The Christ: Luminous Paradox

(5/6/23)

[“While not seeing (You), (we) love (You); while not seeing (You) now, (we) believe in (You); all the while (we are) filled with joy both inexpressible and glorious” (I P 1:8; see also Jn 20:29).] 

O Lover,

Not surprisingly, shimmering paradoxes repeatedly surface throughout Your heílsgeschichte (“salvation history”). Arguably primary among these is that having to do with Your Anointed. 

On the one hand, the Christ is declared the enfleshment of Your Lógos (“Word” [Jn 1:14]); the one via whom Your Lógos has been made accessible to the human sensorium (auditory, visual, tactile [I Jn 1:1]); the eíkon (visual [Col 1:15; II C 4:4]) of You who are “invisible.” The Anointed is set forth as the concretion, the materialization, the finite rendered of You who transcend all such depiction and characterization. Named Immanuel (“You with us all” [Is 7:14; Mt 1:23]), he is seemingly an accommodation— a concession?—to our human propensity to live at the level of the senses. In the Christian scriptures and subsequent tradition the Christ is proclaimed as Your graphic self-disclosure, a Ta-da! incapsulated in Jesus’s response to Phillip: “the one who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). It is as if You, Ineffable One, wanted to draw us finites, slogging in the trenches of limitation, a picture employing the medium of humanese.

On the other hand, the Christian scriptures repeatedly describe Your Anointed as deferring to You (e.g., Mt 4:10). In response to a religious leader addressing him as “Good Teacher,” the Synoptics have Jesus saying: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Lk 18:18-19 [Mk 10:17-18; Mt 19:16-17]). Add to this the modesty of the Christ, especially in Mark’s gospel, referred to as the “messianic secret” (e.g., Mk 8:29-30). The Apostle Paul describes the Christ as “self-emptying” (kenósis [Phil 2:7]), a text widely viewed as pertaining to his self-disinvestiture of divine prerogatives. With him there would be no “clutching” of equality with You (2:6), certainly no Jesusolatry! It is as if the words of the Christ’s herald, the Baptizer, “he must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30), were his own.

So is the Christ the “effulgence of [Your] divine splendor, the exact representation of [Your] nature” (Heb 1:3)? Or is he one ever pointing toward You (and away from himself)? Yes and yes, and that is the pith of the paradox, the Mystérium of the Incarnation! And the plot, imbued as it is with You, thickens and enters, in the words of Juan de la Cruz, “further, deep into the thicket” (SC,#36). 

This paradoxical thicket seems particularly evident across much of Christian mysticism. While all of my mentoring mystics lean apophátic (“withoutimage, verbiage, linearity, mediation”)to one degree or another, in their embracing of the Christ as definitive and decisive all of them are also kataphátic (“imaged, enworded, mediated”). The paradox means that a Christian mystic cannot be purely apophatic; nor could she be exposed to the full Mystérium of You if purely kataphatic. The core of Christian mysticism is the experiencing of You, ineffable and imageless, this principally via the formatorship of Your anointed Lógos and Eíkon, the Christ, oxymoronically characterized by kenósis (“self-emptying”) and repeated deference to You. The kenósis dimension of the Christ is an abiding prophylactic against the human temptation to absolutize the finite thereby flirting with idolatry. Rather than alternatives to be chosen between or a musical dissonance to be resolved, the paradox of the Christ is one to be savored, simply held, and transformingly grown into.

In short, it is via Your Christ that we are able to offer the (edited) Petrine prayer at the beginning of this post.