by John Slattery
Jesus never really experienced winter. Not really. And I find that really interesting.
First, some facts: Israel is geographically characterized as “subtropical” climate, falling between the “temperate zone” and the “tropical zone.” This means that Israel falls between the 35th latitudinal parallel and the Tropic of Cancer (23.27 degrees latitude). Similar temperature ranges would be those of Northern California, with the difference that Israel remains engulfed in the Mediterranean Climate Region, thus experiencing dry summers and rainy winters. Israel does have some snow each year, but it’s limited to the northern mountain region; the rest of the country rarely—if ever—sees snowfall.
 |
| An easy look at the geographical placement of Israel, which is inside the red circle. (Link to Israel's climate information) |
“Fair enough,” you might say, “but why does this matter? Jesus still said the same words, talked to certain people, died on the cross, was resurrected from the dead, etc. Who cares what the climate was like?”
On the one hand, I’d agree with you. The historical nature of Jesus’ life and surroundings belongs precisely to historical aspects of anthropology, archeology, sociology, etc. On the other hand, winter really affects me, and so I change my answer: the fact that Jesus never had to shovel two feet of snow—or even experience subzero temperatures, more than likely—matters because human experience matters to theology.
How it matters is an enormous question tree with lots of branches, but the why is fairly straightforward in a Christian lens: human experience matters to theology because Jesus was human. God became human, thus giving credence and importance to the most common aspects of daily life: the subjective, personal, unique human experience of my life matters.
As a side note: It always turns me off when a pastor talks about Jesus “experiencing everything that humans experience” or that Jesus’ death was “the worst possible death one could know”—as if Jesus would not have suffered more if he had been imprisoned and tortured for an entire month! As if Jesus experienced the pains of childbirth while he lived! Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ essentially makes this gruesome argument, shaming anyone in the audience who might think that they could suffer worse than Jesus did on that day.
Now, let me push the why of the argument forward: if we accept that Jesus never experienced Winter as, say, residents of Saskatchewan have, we can begin to accept that Jesus’ limited human experience allows us to see both (1) The necessary humility of God as exemplary of “kenosis”; (2) The power of our own subjectivity in understanding Christ.
(1) To begin with, a human life can only ever be full of subjective experiences. Even if you travel the world and experience one year in every possible climate, you will still never know the feeling of someone born in the arctic of Russia, going to school, finding a job, raising a family, and dying in the same town she was raised. We can only know truly what we have personally experienced. This does not make our experiences completely unrelated (a dangerous line of thinking that leads to complete relativity), but it does make them dissimilar and individually unique.
It is precisely this dissimilarity and uniqueness—the fact that Jesus lived and died where he did instead of living in every possible culture and in every religious tradition—which allows us to see another compelling aspect of God’s humility. Now, any definition of Christian humility worth its salt must include an explanation of the kenotic nature of God, a phrase which refers to Philippians 2:5-8. In his letter to the people of Philippi, Paul writes:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,In the original Greek, the verb for “emptied” is “ekenosen,” which forms the English theological word of kenosis—a tricky Greek word which is translated rather widely, from the “emptied himself” of the New Revised Standard Version above, to the NIV’s “he made himself nothing,” to the New Living Translation’s “he gave up his divine privileges.” Because of the difficulty in translating this word, theologians like to speak of the "kenotic" nature of God.
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross. (NRSV)
In short, by taking on the form of the perfectly unique and subjective human, God did something drastic and quite revolutionary. God—who must somehow supersede all subjectivity—becomes incarnate as a human being who, by definition, is completely subjective. It remains a mystery, and a very potent one in forming Christian theology—what kind of God gives up objectivity for subjectivity?
With this kenosis in mind, we can understand God’s humility as not only found in Jesus’ actions, but in his very existence: that Jesus came only once, that he lived a human life, that he didn’t travel the world, that he didn’t experience every possible human emotion, that he didn’t test the limits of pleasure and pain. God’s humility is found in the core of Jesus’ human experience of reality as subjective.
(2) Now that we better understanding this compelling aspect of God’s humility, we can begin to see that the intentional subjective nature of Jesus’ Incarnation allows us to see our own subjectivity as renewed. Instead of our subjective experiences as a hamper for living a Christian life, our uniqueness becomes a necessary component of our spirituality. Because God’s humility was so perfectly displayed in the unique life-experience of Jesus, I can acknowledge and utilize my own subjectivity as a Gospel narrative to my own time and place.
God has always been with God’s people, but God’s experience of life in Jesus confirms the individual dignity of every human’s unique experience in a way that had never been done before. The fact that God became human displays a sacrifice of universal significance on the part of the Triune God. No longer should a Divinity be known as a distant, watchful, protector who occasionally hangs out with the locals: Jesus’ existence not only acknowledges our subjectivity, but divinizes—makes as divine—the necessary portion of our life that is completely and utterly our own. All the way down to our experience of a cold January afternoon.
Because of this divinized subjectivity, I must employ the metaphor—like C.S. Lewis did in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—because my uniqueness will never be repeated and has never existed in human history. I must speak for Christ because I am the only instance of this specific bearer of the Gospel that will ever exist. An acceptance of Jesus’ subjectivity pushes each of us to preach a Gospel in ways that Jesus could never have done, and helps us to know that we are accomplishing “greater things” (John 14:12) simply by being free to extend a metaphor to an experience that Jesus never had.
Thus it really does matter that Jesus never experienced the deep chill of months frozen and lakes full of ice. On the one hand, we can come to realize more deeply the beautiful humility that inexpressibly defines God. And on the other, we can come to know that in Jesus’ uniqueness, the individual uniqueness of each of us—the simplicity of our daily lives that can never be repeated or perfectly experienced by another—becomes blessed, dignified, and hallowed in the incessant Incarnation of the Divine.
+ + +
About the author:
John Slattery is a doctoral student in Systematic Theology and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He writes regularly for the blog Daily Theology, and is a Catholic.
Photo sources:
1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5397347316/
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_indicating_tropics_and_subtropics.png
3. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/11523990994/
As I sit inside on a weather bound morning, I eventually found your post to be hopeful. At first I was was confused by the title --- as l suspect you intended. I thoughtyou might be going in the direction of a critique on high Christology. . . But that didn't fit.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't been able to name it but have been bothered by the same inages that, of course Jesus suffered so much worse than any other human. Thanks for the visual of Jesus having limited human experience and therefore Jesus can relate to each of our differently limited experiences.