7. JESUS ATTITUDE TOWARDS LIFE AND DEATH
Now we must touch upon another topic which also throws light on the life of
Jesus: his attitude towards life in the obvious sense of the word.
In the total economy of human existence it is the spirit that makes it
possible to venture forth from the immediate world of things and one's own
nature and become creative. However, the growth of the spirit is not
without its dangers: it can cause difficulties in one's adaptation to life;
be a hindrance to bodily development and also to the unfolding of the
emotional life. Genius can lead either to the utmost limit of human
development or beyond it to a sheer pathological state. Religious genius is
no exception. We have, for example, the man with extraordinary religious
gifts who dies young. In such cases we refer to an early maturity or say
that he had an unearthly quality about him. Or there is the man who seems
to be a borderline case, the visionary who enjoys very poor health, the
mystic with a dangerous penchant for suffering, the man threatened by
demons, and so forth.
What is to be said about Jesus in this connection?
Is he a man in whom the spirit loomed so large that his very constitution
was devoured by it so that he died, as it were, from inside? Not at all.
Jesus gives an impression of perfect vigor. When he died he had, humanly
speaking, immeasurable possibilities left which could have been realized
had there been time and opportunity.
His personality and life are in no respect those of one who attains
perfection and then dies in the flower of youth; his life was destroyed
from outside, by violence. Jesus constantly gave the impression that he was
infinitely more as a being than was apparent on the surface; that he could
do more than he did, that he knew more than he revealed. His death showed
that he possessed incalculable reserves of strength and life.
What of the second type? Is Jesus one of those religious persons who are
borderline cases and, for that very reason, are able to comprehend and
perform the special tasks entrusted to them?
He is not this type either. In him we find no trace of that biological and
psychic instability we encounter so often in religious psychology and
pathology; nor of that oscillation in emotional states between an
extraordinary and unhuman exhilaration and a weakness and depression far
below the normal. The only scene that might suggest such a state is
Gethsemane, but this has a totally different meaning.
Nor can we induce this kind of psychic structure from his eschatological
consciousness, holding, for instance, that he first lived in expectation of
a colossal upheaval in the power of the Spirit, but that when this failed
to materialize he went to the other extreme and fixed his hopes upon a
dialectic of annihilation, hoping to gain through destruction what had not
been attainable the other way. Such an explanation would make sense only if
we could suppose a nature it would suit: and there is no trace of this at
all. The eschatological awareness of Jesus was of a totally different kind,
not to be explained in terms of the presuppositions of religious
psychology.
The essential character of Jesus shows no hint of melancholy, that
commonest of all pathological religious symptoms. He never knew a moment's
real depression. His repeated retreat into solitude was not the escape of
the melancholic from man and from the light of day: it was the result of a
longing for peace in the presence of God, especially at times of momentous
decision; and even more than this, it was the entry into that exclusive
relationship in which he knew he stood to him whom he called his Father.
Jesus was no visionary either, visited by apparitions of the supernatural
or the future, oppressing him at least as much as they exalt him. Nor was
he an apocalyptic so acutely conscious of God's threatening wrath that
everything around him, even his own life, seemed in imminent danger of
collapsing.
He gave the impression of perfect health. We never hear of his being ill or
having to be nursed, or of his being weakly or overworked and needing a
respite. He led the arduous life of an itinerant preacher, and there is no
hint that he ever had to exert every ounce of his strength in order to
carry on. The account which tells how he was too weak to carry the beam of
the cross to the place of execution (Mat. 27. 32), taken in conjunction
with what he had just gone through and with what was taking place within
him, does not contradict this fact. On the contrary, we cannot comprehend
how he was able to bear so much. The same is true of his rapid death (John
19. 33). As a rule it was a long time before a crucified person died; but
we do well to remember that death comes not only from the body, but also
from the spirit.
We have still to deal with the question of Jesus' relationship to death.
What is said here presupposes, of course, that the Gospels do not indulge
in fantasies. That they should have done so seems absurd, for they would
have had to choose either to portray a mythical figure, in which case the
unreality of the figure would have been immediately apparent, for mythical
figures have no psychology and are mere idealizations, whereas Jesus is
full of the most concrete life--or to invent a pattern of life quite
unknown to men, in which case improbabilities would occur at every turn.
If, then, we accept the Gospel narrative as true, we must admit that the
thought of death was not present in the mind of Jesus in the way in which
it is in our minds. Each time he spoke of his dying--he did this five
times--he connected this with his resurrection.
For us, death is simply the end. Our immediate awareness of life does not
penetrate beyond that. True, we say that the essential thing about our life
cannot come to an end with death. We express this in various presentiments,
metaphors and hopes; and the hope of eternal life is assured by faith in
revelation. With Jesus, however, the matter was quite different. He knew
that he was to die and accepted death: but he viewed it as a passage to an
existence involving both soul and body which would immediately follow after
death: "From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to
Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and scribes and chief
priests; and be put to death, and the third day rise again" (Mat. 16. 21).
These are no casual words: they proceed from a general attitude, from an
original and unique mode of being in life.
To regard such sayings as retrospective explanations in the light of the
later Paschal experience of the disciples would be to distort everything.
For Jesus, the concept of death and resurrection which they express is
fundamental to his whole person. As soon as this idea is removed from the
picture it is not a real man who is left, much less the truer one one might
have thought would emerge when stripped of his mythological trappings--his
whole nature and reality vanish. The span of life of which he was directly
aware did not end for him, as it does for us, at the approach of death,
thereafter to be resumed again tentatively; it passed with perfect clarity
right through death. For him, death was not the end but a point of
transition; and not at all--to make the point quite clear--in the sense
that nothing led beyond death but hope. The way in which Jesus felt himself
to be alive, spiritually and bodily, was of such a kind that it reached far
beyond death. It saw this as an event within life itself. This total view
of life has, of course, nothing in common with any mythology or esoteric
certitude: it derived from the reality of God, the beginning and end of all
his existence.
The Christian conception of life, death and resurrection is based on Jesus'
knowledge of life. It is something more than an assurance of spiritual
indestructibility. It is the hope of an eternal human existence in God
himself. But the reality in and with whose accomplishment it is found to be
possible is Jesus' sense of life. Here again the decisive thing is not what
he says but what he is.
All this leads us to the conclusion that he lived and died in a different
way from us. And this reveals, in all its greatness and clarity, what we
have already met before when talking of his "health"; it is something more
than mere natural vitality or the spiritual will to live. It is a quality
of his psychosomatic existence for which there is no standard of measure
based on our natural knowledge.
We can perhaps get some hint of what this means from the power to endure
and to suffer, which can spring from personal love, or from the spirit's
pure will to create; or from a truly religious sense of duty and will-
power. In mere men, however, this "health" has to assert itself in spite of
the disorders and malformations which are found even in the healthiest of
us. But in Jesus there was nothing like this whatever. He was utterly sound
and alive, but in a special sense. An animal can be healthy in terms of its
own nature. Man who has turned from God would like to be healthy but he
cannot be. He was created to exist in dependence on God: this is his
health, which he lost once and for all by sin. That "health", by contrast,
which we commonly speak about, is altogether a problematic thing. One is
even tempted to say that it is more enigmatic than sickness; for what is it
after all but sickness so entrenched as to have become normal? The
ontological sickness of the fallen creature which disguises its own total
disorder under cover of a relative order? There is nothing like this in
Jesus. In him is the fullness of that which this confusion has upset:
existence from God, directed to God, life in the Pneuma of God. Therefore,
our notion of health, worked out inevitably on the basis of our experience,
does not apply to Christ. His state is altogether beyond our notions of
sickness and health.
It is St. John again who analyses and puts plainly into words what appears
in the Synoptics as a simple, and hence elusive, reality. In St. John's
Gospel our Lord says to the disciples: "I am . . . the life" (14. 6); and
to Martha: "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me,
although he be dead, shall live" (11. 25). This is a theological expression
of what the Synoptics present as an objective fact.
"Psychology", however, can do no more than indicate that we are in the
presence of something very special, of a state of affairs which is
expressed not merely in conceptual propositions, but in a living attitude;
in the way, that is, in which personality and life are built up; by means
of words which are the double of an existence or form of life to which
nothing in any other man corresponds.
Further than this psychology cannot go. It can only point out a direction
to follow and show how this human-superhuman reality, once accepted by
faith, appropriated in love, and put into practice in deed, makes possible
an attitude to life which man could never have achieved by himself. That is
to say, psychology can try to exhibit the Christian sense of life and
death. If it does this, it will once more reach its limit at the point
where the believer's "Christ in me" emerges, the point at which the real
"synergeia," accomplishment in and with Christ, begins.
The nature of Christ cannot be deduced from a study of the psychology of
the religious man in general and the Christian in particular. The Christian
can exist only in terms of a Christ who eludes psychological analysis as
long as this is honestly pursued. If it is not honestly pursued, however--
and as a general rule it is not--then it makes no sense at all and becomes
merely another tool in the hands of self-glorifying man who uses it to
prove that there never was a God-man.
