Jesus — Our Virgil

This is Part Two of my exploration into Dante’s Divine Comedy and the true nature of God. The first part, A God of Love or a God of Wrath should be read first.

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Jesus is the proof that God is love. We may blame God for the suffering in the world, but God’s answer was, rather than denying such pain, to come down from the heaven that is perfect beauty and to share not just human existence, but the worst, most degrading, excrutiatingly painful moments of human existence. By becoming a weak baby, experiencing the joys and sorrows of life from the perspective of humanity, and by willingly taking on the lowest aspects of the human experience, Divine Love not only shows itself, but proves itself, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus came to show us that God was not a distant ruler of humanity, but the Lover of humanity, with us every moment of every day. In Jesus, God became a helpless baby. God worked for a poor family, learning a trade. God studied the history, religion and culture of the time. God journeyed by foot from town to town in an occupied nation. God had friends.

A popular song a few years ago asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” I remember hearing it play on the radio, describing God commuting home from work, experiencing all the menial existence of human day-to-day life. I thought, not only is God one of us, God has been trying to show us that for two thousand years! God became one of us in the person of Jesus. The composer of that song still struggled with the Danteen view of an aloof God, and thus the question seemed to be a marvel. That we can ask a question like “What if God was one of us?” as if it was a new idea shows how much we have gotten it wrong from the very beginning!

Jesus example, his love and his death, shows us what kind of Creator we have. We say that Jesus died for us without further thought. But we must give this further thought. It is quite a difficult statement which centuries of saying has made easier. Jesus chose a painful and humiliating death to show his solidarity with the suffering of the world. What a profound love! Jesus is difficult to believe in because what he did is so far removed from common human nature—to put others first, even unto death. In Christianity, we place our faith in a man who endured humiliation and suffering beyond anything most of us will ever face.

The cross is the symbol of Christianity. We are so used to seeing it that we have forgotten what it is. The cross is the invention of a sick ancient mind, a tool of torture beyond most of our imaginations (though not too far off from some of the tortures described in Dante’s Inferno). At the time of Jesus the cross was a symbol of terror. On the cross pain and despair overwhelmed the mind. Death was a relief so far distant the hours seemed like days.

Crucifixion was also considered the most degrading of executions. The convicted is stripped and their naked body stretched out for the entire community to see. In Jewish culture, this made one “unclean” in just about every sense of the Mosaic law. Images of Jesus on the cross typically give him a courteous cloth around his groin, but the reality of the time was that men were crucified naked to maximize the humiliation of the punishment.

As Jesus, God not only experienced the day-to-day life of humanity, but its lowest moments. God was betrayed by a friend and denied by another. God was ridiculed and spit upon. God suffered. God was executed. God died a painful death, utterly alone. “What if God was one of us?” God was!

Imagine for a moment the experience undergone by Jesus. Imagine looking upon the cross on which you would die—the firm and awful darkness of its wood. Death more certain than if you were staring into the barrel of a firing gun, and a thousand times more painful. Imagine the crippling fear just to see this instrument of your death before you.

Your body is already exhausted from scourging and carrying the cross up the hill as they lay you upon the prostrate wood. As the nail pierces your first hand the shock of pain lashes through your entire body. Your arm is pulled across the beam, yanking your hand sharply against the nail as a second nail is drilled through your other hand. Yet the pain in your hands does not even begin to compare with the horror of the spike which pierces your feet. For a moment you try to relax, but soon your cross is lifted upright, jerking against the ropes that lift it as pain pulsates through your body, pulling against every nail. The pain is far worse than you ever imagined. For the next three hours each breath you take pulls against those awful nails, scrapes your back, already raw from lashes, against the rough wood behind you. If you try to relax your arms it pulls excruciatingly against the spike in your foot. If you try to relax your feet you feel like the skin of your armpits will tear from the weight and strain. There is some comfort in seeing your mother below, but her tears are so painful to witness that you can hardly look at her. Beside her are a few other women who loved you. You look for your friends, the ones who said they would willingly die with you. What a relief it would be to see your companions one last time and feel their support. But of your twelve closest friends, only one stands beside your mother below. The pain of rejection almost surpasses the pain of the nails.

Jesus chose this fate. When he was praying at Gethsemane the night before and the soldiers came to arrest him, he could have escaped. The back-side of the Mount of Olives leads away from Jerusalem, into the desert. Jesus was familiar with the desert and knew how to survive in it. A mob coming up the hill with lanterns and torches, as John’s gospel describes them, would have been seen while they were still rising the hill. Jesus and his three friends would have had plenty of time to retreat on the other side of the hill and escape. Later, when Pilate questioned him, he could have defended himself, but he remained silent. Pilate wanted to acquit him. He could have fled Jerusalem and continued to preach his message. But he chose not only death, but the most painful and degrading death possible, to give his message life, by sharing humanity’s lowest moments. Throughout his ministry, Jesus told his disciples that to die was his redemptive purpose. “Verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

Jesus’ death was not to satisfy a blood justice for our sins, as is often portrayed, but that by dying we might trust the love and compassion he preached: the same love and compassion which God has been giving us ever since our creation. The world suffers because of humanity’s selfishness, humanity’s tireless quest for satisfaction and pleasure, and its unwillingness to share what has been gained. God cannot change the human nature that spawns this folly. To change it would be to take away our free will, and with it, our ability to love. What God can do is to prove how much he loves us by sharing in our suffering, even the suffering of death. This is what it means to say that Jesus died for us.

If we view God as did the poets Dante and Milton, the wrathful God demanding punishment to atone for sin, then Jesus becomes a mediator, standing between us and God’s anger. This theology places Jesus’ death in the context of ancient Jewish sacrificial rites, and against the unity of Trinity. Jesus is a sacrificial lamb. Sin must be atoned for by death. If Jesus did not die, then we all must die. As Dante described, “Ne’er was a penalty so just as that inflicted by the Cross…. that a just vengeance was, by righteous court, justly revenged.” (Par. VII) The problem with this view, still widespread in Christianity today, is that it is entirely inconsistent with the picture of God given by Jesus. If God is pure and perfect love, why would he need blood to satisfy wrath and justice? What God of love would send his own son to slaughter in order to satisfy laws he had created?

Such a doctrine turns God’s love into a kind of currency which can be bartered for through sacrifice, rather than his very nature. Many Christians still think that this is what the doctrine of the cross means, but this is not the case. The Pope himself works tirelessly to dispel this gruesome view of God. “One turns away in horror,” he says, “from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.” Rather, he identifies the cross as “the love that gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others.” (Ratzinger: Introduction to Christianity, II, II, 3) This is indeed the description of a God who is by his very nature Love, who’s gift of himself is so complete that the cross was the result. We have here a God who out of unbounded compassion for creation, chose to become one with humanity, showing love by example, and as Jesus subjecting himself to our own worst hours—betrayal, ridicule, torture, and death. (Ibid, II, II, 2)

If Jesus was merely the greatest man who ever lived, or a lesser form of God, then the cross again begins to appear as a sacrificial rite, where God’s justice must be appeased with blood. Jesus, then, as the best man, offers a sacrifice for all humanity. But Jesus was in fact God incarnate. Thus, again in the Pope’s words, “it is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him… God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them… The cross is not an offer from mankind to the wrathful God, but the expression of that foolish love of God’s that gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way around.” (Ibid. II, II, 3) Jesus died for our sins, not as a blood sacrifice, but because only by passing through death, even through the gates of hell, can he bear us up with him. This is how he cleanses us with his blood.

How remarkable! Jesus really loved us that much! Jesus is our Virgil, guiding through every terror of our lives, but then he even goes so far as to die with us in order that we, who have earned none of the love we seek, might achieve perfect love. Jesus not only leads the path out of hell, he shares in the suffering of hell, of his own accord, that he might destroy it. Only our selfishness, our egotistical greed, has allowed a place without love—hell—to continue to exist.

It seems ridiculous to believe that God could be so close. We set God in a cloud, not believing he could touch us, and thus we do not need to touch God. Jesus shatters that possibility. Jesus says, yes, it is ridiculous. But love is ridiculous. Love knows no bounds and will defy logic for its be-loved. Jesus says I am love. You are my beloved. This is what I am willing to endure for you!

Dwell on this for a moment. Think about this love that Jesus gave. Contemplate the terror of the cross—the utter hell he endured! Could you willingly endure such horror, even for the sake of your beloved? Yea, not only to endure it for the beloved, but to endure it at the hands of the beloved! What terrible pain of body, and what worse pain of heart Jesus suffered! Next time you feel tempted to blame God for your suffering, realize that God has faced suffering much worse than your own!

In Jesus, God, the Omnipotent Creator stands in solidarity with creation. When Jesus faces the terror of the cross he gives us the courage to stand firm in our darkest hours. This is the love God has for us, that he became one of us. Jesus truly took the sins of the world on his shoulders that day at Golgotha. How he must have suffered, not just in the pain, but to bear the creation he had so lovingly made spitting on him and scourging him. In Jesus, God shows himself to so love the world and pity its suffering to come into it and share its suffering, that by example, the world could have hope.

Let us reflect again on Michelangelo’s two Jesuses. God willingly became the limp, weak frame of the “Pieta.” If we have love, need we fear the wrathful Jesus of “The Last Judgement?” When we die will we face the upraised arm that casts the sinners down to their doom, or will we meet our friend, our own Virgil, the Jesus who walked with us through life’s misery? We all have failed. We all deserve to be punished for our selfishness and rejection of love. We should all be fearful of judgement. But take heart, for the Jesus who judges is none other than he who shared our sufferings and temptations. We fall at the judge’s feet, begging mercy, but he stoops down to lift our chin, saying, “Fear not, it is I.” (Revelation 1:17, Mark 6:50)