The Sacred Humanity of Jesus

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

An elderly lady stood up at a service someplace in Tennessee—elderly, gray hair, heavy German accent. She started talking about how she had been a prisoner, a Jewess in Auschwitz, and she began to narrate how there was a starvation diet.

She realized it, and so she thought, ‘If I'm going to escape, I have to do it while I still have strength.’

So she planned her escape for a certain night to move through the different corridors of the huts of the camp until she got to the exterior. When that night came, she began her journey.

Eventually, she got to the outer barbed wire fences. She looked left and she looked right. There was nobody around, so she started to climb the barbed wire fence.

But then a German soldier appeared and told her to drop to her knees.

She dropped to her knees, sobbing, bloodied. Then he seemed to recognize her, and he said, “Ellie? Is that you, Ellie?”

She looked up and she saw that it was Rolf. They had been classmates in primary school, best of friends. But now he was a Nazi soldier, and she was a Jewess.

She said, “Just go ahead and shoot me, Rolf. I have nothing else to live for.”

He said to her, “Ellie, you're so wrong. I'm going to let you go, but I want you to promise me one thing.”

She said, “Yes, yes, I'll do anything. I promise you anything to get out of this hellhole.”

He said, “Promise me that for the rest of your life, you will keep asking the question: ‘Why does Jesus Christ make life worth living?’”

She said, “Yes, yes, yes. I'll do anything.” And with that, she began to climb the barbed wire fence. She jumped to the other side. She ran to freedom.

She said, “As I ran, I heard a volley of shots ring out, and I looked back over my shoulder, and I saw Rolf fall to the ground.”

“The other soldiers had seen how he had let me escape, so they shot him on the spot.”

She said, “As I ran to freedom, I wondered who this Jesus Christ might be, that somebody would be willing to give his life so that I might know Him.”

Obviously, she had kept her part of the promise.

This meditation is about the Sacred Humanity of Christ.

We come to fall in love with Our Lord Jesus Christ—the essence of our Christian vocation. God is love (1 John 4:8,16). The Church is love. Christ is love.

We come to fall in love with Love —He who is perfect God and perfect man.

“A windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves, but he was asleep. And so they went and woke him, saying, ‘Lord, save us, we are perishing’” (Matt. 8:24-25).

Our Lord “became like us in all things but sin” (Heb. 4:15).

Down through the ages, God spoke through the prophets. He revealed Himself through them.

But then the high point of human history came when God, instead of just speaking to man, became man. Revelation becomes personified in the person of Christ, and that's why our Christian vocation leads us to be so Christo-centric.

Everything is focused on Christ. We see Him everywhere.

In his recent document on Amazonia, the Holy Father said, “Similarly, a relationship with Jesus Christ, true God and true man, liberator and redeemer, is not inimical to the markedly cosmic world view that characterizes the indigenous peoples, since he is also the risen Lord who permeates all things.

“In Christian experience, ‘all the creatures of the material universe find their true meaning in the incarnate Word, for the Son of God has incorporated in his person part of the material world, planting in it a seed of definitive transformation’ (Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’). He is present in a glorious and mysterious way in the river, the trees, the fish, and the wind, as the Lord who reigns in creation without ever losing his transfigured wounds, while in the Eucharist he takes up the elements of this world and confers in all things the meaning of the paschal gift” (Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Point 74, February 2, 2020).

And so, we can learn to see Christ in everything—in people, in places, in events.

There was a poet once who said:

‘I see his blood upon the rose,
And in the stars, the glory of his eyes.
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies” (Joseph Plunkett, I See His Blood Upon the Rose).

We hear a lot about words such as togetherness, community. We used to hear a little more about them in the Church a couple of decades ago.

The recent folks hardly use those words; they use them sparingly. But they talk a lot about Christ, being Christo-centric.

John Paul II has a phrase where he likes to say, ‘In Christ, we find the meaning and the purpose of our life.’ One of his very simple phrases. Very clear, but yet very powerful.

He wasn't just talking to Catholics, but every single person on the planet. Even every person in China finds the meaning and the purpose of their life in Christ. And if we don't find it there, we don't find it anywhere else. And so, the key always is Christ.

We can tell Our Lord in our prayer: Lord, I want to know you a little more. I want to love you a little more.

Thank you for that habit that you've placed in my life of reading the Gospel for a few minutes every day.

Possibly when we started to do that, we never really realized its significance. Those two or three minutes or moments, a word, a phrase would be so important.

Yet over time, those few minutes lead us to have a profound knowledge of Our Lord Jesus Christ—what He said, what He did, how He acted, how He reacted.

“And when he saw the crowds, he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and rejected, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36).

“He called his disciples to him and said, ‘I feel sorry for all these people. They've been with me for three days now and have nothing to eat. I don't want to send them off hungry or they might collapse on the way’” (Matt. 15:32).

Christ had a heart. He felt for people. He lived their lives. He was concerned about them. There was a gentleness about him.

“Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart” (Matt. 11:29).

The whole of our vocation has a purpose to it to convert our lives in Christ. “It is no longer I who live, but he who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

“Put on the Lord Jesus Christ in all situations” (cf. Rom. 13:14). Often that means coming back and beginning again with a deeper focus.

We find that our nets have been a little bit empty, or the places where we're fishing turn out not to be very fruitful.

Our Lord invites us to cast our nets deeper (Luke 5:4). This is a good moment for us to cast our nets deeper in the whole reality of the Humanity of Christ, so that we look at Him from a new optical angle.

Each year we get new graces to go a little deeper.

Pope Francis just said, “By his incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every man” (Gaudium et Spes, Point 22); with his gestures and his words, he illumined his highest and inviolable dignity; in himself, dead and risen, he restored fallen humanity, overcoming the darkness of sin and death; to those who believe in him, he opened the relationship with his Father; with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, he consecrated the Church, a community of believers, as his true body, and participated in his own prophetic, royal, and priestly power, so that he would be in the world as the extension of his own presence and mission, announcing to men of all times the truth, guiding them to the splendor of its light, allowing them to be truly touched and transfigured” (Apostolic Penitentiary, approved by Pope Francis, Note on the Importance of the Internal Forum and the Inviolability of the Sacramental Seal, June 29, 2019).

Our Lord wants to touch our lives, to take us by the hand and lead us forward along the pathway that He's called us to, needing us to understand things a little more, a little deeper—to assimilate His ideals, the greatest ideals that any human person could have on the planet, the ideals of Christ.

He wants us to use the opportunities to take oil in our lamps (Matt. 25:4), and to fall a little bit more in love with those ideals that He’s given to us, ideals that often pass by way of the Cross.

Christ without the Cross is a caricature of the Cross.

Fulton Sheen tells a story of how in 1968 he went to visit Pope Paul VI. It was just after he issued the Encyclical Humanae Vitae.

He said to him, “Holy Father, you're well named–Paul. Because Paul they stoned (Acts 14:19), and now they're stoning you.” The Holy Father was receiving a lot of flak in the international press.

Pope St. Paul said, “Yes, I receive a lot of mail, and in each mail there comes a thorn. It's 10 in the evening before I get to open my personal mail. When I lie down in my bed at night, I lie down on a crown of thorns.”

“But,” he said, “I can't tell you the joy, the happiness, the peace I get out of knowing that I'm making up in my body for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.”

With that, he was quoting St. Paul to the Colossians, who said, “I rejoice now in the sufferings I bear for your sake, for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ I fill up in my body, for the sake of the Church” (Col. 1:24).

There is nothing lacking in the sufferings of Christ, but what is lacking often is our participation in those sufferings.

Christ came to this earth during a peaceful and silent night while mankind was sleeping. Only the shepherds remained awake. His birth is surrounded by solitude and silence.

Cardinal Sarah, in his new book on silence, says all sorts of beautiful things about silence, the silence of Christ:

“For thirty years no one hears him. Christ lives in Nazareth in great simplicity, buried in the silence and the humble workshop of Joseph the carpenter (Matt. 13:55). It is certain that he already lives in prayer, penance, and interior recollection” (Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise).

We can ask Our Lord that we might see things in the way that He sees them:

Open my eyes. May I see things with your divine vision. Give me a penetrating vision of humanity, of where you've placed me, my work, of what you want me to contribute in the particular place that you've placed me—to see personal sanctity as the goal of my life. Come back to that central idea.

“This hidden life of Jesus,” he says, “is the silent shadow of God. The Son of Mary lives constantly in the Beatific Vision, in profound communion, inseparably united to the Father… The whole life of Jesus is wrapped in silence and mystery. If man wants to imitate Christ, it is enough for him to observe his silences” (Ibid.).

We have periods of silence ingrained into our existence. It's not just an empty silence, but a silence full of meaning.

On one of the Christmases of Pope St. John Paul, he was addressing lofty words of Christmas greetings to the United Nations in New York.

When he had finished, he said, “We now turn our attention from the assembly hall of the United Nations in New York to a small stable in Bethlehem of Judea.”

And really, he was saying, ‘We turn our attention from the great things of man, with their glitter and their glamour and their razzmatazz, to the great things of God, which are silent, which pass unnoticed, where Christ is born.’

“The silence of the crib, the silence of Nazareth, the silence of the Cross, and the silence of the sealed tomb are one. The silences of Jesus are silences of poverty, humility, self-sacrifice, and abasement. It is the bottomless abyss of his kenosis, his self-emptying (Phil. 2:7)” (Ibid.).

We follow that Sacred Humanity in practicing those virtues, not just for the sake of practicing virtue, but for the sake of being a little more Christ-like: loving Him a little more through my poverty or my humility, my self-sacrifice, my self-abasement, my forgetfulness of self, giving Him all the glory.

If I manage to achieve anything, it's because Christ gives me those graces.

“Christ lived for thirty years in silence. Then, during his public life, he withdrew to the desert to listen to and speak with His Father. The world vitally needs those who go off into the desert. Because God speaks in silence” (Ibid.).

“In the silence of these days, Christ is also speaking to each one of us through people, through places, through events, through creation, reminding us of the purpose of our existence, the purpose of our Christian vocation—what it's all about—so that we don't get lost so that we keep our focus in that central personality.

“The more man advances in the mystery of God,” we're told, “the more he loses speech. Man is enveloped in the power of love, and he becomes mute from astonishment and wonder. Before God, we disappear, snapped up by the greatest silence” (Ibid.).

The Preface of Christmas says, “In the wonder of the incarnation your eternal Word has brought to the eyes of faith a new and radiant vision of your glory."

“In the wonder of the incarnation”—we’re called to wonder, to wonder about all these great realities and to fall in love with them, and to come back to the central mystery of our faith again and again.

“In Him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see” (Roman Missal, Preface of Christmas I).

Our God becomes visible in the Son (Col. 1:15).

Christian life doesn't consist in following some more or less attractive ideals, which entails uniting ourselves to Christ to live His own very life, so as to be able to say, “For me, living is Christ” (Phil. 1:21).

And so, whatever we're doing—our work, our apostolate, our activity—occasionally we stop doing those things to go back and relearn the central mysteries of our faith.

There might come a moment when we can't do a lot of those things, yet that goal of being Christ-like becomes even more relevant, more central.

“In various times in the past and in various ways,” says St. Paul, “God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets. But in our own time, in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son” (cf. Heb. 1:1-2).

“When the completion of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law” (Gal. 4:4).

God takes us by the hand and leads us back there “until we reach unity in faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and form the perfect man, fully mature in the fullness of Christ himself” (Eph. 4:13).

We're called to maturity in Christ, so that we see every opportunity of our life as an opportunity to reflect Christ, to imitate Him, to maybe make an act of love and gratitude—the norms of always.

He's called us, says St. Paul, “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29).

St. John Paul says, “These words in Scripture contain an unfathomable mystery since our conformity with Christ is not a superficial likeness. Certainly, Christ is our model. We need to imitate Him and become like Him.

“But following Christ is not an outward imitation, since it touches man at the very depths of his being” (John Paul II, Encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, August 5, 1993).

We can always go deeper into this mystery. There's always something new for us to learn, some new way for us to change, to bring about this reality.

Our likeness to Christ, we're told, is the result of the demand for a deeper reality, namely the presence of His very life within us, our vital union with Christ through grace.

In some ways, our life and lifestyle will carry that message, the importance of living the life of grace, of going to the sources of grace in a regular way—taking that grace upon us, because that grace deep within us is bringing about that transformation.

This union is a supernatural mystery which completely “surpasses our intellect's grasp” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles).

Our Lord chose to reveal it to us in different ways, sometimes through eloquent metaphors, such as the union of the vine and the branches.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. He who remains in me brings forth much fruit” (John 15:5).

Hence, the importance of our periods of mental prayer. We have our presence of God, our norms of always, so we're never far away from the God made man.

The fullness of our divine filiation, holiness, is nothing other than the identification with Christ, the Son of God made man.

All this wealth of doctrine is a hidden treasure that transforms the life of the one who discovers it, the pearl of great price (Matt. 13:45-46), the treasure hidden in a field (Matt. 13:44).

“All of us Christians can and should be not just other Christs, alter Christus, but Christ Himself: ipse Christus” (Josemaría Escrivá, In Love with the Church, Point 38).

“In order to draw close to God we must take the right road, which is the Sacred Humanity of Christ” (J. Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 299).

We're told in The Way (Point 2): “Put a lot of effort every day into reading and meditating on the Holy Gospel, following Jesus' footsteps. How I wish your bearing and conversation were such that, on seeing or hearing you, people would say: ‘This man reads the life of Jesus Christ.’”

The whole story of the Resurrection in St. John curiously opens with Mary Magdalene, the sinner who learned how to love—she who seemed so far away but who came so close.

One might have thought that the greatest event in human history would have merited the presence of St. Peter or Our Lady, or somebody more important or more prominent than Mary Magdalene, but she wins the Oscar. She steals the show.

She couldn't sleep. If you're bothered about something, often you cannot sleep—you have an exam the following day or some concern or anxiety.

She can't sleep and she gets up early because something is missing. Her heart is empty. There's a hole in her heart.

Blaise Paschal says, “There is a chasm in the human heart that can only be filled by God.”

That absence of God in her life, that sensible absence of the presence of Christ, will move her to get up early in the morning and to get over the difficulties, to make her way to the village, unconcerned about what people might think or might say as they peer out from behind their curtains.

She knows she has to be with Christ. She goes seeking Him, like a model of the whole of sinful humanity.

Then, when she finds the stone rolled away, she goes and runs and gets St. Peter and St. John and they came, and they look in and they believe. Then they go back to where they came from (John 20:1-10).

But Mary Magdalene stays there. She doesn't go home. Her heart is still empty.

She wins the privilege of being the first to whom Christ reveals Himself after His Resurrection: “Rabboni” (John 20:16). She becomes the first Apostle.

"Go and tell my brethren that I have risen” (cf. John 20:17).

St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope Benedict call her the Apostle of Apostles.

Like Mary Magdalene, we have a heart that is in need of being filled.

We bring our hearts to the Sacred Heart of Christ, immersing our heart there, a Heart that was willing to be on the Cross, that embraced all souls, that gave itself completely.

In Christ Is Passing By, Point 107, we're told, “To be Christ himself, we must see ourselves in him. It's not enough to have a general idea of the spirit of Jesus' life; we have to learn the details of his life and, through them, his attitudes.”

Human virtues—the virtues that Christ practiced in all sorts of ways—to become icons of Christ. He said, “I've longed and longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (cf. Luke 22:15).

He went fishing with His disciples.

We notice a lack of human formation when He wasn't given a proper greeting in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36, 44-46).

We could ask Our Lord for the grace to use all the opportunities that He gives us to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

C. S. Lewis says, "Each new child is a new universe of hope. Each human person is more important than every great empire which ever existed, because the human person is a child of God destined for eternity, and nations and cultures pass away into dust all the time.”

There is nothing more important than that new Child born in Bethlehem, the new Universe of Hope.

We could ask Our Lady that she might help us to go closer to that Sacred Humanity that she cradled, and cherished, and looked upon, and contemplated all through her life, and that from her spirit of contemplation and proximity to the Christ Child, we too might learn to be more close to Jesus.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

SMF