sleep or suffer. He only pretended to do so, in order to teach us various things, such as the value of a noble steadfastness in the face of difficulty. He did not rise from the dead, because he did not die; he only seemed to. This suggestion is called docetism, from a Greek word meaning ‘to seem’, and the group tend to be called Gnostics, because they thought that Jesus had imparted a saving knowledge (gnosis, in Greek). This knowledge was like a set of passwords that would lead us to God past all obstacles, earthly and demonic.
What Gnostics could not stand was matter, especially bodies. Real reality, they would say, is spiritual, untainted by the flesh. There is no need to spell out the baleful influence of such thinking on Christian life, and sometimes even doctrine. Jesus said once, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matthew 26:42). The Gnostics went further and said that the flesh is bad, evil. Some went so far as to say that there are two powers: God, who made the soul, and a wicked demi-god who trapped us in flesh.
This is not Christian, and we shall see why in later chapters. The Incarnation affirms once and for all the Genesis message that the creation is good, is loved by God. The aim of Christ is not to free us from matter, but to free us for it. It is we who are alienated from ourselves, spirit and body. But, ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ (Romans 8:11).
The reason Gnostics found the Old Testament so difficult was that it is so earthy, so everyday. Pots and pans were not just boring, but revolting to them. The Incarnation says the opposite, that God delights to be with us so much that he became one of us. The Second Vatican Council put it like this (the full passage is given at the end of the chapter):
Christ the Lord, who is the ‘image of the invisible God’, worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved.
Gaudium et Spes, 22; the scriptural quotation is from St Paul, Colossians 1:15
In Christ, the invisible God found an image. God was invisible because he is beyond our imagining, but also because we have forgotten what he looks like. We have lost the image in ourselves. In Jesus, the words of God took flesh, in a practical demonstration. Our assumptions tend to play this down; we assume that at any moment, the divinity was on top. But to take the Incarnation seriously is to say that Jesus could have died at the age of four from yellow fever.
Has it ever struck you how little the Gospels tell us about the life of Christ? There have been plenty of novels and films to fill the gap: most of those in the first few centuries were written by Gnostics, silly stories about Jesus zapping his childhood friends (wish I could), and so were rejected by the Church. In the genuine scriptures of the New Testament we have two nativity stories, and that is it until Jesus is about thirty. There is only one exception, in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus goes missing on a visit to Jerusalem, and is found in the Temple, giving the learned priests a run for their money. It is a rather charming picture of an ordinary family event: a lost child, panic, reproaches and answering back. The Gospels tell us nothing of the boyhood of the Saviour because he was just another kid.
Maybe you find all this shocking. It is indeed shocking, but because it is the full revelation of God’s love, not because it is blasphemy. If Jesus was not fully man, then he did not show us what humanity could be. If he did not live as we do, then God has no interest in our lives. If he did not die, then our own deaths are the end, there will be no rising. God stands, unruffled, on the stormy lake and taunts us with advice on how to bail out the water.
But that is how we think, not how God thinks, which is just as well. So now we have the Son of God and us, all in the same boat. From this we can come to understand most of what we want to know about being Catholic.
It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. He who is the ‘image of the invisible God’, is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved.
Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, 22
It is time to say what that might mean for us, and for him. First, however, there is a possible apprehension that needs to be cleared up.
Chapter 3 WILL GOD PUNISH YOU?
Death was not God’s doing.
Wisdom 1:13
From time to time you hear people say that the problem with the Church now is that nobody believes in sin any more. It has all become a sickly soup of love and forgiveness. What about the wrath of God? What about the fires of hell and of purgatory? Surely, if you do bad, you are punished, and if you do good, you are rewarded. Justice, love and peace are all very well, but the world also contains oppression, hate and violence. We do wrong either to ourselves, or to each other.
Such people have a point. If the Gospel is all about things going right, and people full of Christian charity and nothing else, then it has very little to do with any of us. The tendency to think that God forgives everything really, in the end, is to an extent connected with wish-fulfilment, the desire to live in a perfect world, undisturbed. But, on the other hand, it seems strange, to say the least, that the God who is love might condemn anyone he has made to eternal and final suffering in punishment for offences which, in the perspective of infinite goodness, are maybe not that big.
Not so fast
On this question, Jesus has a very unwelcome thing to say. His view is almost impossible to explain away; though, of course, that has not stopped people from trying. When you read it, you can see the temptation to marshal the technology of literary and historical criticism to prove that Jesus did not actually say it. But I think his statement, grim as it looks, has much to tell us about the full richness of the Good News. It is worth taking it on the chin, and examining ourselves and our reaction to it. Here it is, from St Mark’s account:
I tell you solemnly, all men’s sins will be forgiven, and all their blasphemies; but let anyone blaspheme against the Holy Spirit and he will never have forgiveness; he is guilty of an eternal sin.
Mark 3:28–30
Mark tells us that Jesus said this because some scribes were attributing his miracles to demonic possession. The statement might almost confirm their suspicions. There is, according to Jesus, a special reserved sin that will not be forgiven, no matter how sorry you are, and how much you repent. Worried? You should be. For it seems that after baptism, and a sacramental life of eucharist and reconciliation, you can finally and truly blow it. Murders, genocides, can all be forgiven; but let anyone speak against the Holy Spirit, and he, or she, is lost for ever. God is more touchy about his honour than about the lives of his children.
At least, however, we can be assured that the Christian tradition does contain some tough and uncompromising claims about sin and punishment. It may also be clear from your own reaction to the text why hell, damnation and sin have so dropped out of the contemporary religious vocabulary. Perhaps,
