A Moment of Time Gave the Meaning

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time, A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time, A moment in time, but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning. 

—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

On the matter of Christ’s alleged appearance among men, an event which we call the Incarnation of God, there is little room to maneuver once you’ve eliminated either madness or mendacity as an explanation for it. Leaving what? Only the bedrock certainty that it happened, which is to say, a miracle. And because that’s the one remaining option on the table, our acceptance of it becomes less a function of faith than of sheer historical fact.  

In other words, if the evidence exonerates Jesus of either lying or lunacy, then perhaps He really was the Logos of God. Yes, it really did happen! From out of eternity into time, at a still point amid the turning world, God somehow entered the human story in order to make it His-story. And by doing so, He redeemed the whole broken world.  

So, we’re not expected to solve a religious or philosophical question here. It matters not one whit whether the idea of God becoming man pleases the mind or the heart, because it’s not about an idea at all. And, in any case, if He never bothered showing up in the first place, what difference does it make on what basis an appeal is made for the idea? Christianity does not stand or fall as an idea or a supposition spun out of some Platonic head but as an event out of history, drawn from out of the great sea of the past. Meanwhile, says Eliot right at the beginning of Four Quartets, 

What might have been is an abstraction, 
Remaining a perpetual possibility 
Only in a word of speculation.

Thus do we speculate when, taking leave of reality, we wander off into realms of pure ethereality. All the claims concerning Christ must, therefore, come down to a matter of sheer historicity. Did He or did He not appear as one of us? There is no other alternative to choose from this side of the asylum. We are necessarily wedded, as Joseph Ratzinger once put it, to “the ineradicable positivity of the Christian story”—a story tethered to history, even as its source, the teller of the tale, transcends history.  All the claims concerning Christ must, therefore, come down to a matter of sheer historicity. Did He or did He not appear as one of us?Tweet This

“The Christian message is this,” reports Luigi Giussani in a short, seminal work entitled At the Origin of the Christian Claim: 

a man who ate, walked, and lived the normal life of a man proclaimed: “I am your destiny,” “I am he of whom the whole Cosmos is made.” Objectively, this is the only case in history where a man did not declare himself divine in a generic way, but substantially identified himself with God.

If, however, He was not who He said He was, then He must have been either mad or mendacious to have kept on saying it. “Now it seems to me obvious,” declares C.S. Lewis in his masterful exposition from Mere Christianity, “that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and, consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God.”

Neatly put, I’d say. Which, if it be true, then the first and most obvious possibility of our believing it is neither a set of propositions we affirm as true nor a series of precepts we pronounce as good. Rather, it is the embrace of a living Person whom we acknowledge as divine and absolute, who freely entered our world in order to rescue all that was lost, and whom I am singularly blest to encounter in the human being Jesus. The Christian claim is nothing less than the fact that thanks to a wholly unforeseen, undeserved eruption of eternity into time, of the glory of the Lord into the grime and the grit of a fallen world, we have all been gathered up, placed upon the lap of the Lord of heaven and earth.

At a single stroke, no less, the long estrangement between ourselves and God, the loss of atonement which has left us divided and dispersed, has ended. The fulfillment for which we were fashioned from the start, but which sin deprived us of almost from the beginning, does not depend on anything we do. We must cease, therefore, our striving, our pining after a perfection we cannot provide, could never ourselves give, but may yet freely receive. 

We needn’t pretend any longer to be Prometheus; we can instead remain paupers, with arms outstretched waiting to receive the God of the Universe. Because the Mystery Itself has come into our history, moving at every turn among the poor creatures He made for glory. God wished to become one of us, pitching His tent in our midst, so that, “Infinity dwindled to infancy,” we may be united with Him in the most intimate and lasting way possible. 

Giussani explains, 

If God had manifested a particular will in a particular way in human history, if he charted a pathway of his own leading us to him, the central issue of the religious phenomenon would cease to be man attempting to imagine God, even though this attempt is the greatest expression of human dignity; instead, the whole issue would lie in freedom’s pure and simple gesture of acceptance or rejection.

Not unlike that simplest of all recognitions, which is “the reaction of one who, watching out for the arrival of a friend, singles him out of the crowd and greets him.” It would be the meeting of one person with Another, who, for all that He has drawn so close that I may now stretch forth my hands and touch Him, is yet the Wholly Other, who dwells in light too blinding for our eyes to see.