Avoiding the Perversion of our Christian Anthropology

In the suffering servant discourse, the Prophet Isaiah asks, “Who has believed what we have heard?” The question serves as a revelatory precursor of what will transpire with the Son of God Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Isaiah continues by telling us how the Son of God will come to be and how he will be rejected and despised by men, men of sorrow associated with grief. Jesus would be borne from our griefs and carry our sorrows, wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made him whole, and with his stripes, we are healed.[1]

Isaiah’s description of the Messiah Jesus Christ reveals that our relationship with God had drifted both spiritually and morally to the point that the foundation of our identity as His children had been spiritually and physically disfigured. Sin had become a friend instead of an enemy. The idea that we should naturally pay homage to God the Father was now questioned. Hence the proclamation from Isaiah of the one who is to bear our sins will come to restore our identity with God the Father through him as the Son of God the Word made flesh.

A principal tenet found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Incarnation came to make us partakers of the Divine Nature,[2] meaning that we will now receive the privilege of participating in the life of Christ, the Paschal Mystery to restore our identity with God our Father through the Son. The notion of our identity is further amplified with Jesus assuming a human nature so that He made man might make men gods.[3] Isaiah’s discourse also reveals a significant aspect of the entire salvific narrative based on the suffering servant discourse, many rejected the message of the Messiah and his miraculous acts of healing, deliverance, and consecration. The life of Jesus, his Words, actions, and suffering demands a conversion of heart if we choose to follow him.

The identity of our Christian anthropology requires a trustful and unimpeded acceptance of the works of the Father through the Son. If Christ died to atone for our sins, which he did, his redemptive act reveals the fullness of God’s love for us and invites us to seek healing and everlasting life.

Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross, Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the “sin of the world,”¹¹³ of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.^[4]

Isaiah provides a redemptive bridge of the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb in Exodus with the true Paschal lamb. Christ himself completes the entire Paschal Mystery narrative and reveals the reality of our Christian anthropology as sons and daughters lovingly created in God’s image and likeness.

The Scriptures had foretold this divine plan of salvation through the putting to death of “the righteous one, my Servant” as a mystery of universal redemption, that is, as the ransom that would free men from the slavery of sin. Citing a confession of faith that he himself had “received,” St. Paul professes that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.”³⁹⁸ In particular Jesus’ redemptive death fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy of the suffering Servant. Indeed Jesus himself explained the meaning of his life and death in the light of God’s suffering Servant.⁴⁰⁰ After his Resurrection he gave this interpretation of the Scriptures to the disciples at Emmaus, and then to the apostles.^[5]

The connection from the suffering servant discourse in the Old Testament to the Crucifixion in the New Testament reveals the reality of our identity as children of God and reminds us that our entire identity is directed toward a desire for eternal life.[6] The anthropology of our Christian heritage is firmly and intimately bound through God’s love for us first as human beings created in his image and likeness, and second, the resuscitation of our identity through Jesus Christ the Incarnate Word who was offered up by God the Father to atone for our sinful disobedience to the will of God.

Whether a perversion of our Christian anthropology is driven by indifference, ignorance, hostility, anger, or self-worship, the result in all cases is a complete deviation from the Paschal Mystery and a loving relationship with God. The notion of sin, forgiveness, repentance, mercy, creed, sacraments, moral life, and prayer becomes dissociated from Jesus Christ. When Jesus entered the temple to be with His Father[7] he told his mother Mary after she frantically asked him why he had treated both she and Joseph by running off, Jesus calmly told the Blessed Mother, I must be in my Father’s house.[8] The most important statement between Jesus and Mary is Jesus’ exclamation, “I must” meaning that nothing else mattered than being with His Father, as a Father with his son. Romano Guardini best describes the perversion of our Christian anthropology in the following way,

Let us once more project ourselves imaginatively into what it must mean when a man is there full of the profoundest insight into what is necessary for everyone's salvation, full of the purest sort of love, ready to open his heart, to offer himself, to be of help. And then he comes and speaks to one, and another, and encounters distrust here and incomprehension there, mocking laughter, and hostility is what Jesus had to go through. And it was much worse than that: ungodly, dreadful! He carried within Himself the truth which came from God. He was bringing with that immeasurable healing power which could say, Come unto me, all of you, and I will refresh you. He knew how things stood with people and the world, and He had the power to remove the very foundations of distress. But everywhere He ran up against a blank wall. Such suffering as this indeed must have been terrible. But the worst of it was that it never let up; the darkness never gave way to light, the closed hearts never opened the least bit. Instead, everything only grew flintier, more obscure than before, more hostile, right up to the hour of the Powers of Darkness. This gives us some conception what sin is, and the Fall of Creation, to have such a thing be possible as this blindness and hardening of hearts.[9]

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) in his book on Faith, Hope, and Love provides us with an antidote to ward off any perversion of our Christian identity,

The challenge of the Cross is something quite different. It reaches deeper” it demands that I give my ego to Jesus’ hands, not so that he may destroy it but so that in him it may become free and expand. The “yes” of Jesus Christ that I hand on is only really his if it has also become completely mine. . . Holiness does not consist in adventurous achievements of virtue, but in joining him in loving.[10]

As we spiritually prepare to engage the season of Lent, let us not forget what the Son of Man did and continues to offer us through the holy sacrifice of the mass, an opportunity to encounter Him in the Holy Eucharist, strengthen our Christian identity, and experience a foretaste of heaven.