Edmond Grace SJ answers the question about Jesus’ relationship to the Father, and if he could have refused to fulfil the will of the Father.
In your article in the March issue of ‘The Messenger’ you said it is strange but true that Jesus could have turned away from the Father. How can this be true? He was true God and true man. Because he was divine, the temptation and struggle were all the greater, but I cannot think that he could ultimately separate his will from the Father’s.
The question you raise is a deep one. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, living with the Father from all eternity. As you rightly say, he ‘became’ man. In other words, God took on our human nature. However, that does not mean that a man ‘became’ God.
You say that the temptation and struggle were all the greater because he was divine. I believe there is real insight in what you say, but it is not immediately clear why this should be so. After all, why should temptation and struggle pose any great problems for an all-powerful God?’
On the other hand, of course, if the struggles and temptations of the Son of God were not real his coming on earth was all for show. In that case he would not have been human in any sense with which we could identify. He would have been be more like an actor putting on a performance.
More than an act
When we see an impressive piece of acting, we may be deeply moved by the story which is presented to us, but we know that the actor doesn’t become the actual person whose role he or she is playing.
A play can be powerful, even though it is fiction. In fact, part of the power of fiction is that we can imagine the characters in the play as real people. A playwright is an artist, but we detract in no way from art by distinguishing between what an artist creates and real life. Art reflects real life; it is not to be confused with it.
The story of Jesus’ life is a very powerful one. It has shaped our entire civilisation, but it is more than a great work of art. His presence among us is much more than God giving a powerful performance for our benefit. Jesus was a real man who lived a genuinely human life.
Those who met him could only have come to know that he was the Son of God by getting to know this man who came from Nazareth where he was known as the son of Joseph the carpenter.
A real decision
There is a sense in which we are better off putting to one side the fact that Jesus is God and learning to understand him as a man who loves each one of us passionately.
Only he, operating through his deeply human appeal, can reveal to our limited minds and hearts who he himself really is and how this man can be God. If we begin by saying ‘Jesus is God, therefore he must be like this or like that’ we will get it wrong. Who are we to say what God is like!
What cannot be denied is that Jesus endured something which, by human understanding, is just not possible for an all-powerful eternal Creator. He died. Our faith tells us that he rose from the dead, but that has no significance if his death was not real.
In other words, it had to be like the death of every other human being. If he did not die, Jesus was not really human. He is not really our brother and we cannot really pray ‘Our Father,’as he taught us.
Terror and anguish
On the night before his death he begged the Father to be spared the trial which lay ahead. Mark’s Gospel goes so far as to say that he experienced ‘terror and anguish.’ He did not want to die but, as he said to his Father, ‘Not my will but yours be done.’ He made the decision to do what the Father wanted.
He was a free man, and if the Father had taken away his freedom his death would not have been an act of loving obedience. It would have been nothing more than the mechanical motions of a puppet whose strings are being pulled by a character off stage.
It is worth our while to look at John 10:17-18, where Jesus is quite emphatic about laying down his own life: ‘No one takes it from me; I lay it down of my own free will.’
The Father does not kill the Son. He tells him to lay down his life out of love for humankind, and the Son does so for that reason and for his own love of the Father.
The Father commands him – and Jesus is quite clear about this. He talks about having the power to lay down his own life and to take it up again. But then he adds: ‘this is the command I have received from my Father.’
Obedience
The point is that it makes no sense at all to command someone to do what they cannot do. And if they refuse to do something which they consider is beyond their powers you cannot then say they are disobedient.
Obedience is a decision to do something which we have the power to do or not to do. If Jesus wasn’t free to turn away from the Father, he would have been like a computer into which the Father typed his ‘command.’ If a computer fails to respond to a command we don’t say it is disobedient, we say it is broken.
A computer is a machine, and machines don’t obey. They just function. Only people obey. When Jesus obeyed the Father, he could have done otherwise but he chose to do what he did out of love. Maybe, in a deeper sense, because he is a God who is Love, he could not have done otherwise. But Love, as you know, never destroys freedom. Therein lies the mystery.
This article first appeared in the Messenger, a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
