NO GREATER LOVE: CONTEMPLATING THE LIFE OF JESUS

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A very fruitful area for prayer is the Human Life of Jesus Christ from the Annunciation to His Death on the Cross.  Here we can contemplate the Divine entry into the world. In the book Prayer, theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar discusses the ways which the Word of God uses to enter into the world. …..he has that of normal human existence between conception and death: a tremendously dramatic field of energy, characterized by the most powerful tensions, tailor-made, in a profound sense, to be the vessel of a more-than-human, divine fullness of life and spirit. The life of Jesus is the ideal stage for the portrayal and interpretation of the meaning of contemplative man's own existence. Here, scene by scene, as each stage of life unfolds, he is shown the meaning of life as God sees it and desires man to see it. …….. The person at prayer need only let himself be carried from one picture to the next: in the humanity which he encounters in each picture he will see a revelation of eternal, triune love. First the child as such, with his natural qualities; the boy, the youth with his, then the grown man; each stage and condition of life; waking and sleeping, liveliness and tiredness, solitude and conversation with others; the "feel" of morning, midday and evening; work and rest, eating and fasting, pleasure and the forgoing of pleasure; human emotions and the lack of emotion, festivities and the monotony of the daily round. God the Creator has designed and created every one of these changing conditions of human life, and now, in the fullness of time, he has sent his Son into them, to "taste" them and make them the "experiences" of God in human nature, to charge them to his account. Thus, he crowns the accomplishment of human life, and by rising from the dead he elevates its truth, its quintessence, into eternity. Now, instead of a vague "similarity in a still greater dissimilarity", there is a communion in which the transitory becomes a vehicle for the eternal, filled to the brim and running over with the fullness of meaning of divine love. The Child at peace in the lap of his virginal Mother; the way he clings to her breasts with his little hands, desiring her milk; the way he sleeps in her arms or, at night, at her side; his child's cry for nourishment, his first smile, his first step taken by himself, the first words learned from his Mother; the first object he makes in the workshop with Joseph's help; friendship with all its joys and disappointments; school, the worship of God, solitary walks and times of prayer: everything begins to speak of "the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed" (Rom 16:25), namely, eternal love. All this human life of his is flesh of the Word of God, the expression of what is eternally true and valid. Nor is it the expression of some kind of truth that will one day be universally acknowledged (for a secret ceases to be a secret once it has been let out, and a solved crossword puzzle is no longer any interest); what we have here is the translation of eternity into temporal terms (exclusively here and now, exclusively in this one particular Person), the translation of temporal reality into eternity. And it is his translation, bearing the hallmark of his personality and inseparable from it. We can perceive it only by looking at him. It is exclusively for his sake that something of it becomes visible in his Mother and his foster-father, in his aunt Elizabeth and her child John, in those who came before him and come after him.

As we contemplate the Life of Jesus, we can see in concrete terms the extreme Love that God has for us. Von Balthasar explains this to us.  Through him, everything human has a sacramental symbolism. God's love shines through it; the humanity becomes the mediating vessel of the love of God which it signifies; but, through him, all are bound to this meaning in faith and discipleship. We cannot say that every mother who suckles her child is a picture of heavenly love in the same way as Mary. But because of Jesus and Mary she can have a real share in their symbolism; the contemplative, in faith, can make the archetype come alive in the familiar human picture. For God has taken responsibility for this single unique life in order to give the whole human race a foothold in heaven with himself. He did not do this for his own sake (for how could the Creator fail to know the work he himself had designed and executed? “He who planted the ear, does he not hear?" Ps 93:9), but for the sake of his creature, in order to give him sanctuary and a home with him, to lend an abiding, eternal, divine meaning to the creature's transitory existence.

When we contemplate the Lord in His Human Life, it is always the same Lord for each person and for all times.  However, since we are temporal and limited creatures, each person will experience God’s Word differently from someone else and even the same person can experience God’s Word differently from day to day.  Theologian Von Balthasar discusses this in more detail.  Our aim in contemplation is not to discover some hidden divine meaning behind all the individual material features of the Lord's life. Such complementarity would be impossible anyway since each detail points toward God's inexhaustible infinity. As well as that, the same praying person encounters the same reality differently at different times, and the experiences of people are all different too, in spite of the fact that a particular teaching of Christ, in word or deed, has an unequivocal meaning. Furthermore, it would be impossible because the divine archetype is translated into human terms through the freedom of the Person of the Word, which cannot be restricted by any extrinsic system. It is this that makes everyone's personal meeting with the Lord in prayer so dramatic and fruitful each time he turns to contemplation: we can never know in advance how the eternal will manifest itself in temporal form, what aspects will predominate this time, what familiar aspects will be deepened, what new, unsuspected ones will be brought to light, what dimensions will be brilliantly lit, what others will be left in semidarkness. Every human life is unique, and so each person's gaze will illuminate the Lord's archetypal existence in a different way. Furthermore, at each instance of contemplation, the love of God, which each individual experiences as unique, plays an utterly fresh, original and inimitable melody upon the instrument of Christ's life. The instrument has a limited number of keys, just as the words of holy scripture are limited. But there is an unlimited number of possible variations on the one theme, which is the self-sacrifice of divine love and our initiation into the depths of divine meaning.

Anyone at all versed in contemplation will surely have had this experience. Every gospel scene seems new and fresh each day; it does not seem threatened by the dust, pallor and obsolescence of history. Every day the eyes of faith witness the miracle: the gospel is the only factor within history which is superior to the laws of history. "Heaven and earth will pass away; but my words will never pass away."

We always need to understand that the Life of Jesus Christ was not an “ordinary” life. It was miraculous that God chose to enter human history.  According to Von Balthasar: Though these words have entered into history, they are actually the supports holding up heaven and earth and all transitory process. What we have here is the word as archetype, beginning (Jn 8:25), word from God, "upholding the universe by his word of power" (Heb 1:3); thus, too, the events of my life take place within this word. Here I am faced with true archetypes; but they are not in me: I am in them. Many of these events are explicit miracles, tangibly showing eternity breaking into time. But the Lord's words are no less miraculous, indeed for the contemplative they are even more so because, according to the Lord himself, they are a greater proof of the truth of his mission than the "works", which are intended more as a help to those who are slow to comprehend (Jn 10:36-38). The miracle of the word is its power over history, the sovereignty which, now as then, the eternal word itself manifests throughout all the changes of history. Throughout all its own transformations, moreover, it remains the same, one, unique word; it can undergo all the variations characteristic of time, including weakness, powerlessness and death, without losing anything of its divine supremacy.  –Jim Nugent, CFP