Jesus Christ
"Christ Jesus ... Who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men and in habit as found in a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross, for which cause God also has exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names." — Philippians 2:6-9
Jesus Christ is not only the namesake but the sine qua non of the Christian religion, its central and uniting figure and the focus of its devotion. His names and titles are many: the Lord, the Word of God, Emmanuel ("God is with us"), the Suffering Servant, the Lion of Judah, the New Adam, the Bridegroom, the Eternal Wisdom of God, the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek, “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6) … In the four Gospels of the New Testament, the title Jesus of Nazareth most often claims for himself is “the Son of Man,” an identity that springs from a prophecy contained in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. However, all four Gospels are quite clear in identifying Jesus as the “Son of God,” and not in a merely metaphysical way. For the Nicene Creed, inspired by the Gospel according to John, Jesus is the eternal Logos, or Word, of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, coeval with and eternally begotten of God the Father: Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum Verum de Deo Vero “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.” In a similar vein, the Gospel According to Mark opens with the scene of Jesus’ baptism, upon which a voice from the heavens declares that “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased” (1:11). And the Gospels of Matthew and Luke famously present Nativity stories that likewise affirm Jesus’ divine paternity: his conception by the Holy Spirit of God, his human descent from the royal House of David, and his gestation and birth from the Virgin Mary. Jesus’ disciple Peter makes the point most vividly when he confesses, in answer to Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?”, that “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 17:16).
The Greek term Christos that Peter uses is a direct translation of the Hebrew term Messiah (“the Anointed One”), the prophesied holy messenger-hero who would deliver Israel from her bondage, in fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, Malachi, and others. But the Gospel accounts show that while the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth may have expected a political Messiah who would rescue Israel from the yoke of Roman authority, what they instead got was a deliverer whose goal was not narrowly political, and who in fact evaded political labels: a teacher who radically reimagined what the Kingdom of God, governed by the law of love, could be like, even on earth; a holy man who shared his table with social outcasts (lepers, paupers, tax-collectors, publicans, prostitutes, the “unclean”); a human being, a mere man, the supposed son of a provincial carpenter, who nonetheless read himself into the history of Israel’s salvation, who radically reinterpreted traditional Jewish religious teachings, and who took upon himself the authority to forgive sins in the name of his Father in heaven; the Son of God who laid down his life in humble and patient defiance of religious and secular powers, suffering a violent and ignominious death through crucifixion, and who rose from the dead on the third day. Having conquered death, he offered deliverance from sins and eternal life to all who would follow him. And what neither his disciples nor the powers he opposed expected in the least was that Jesus of Nazareth was, in some mysterious way, God himself, the creator of the entire universe, humbling and emptying himself to become incarnate in the world in order to remake and renew all his creation. Most medieval Christians encountered the life of Jesus as part of the cycle of liturgical readings from the Gospel accounts that were read throughout the year. Ecclesiastical sculpture, stained glass windows, hymns and, in the later Middle Ages, the cycle of mystery plays also reinforced many individual episodes in the popular memory. While the four Gospels all give somewhat differing versions of Jesus’ biography, probably most Christians, then as now, experienced these as a kind of composite: bits of the complete story were to be found in John, bits in Matthew, etc. In fact, gospel harmonies — books that co-ordinated the fragments found in the Four Gospels into a coherent chronological narrative — existed as early as the second century and continued to be produced throughout the Middle Ages. And so the story goes: Not long after Christ became Incarnate and was born of the Virgin Mary, he and his family were forced to flee into exile in Egypt for a number of years to avoid the violence threatened by the Roman client-king, Herod the Great. By age twelve, Jesus and has family had returned to Nazareth in Galilee, and the boy was showing early signs of his remarkable abilities as a teacher. At about the age of thirty, he began a three-year public ministry first by receiving baptism in the River Jordan from the hands of his cousin, the holy prophet John the Baptist, and then by spending a forty-day fast in the desert, where he successfully resisted three temptations from the Devil. Upon his return to human society, he gathered to himself a group of twelve devoted disciples and set out teaching to private persons and to crowds, healing the sick, raising the dead, casting out demons, and performing a wide variety of other miracles. He turned water to wine, he calmed the storm, he walked on water, he multiplied loaves and fishes to feed his hungry listeners. Through sermons, discourses, and parables, Jesus proclaimed God’s love and the forgiveness of sins, and he encouraged his listeners to reform their lives in anticipation of the coming Kingdom of Heaven, exhorting them to lead their lives in accordance with the law of charity. “A new commandment I give unto you,” he declares in the Gospel According to John, “That ye love one another; as I have loved you” (13:34). In the Gospel According to Mark, when asked by the scribes which commandment is the most important of all, he answers: “The first is ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31). Jesus’ message was an extension and deepening of the commandments of Hebrew Scripture, and he seems to have known it. It is perhaps no surprise that he eventually fell foul of the religious authorities in Roman Judea. All four Gospel accounts suggests that it was Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, celebrated by medieval Christians on Palm Sunday (the final Sunday before Easter), that sealed his fate. After a Last Supper with his followers, in which he instituted the mysterious memorial of his impending death that later Christians would celebrate as the Eucharist, Jesus was betrayed by his disciple Judas Iscariot and arrested by the Temple authorities, hastily tried and convicted of blasphemy, and condemned to death with the collaboration of the Roman state under the local leadership of the provincial governor Pontius Pilate. Like many other convicted criminals under Roman law, Jesus was crucified — some of the Gospel writers say on the eve of the Jewish Passover. The Gospels then tell of how he was tortured, mocked, executed, and buried, and how he rose from the dead on the third day. He made several post-resurrection appearances to his disciples and others; his risen body was both marvelous (he seemed to walk through walls) and also quite solidly real, still carrying the wounds of his crucifixion. Forty days after rising from the dead, he ascended to heaven, promises being given that he would return at the end of time. Patristic and medieval authorities, taking their cue mainly from the New Testament accounts, saw in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ both the fulfillment of Hebrew Scripture in a narrow sense (he was seen as the “Suffering Servant” prophesied by Isaiah, for instance), but they also looked upon Christ as the allegorical counterpart to a number of other significant biblical figures. In proclaiming a “New Covenant,” Jesus stood as a new Moses. In his descent from the ancient Israelite King David, and especially in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus appeared as a rightful king returning to his throne. Following St Paul (1 Corinthians 15), countless later patristic and medieval writers regarded Jesus also as the Second Adam: where the original Adam had eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and thus, as medieval believers saw it, fell into Sin and Death, Christ as the New Adam demonstrated that a life of full obedience to the will of God, even obedience unto death (Philippians 2:8), would inaugurate a life that was more powerful even than death itself. The implications of Jesus’ Incarnation and Resurrection were cosmic, a restoration and renewal of the entirety of creation. As St Paul writes, at the coming of Christ “creation itself also will be delivered from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of glory of the sons of God” (Romans 8:21). Nonetheless, countless medieval homilists found in Jesus’ teachings a core of remarkably wise and useful ethical content, one immediately applicable to normal people in their daily lives. Jesus’ ministry modeled a new moral code, one of non-violence, non-aggression, and the cultivation of charitable behavior. The Beatitudes, which constitute the opening salvo of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel according to Matthew 5-7, capture the radicality of the Christian ethos: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Jesus sets humility over pride, peace over victory, poverty over wealth, mercy over retaliation. The rest of the Sermon on the Mount underscores these points, often with vivid examples: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (5:22); “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (5:39); “Judge not, that you be not judged” (7:1); “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven … For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (6:19-21). While the Beatitudes in Jesus’ day must have contrasted dramatically with the cruelty and corruption of the Roman state and the hypocrisy of the religious authorities within Judea, their ethical message was also eminently adaptable to emerging medieval realities. Powerful and callous rulers, violent marauders, corrupt local officials (including sometimes even Christian clergy) — along with all the petty, venal, apathetic, and hypocritical people one could find in any province of Christendom — may have represented for the medieval mind what wicked Caesar, Herod, and all the centurions, Pharisees, and Sadducees represented to Jesus and his earliest followers.
Despite the prominence of the Christian ethical message, which provided innumerable points of departure for holy living, for homiletic exhortation, and for moral courage, Jesus Christ was not perceived primarily as a wise teacher in the Middle Ages. (This would be an innovation of eighteenth-century Deism and nineteenth-century liberal theology.) Jesus was instead revered as the Savior of the human race, or at least of all good Christians. It is in this salvific role that Jesus’ moral teachings are best understood. As both the eternal and divine Son of God and also as a fully human historical person, Jesus was considered to inhabit a unique position from which to enact such a salvation. It was specifically Jesus’ death on the Cross — and his subsequent Resurrection on the third day — that was thought to be the great act of redemption of humans from sin, death, and their enslavement to the evil “principalities and powers” (Ephesians 6:12) of this world. Although theories about the precise theological mechanics developed over the centuries, Jesus’ execution was believed to somehow make atonement for human sin. Moreover, Jesus’ status as the Incarnation on earth of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity showed how the salvation of human beings was accomplished through God’s own initiative. As the Gospel according to John puts it: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that anyone who believes in him will not perish but may have eternal life” (3:16). The Incarnation of the Word of God on earth thus stands as an expression of God’s love for the created world. The emphasis in the New Testament — especially in the Gospel According to John and in the letters of Paul — is on Jesus as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, and so Jesus is sometimes described as the Lamb of God,” the sacrificial lamb. Accordingly, an essential part of the Christian liturgy was the recitation of the brief Agnus Dei prayer: Agnus Dei, qui tollit peccata mundi, miserere nobis (“Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us”). The crucifixion of the Son of God is represented at the more mystical and symbolic level as the slaughter of the sacrificial lamb. For early and medieval Christians, this sacrifice saves, cleanses, redeems, the faithful; in some mysterious but definite way it effects the forgiveness of sins. Again, the specific beliefs about exactly how such a sacrifice really works varied and developed throughout the Middle Ages. But suffice it to say that because of his Incarnation and crucifixion, and because of the continuous reminders of his saving presence in the Eucharist offered in every Christian mass, Jesus Christ remained probably more than the other two persons of the Holy Trinity, the focus of worship, adoration, and emulation for Christians throughout the period. If the image of Christ as the sacrificial Lamb and Redeemer of sins appeals to the desires of the faithful for a benevolent sense of the divine, the religious tradition also found a place for Christ as the final judge of the world at the end of time: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” the Creed reminded Christians. The image of Jesus as the ultimate judge also doubtless reinforced the idea — common especially in the earlier half of the Middle Ages — of Christ as the ruler of the entire cosmos (Christos Pantocrator). As the King, so to speak, of all Creation, a central part of Christ’s role was thus to sit as judge, both over the world as a whole and over the conscience of each individual soul. At the same time, emphasis developed as early as the ninth or tenth centuries, of the reality of the sufferings of Christ on the Cross, of the sheer magnitude of the pains he suffered on behalf of mankind. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the sufferings of Jesus had become a frequent focus of contemplative prayer. And so the spiritual (and emotional) valence of Jesus throughout the Middle Ages was a complex and ever-evolving one. The Christus Victor, the eternal Word of God and glorious Redeemer of the world who triumphed over death, existed side by side in the minds and hearts of medieval Christians with the Christ who suffered an agonizing death on the Cross, who came into the world as an infant, who loved his mother, who enjoyed the company of his disciples and of all the poor and downtrodden, who had wept at the death of his friend Lazarus. For the author of the Saxon epic Heliand, Christ could be presented as a king, surrounded by his band of disciple-warriors, meekly but valiantly accepting his death on the cross. The Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood” even imagines Christ leaping upon the cross, accepting his fate with all the bravado of a pagan warrior. On the other hand, certain other medieval Christians registered the full impact of Jesus’ humanity, especially after the twelfth century. Both Anselm of Canterbury and the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux emphasize the many ways in which the intense human suffering of Christ on the cross could (and should) enhance the subjective experiences of individual believers in both their prayer life and their practical life; Aelred of Rievaulx, in a gripping short treatise, paints with moving detail a picture of Jesus at the age of twelve, sought out by his worried parents and lecturing to the Temple elders in Jerusalem. Along similar lines, one thinks of Francis of Assisi’s trust in the benevolent — and deeply human — friendship of Christ, leading the saint and his followers to lives of peace, poverty, charity, and humility. In the later Middle Ages, the emphasis on Christ’s humanity had developed into what is known as affective piety, a devotional mode that encouraged highly personal emotional responses to the events of Christ’s life. St Bridget of Sweden, for instance, reported intense visions of Christ as a newborn baby in the Manger. The religious arts of the day also emphasized Christ’s broken body in scenes of his deposition from the Cross or of the intense sorrow of his mother Mary. Likewise, Richard Rolle meditates with great emotive detail on the Passion and Crucifixion. One considers also the English anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose mystical visions — initiated by her deathbed prayer before a crucifix — construed Jesus as brother, lover, friend, and even mother! For the fifteenth-century mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe, the thought of Christ’s sufferings precipitated frequent and uncontrollable weeping. And the Dutch-German Thomas à Kempis’s book, The Imitation of Christ stands as perhaps the spiritual classic for the generations before the Reformation, capturing with great vigor the ways in which individual Christians could enrich their inner lives by placing Jesus at the center of all their thoughts. But even putting the affective efflorescence of the late Middle Ages aside, it was nonetheless true that for nearly all medieval Christians, Jesus — as encountered on the altar, in the reading of Scripture, in sermons and popular drama, in private prayer — was the cornerstone of their religious faith. In Jesus Christ the roles of Redeemer and Judge, God and Man, Lion and Lamb, coexisted in a perennially bountiful spiritual tension. |
"I and the Father are one." — The Gospel According to John 10:30 "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find my rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light." — The Gospel According to Matthew 11:28-30 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep." — The Gospel According to John 10:11 "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage." — Epistle to the Hebrews 2:14-15 |
"He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible ... He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the Church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross." — Epistle to the Colossians 1:15-20
The Crucifixion, from the facsimile of Herrad von Landsberg's Hortus Deliciarum (German, early 12th cent.). Jesus is crucified between two thieves; at the top, the curtain shielding the Holy of Holies in the Temple is rent at the moment of Christ's death; at the bottom the dead rise in anticipation of the general resurrection; an allegorical figure of the Church catches Christ's blood in a chalice.
Further Reading
- Aelred of Rievaulx, On Jesus at the Age of Twelve, trans. Geoffrey Webb and Adrian Walker (A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1956)
- Anselm of Canterbury, "Prayer to Christ" and "Prayer to the Holy Cross" in Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Benedicta Ward (Penguin, 1973)
- Athanasius, On the Incarnation , trans. John Behr (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2012)
- Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, in Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (Paulist Press, 1987)
- Raymond Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (Paulist Press, 1994)
- Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (University of California Press, 1984)
- "The Dream of the Rood," in A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, trans. Richard Hamer (Faber & Faber, 2015)
- The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, trans. G. Ronald Murphy (Oxford University Press, 1992)
- Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, trans. John Behr (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997)
- Julian of Norwich, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise Baker (Norton, 2004)
- Anthony N. S. Lane, Bernard of Clairvaux: Theologian of the Cross (Liturgical Press, 2013)
- Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2017)
- E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin, 1996)
- Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Joseph N. Tylenda (Vintage, 1998)