agree or disagree?

The most helpful resources in teaching the contents of this chapter have been the portions of the following works cited here: the Gospel according to Mark, Catechism of the Catholic Church, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Werner Kelber’s Mark’s Story of Jesus, Robert Barron’s The Strangest Way, M. Cath-leen Kaveny’s “Wholesomeness, Holiness, and Hairspray,” and Richard John Neuhaus’s Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross. As always, the work of Thomas Aquinas (esp. Summa Theologiae III) is an important foundation for this chapter.