Humanity Of Christ

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Christ be to you. We have emphasized to a great extent the divinity of Christ, and rightly so. But it often happens that we forget the humanity of Christ. And it is of that that we would speak. There are two verses in the Scripture, one from Isaiah and the other from the Epistle of the Hebrews, which seem to be contradictory. Isaiah says that our blessed Lord was reckoned with the transgressors, or sinners, in the Epistle of the Hebrews, that he was separated from sinners. One with them, and at the same time, not with them. He was with them, reckoned with sinners, inasmuch as in his human nature he took upon himself all of the penalties of sin. He was separated simply because he was God, and also because even in his human nature he was like to us in all things save sin. Now we will penetrate rather deeply into the meaning of this human nature that Christ assumed. Remember it had no human personality. In a certain sense, therefore, the human nature of our blessed Lord was unlimited. It was almost as if, for example, we had a playground on which there were no fences or walls. Then all children could come into this playground. Now the human nature of Christ, simply because it was not capped, it was not limited or confined by a human personality, could embrace within itself all the human natures of the world. In other words, that human nature of Christ represented, to a great extent, the human nature of every single person that has ever lived. You read his genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew, and in the genealogy of Luke, you will find saints, but you will also find sinners. There was a bar sinister in his description. We find Gentile women like Ruth, we find a public sinner like Rahab, and these were typical of the humanity that Christ assumed into himself when he became incarnate, but also every single human being that would ever be born until the end of time was incorporated into this humanity. Hence, there is not a Buddhist, there is not a Confucianist, there is not a Communist, there is not a sinner, there is not a saint that is not in some way in this human nature of Christ. You are in it. Your neighbor next door is in it. Every persecutor of the church is in it. When therefore we are puzzled about how other people are saved, we need only realize that here is implicitly all salvation, all men in Christ. They may not recognize their incorporation to Christ, but in a certain sense, every person in the world is implicitly a Christian, implicitly, is in that human nature. Or go back and think of all of the repercussions of the sin of Adam. There isn't an Arab, there isn't an American, there isn't a European, there isn't an Asiatic in the world who does not feel within himself something of the complexes, the contradictions, the contrarieties, the civil wars, the rebellions inside of his human nature which he has inherited from Adam. We all struggle against temptation. And why? Simply because our human nature was disordered in the beginning. Let me tell you, there is a terrific monotony about human nature. You must not think that you are the only one in the world who has a tortured soul. Now if the sin of Adam had so many repercussions in every human being that has ever lived, shall we deny that the incarnation of our blessed Lord has had a greater repercussion? Can it be that the sin of one man shall have greater effects in disordering human nature than the incarnation of the Son of God has in ordering all humanity? That is why I say that everybody in the world is implicitly Christian. They may not make themselves explicitly Christian, but that is not the fault of Christ. He took their humanity upon himself. Just suppose that there was a great plague which affected a wide area of the world. And some doctor in his laboratory found the remedy for this plague and made it available to everyone. There would be some who would seek the remedy. There would be others who would not. They might say, how do I know he has the remedy? Why should I bother? I will cure myself. Are they not all potentially saved? It is certainly not the fault of the scientists that they are not cured. It is the fault of people themselves. And so it is with the person of Christ. He brought salvation to all men. All. And it is up to us to find that salvation in him. That is one of the reasons why our blessed Lord was so hopeful about humanity. He always saw men the way he originally designed them. He saw through the surface the grime and the dirt the real man underneath. He never identified a person with sin. He saw sin as something alien and foreign. Something that did not belong to a man. Something that mastered him, but from which he could be freed in order to be his real self. Just as every mother sees beneath the dirt on the face of her child her own image and likeness. God always saw the divine image and likeness beneath us. He looked on us very much the same way that a bride looks on a bridegroom the day of the marriage. And as a bridegroom looks on a bride. Each and every one of them are at their best. Later on in life they may fall away from this ideal. Or perhaps they will forget the ideal. One day a woman came to me and told me that she could never love her husband again. And I told her to try and think back of how much she loved him the day of the marriage. And they stood side by side at the altar. For that is the way he really was. What the woman had to do was to see beneath the distorted image the real person to whom she committed her life. And this is precisely what our Lord does in coming to this earth. Even when men raged and stormed beneath his cross he saw them as homeless and unhappy children of the Father in heaven. Before them he grieved. Before them he died. This is the vision our Lord has of humanity. But now we want to bring this home in a little more intimate way. And here we're going to take a term called transference. And try to make clear what the humanity of our blessed Lord did in relationship to our sins and our suffering. There are three kinds of transference in the life of Christ. There is physical transference. There is psychic transference. And there is moral transference. If our blessed Lord did not come to this earth to undergo every single kind of agony and torture and pain that we ourselves suffer, then we could say does God know what it is to suffer? Did he ever go without food? Was he ever betrayed? Was he ever blind? Let me tell you the best way to describe our blessed Lord's humanity is that he is a God who took his own medicine. He made man free. Man abused that freedom and brought upon himself all of the ills that he is heir to. And God came down and took upon himself a human nature in order that he might feel every kind of torture of the human soul and every twisting pain of a human body. That is what I mean by transference. First of all, physical transference. We read about this in the gospel, namely that our blessed Lord took upon himself our sicknesses and our illness. I was always very much disturbed about this particular passage because there seems to be no record that our Lord was ever sick. He must have had a very perfect human nature. After all, he was conceived by the divine spirit of love and also born of a woman who was immaculate in seed. Therefore, his physical organism must have been a perfect specimen of manhood. This seems also to be indicated by the mere fact I suppose every woman wants to be the mother of a great son and one day when our Lord was preaching some woman shouted out in the crowd Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the breast that nursed thee. She would have loved to have been the mother of that man. And then too when we find these soldiers and the enemies crowning him with thorns, beating, scourging, buffeting him spitting in his face, ridiculing him what did all this mean but an attempt to drag this lovely human nature of Christ down to their level. They could not bear the majesty of his being as they would rob a man of his reputation so also they would rob him of the nobility of his character. So our Lord must have had a perfect human nature. But this passage, he took upon himself our sicknesses and our illnesses. What does sacred scripture mean by that? I think for about two years I have been pondering over in my mind that passage. And the answer came in reading the work of a famous Swiss psychiatrist. He tells the story of two doctors both of whom had healing hands. One of the doctors stated that whenever he healed anyone that something of the sickness of that other person passed to himself. The other doctor stated that he often cured patients of angina. And he had to give up healing because he suffered so many attacks of angina. Is not this the key? Now let us go into some of the cures of our Lord. We often read in the gospel that when he cured the deaf and the dumb and the blind that he sighed. We read that when he rose Lazarus from the dead he groaned. I believe that at that moment our blessed Lord took upon himself the ills and the sicknesses of others. When he cured a blind man I think that he felt inside of himself not just the blindness of that one man but all the blindness of men that have ever lived. So there is not a blind man in the world in that deep cavern of senses where there is no light who could ever say, did Christ know what it was to be blind? Yes, he did. And the dumb? The mongoloids? Did he feel that? Yes, he the Word, the eternal Word felt their dumbness. Not just of that one dumb person whom he healed but of every single dumb person. And when he rose the dead and brought them back to newness of life I think he felt the agony of death. He went into that fear as we know he actually did in the garden of Gethsemane. St. Paul tells us that he died for all men. In other words, the death that each and every one of us will have to undergo. Christ himself felt. He knows what death is. Knows what your fear of death is. This is the Christ that comes to you. That is why we say he is the only one that can ever understand your illnesses and your sickness, and why? Simply because he has that sickness, that illness inside of himself. He brought it for you and with you in order that you may have strength and patience as he did. But then there was not only physical transference he also suffered psychic transference. By psychic transference I mean that he took upon himself all the loneliness of people their mental ills the tragic effects of their psychoses and neuroses. He felt all of the darkness of the atheist. He knew what it was to be a skeptic and a doubter. He knew what went on in the heart of any man who raises a clenched fist. Of all those who hate so much that their mouths are craters of hate and volcanoes of blasphemy. After all, if our blessed Lord was to redeem the atheist and the communist he had to know how it felt to be an atheist, did he not? And how it felt to be a communist? He had to feel their God-forsakenness as his own. And that is why on the cross his darkness crept into his soul. He confessed to his father in his human nature his utter abandonment. So he uttered that mysterious shriek My God! My God! Why? Why hast thou abandoned me? Here he traversed the darkest valleys and deserts of mystery with all human brothers. We might almost say that this is a moment when God was almost an atheist. It was a moment when he almost went into hell. But with this difference that in that terrible torment of loneliness he cried to God. And so from that moment on when anyone says he is forsaken by God or he denies God he must realize that he has a brother who endured the bitterness of separation to the very last extremity of Golgotha. And if he showed the way then we can find the way out too. This was the loneliness of Christ in the garden and the loneliness on the cross. Like a sponge the silence of our Lord soaked up all the evil. And because he soaked it up evil lost all of its strength. After all, when an atheist complains about the ugliness and evil of the world does he not know in his inmost heart that this is not the way the world was intended to be? He is affirming the very existence of God by the intensity of his complaint. Without God there would be no one to complain to. And in his complaint he has Christ to whom he can go. And finally there was moral transference. Moral transference of sin. Sacred scripture says that our blessed Lord was made sin. By that it is meant that he took upon himself all of the sins of the world as if they were his own. Every blasphemy was put upon his lips as if he himself had spoken the blasphemy. Every theft was in his hand as if he himself had committed the theft. This flesh hanging from him was in token of all the rebellion of the flesh of the world. He knew what sin was. Perhaps I can make this clear to you by telling you that some years ago a girl wrote to me from a large city of this country telling me that at the age of 18 she went to her first dance. She went in company with her cousin. Her house was some distance from the gate. Her cousin dropped her at the gate and in that distance between the gate and the front porch she was attacked by a stranger. In due time she found herself with child. The only ones who would believe her were her mother and the pastor. Neighbor women said oh isn't it terrible the poor woman has one bad daughter. Some girls in the choir would not allow her to sing because she was wicked. And she told me of all of this torture that she endured and she said what's the answer. I wrote back to her and I said my dear girl all of this suffering has come upon you simply because you bore the sin of one man. I therefore assume that if you ever bore the sins of ten men you probably would have suffered ten times more. If you ever took upon yourself the sins of a hundred men your sufferings would have been a hundred times worse. And if you ever took upon yourself the sins of all the world you might have had a bloody sweat. That's where your sin was and mine in that bloody sweat on Calvary. In this human nature that so loved us that we call it the sacred heart. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S. call 818-331-3549. Please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.