Jesus
Christ – the
Firstborn of
Creation
by Fulton
J. Sheen
THE
PREHISTORY OF CHRIST
The Lord to be born of
Mary is the only Person in the world Who ever
had a prehistory; a prehistory to be studied not
in the primeval slime and jungles, but in the
bosom of the Eternal Father. Though He appeared
as the Cave Man in Bethlehem, since He was born
in a stable hewn out of rock, His beginning in
time as man was without beginning as God in the
agelessness of eternity. Only progressively did
He reveal His Divinity; and this was not because
He grew in the consciousness of Divinity; it was
due rather to His intent to be slow in revealing
the purpose of His coming.
St. John at the beginning of his Gospel
relates His prehistory as the Son of God:
In the beginning
was the Word,
And
the Word was with God;
And
the Word was God.
The
same was in the beginning with God.
All
things were made by Him,
And
without Him was made nothing that was
made.
JOHN
1:1–3
“In
the beginning was the Word.” Whatever there is
in the world, is made according to the thought
of God, for all things postulate thought.
Every bird, every flower, every tree was made
according to an idea existing in the Divine
Mind. Greek philosophers held that thought was
abstract. Now, the Thought or Word of God is
revealed as Personal. Wisdom is vested in
Personality. Prior to His earthly existence,
Jesus Christ is eternally God, the Wisdom, the
Thought of the Father. In His earthly
existence, He is that Thought or Word of God
speaking to men. The words of men pass away
when they have been conceived and uttered, but
the Word of God is eternally uttered and can
never cease from utterance. By His Word, the
Eternal Father presses all that He
understands, all that He knows. As the mind
holds converse with itself by its own thought,
and sees and knows the world by means of this
thought, so does the Father see Himself, as in
a mirror, in the Person of His Word. Finite
intelligence needs many words in order to
express ideas; but God speaks once and for all
within Himself—one single Word which reaches
the abyss of all things that are known and can
be known. In that Word of God are hidden all
the treasures of wisdom, all the secrets of
sciences, all the designs of the arts, all the
knowledge of mankind. But this knowledge,
compared to the Word, is only the feeblest
broken syllable.
In the agelessness of eternity, the Word was
with God. But there was a moment in time when
He had not come forth from the Godhead, as
there is a moment when a thought in the mind
of man is not yet uttered. As the sun is never
without its beam, so the Father is never
without His Son; and as the thinker is not
without a thought, so in an infinite degree,
the Divine Mind is never without His Word. God
did not spend the everlasting ages in sublime
solitary activity. He had a Word with Him
equal to Himself.
All things were
made by Him,
And
without Him was made nothing that was
made.
In
Him was life and the life was the light of
men.
And
the light shineth in darkness;
And
the darkness did not comprehend it.
JOHN
1:3–5
Everything
in space and time exists because of the
creative Power of God. Matter is not eternal;
the universe has an intelligent Personality
back of it, an Architect, a Builder, and a
Sustainer. Creation is the work of God. The
sculptor works on marble, the painter on
canvas, the machinist on matter, but none of
them can create. They bring existing things
into new combinations, but nothing else.
Creation belongs to God alone.
God writes His name on the soul of every man.
Reason and conscience are the God within us in
the natural order. The Fathers of the early
Church were wont to speak of the wisdom of
Plato and Aristotle as the unconscious Christ
within us. Men are like so many books issuing
from the Divine press, and if nothing else be
written on them, at least the name of the
Author is indissolubly engraved on the title
page. God is like the watermark on paper,
which may be written over without ever being
obscured.
BETHLEHEM
Caesar Augustus, the master bookkeeper of the
world, sat in his palace by the Tiber. Before
him was stretched a map labeled Orbis
Terrarum, Imperium Romanum. He was about
to issue an order for a census of the world;
for all the nations of the civilized world
were subject to Rome. There was only one
capital in this world: Rome; only one official
language: Latin; only one ruler: Caesar. To
every outpost, to every satrap and governor,
the order went out: every Roman subject must
be enrolled in his own city. On the fringe of
the Empire, in the little village of Nazareth,
soldiers tacked up on walls the order for all
the citizens to register in the towns of their
family origins.
Joseph, the builder, an obscure descendant of
the great King David, was obliged by that very
fact to register in Bethlehem, the city of
David. In accordance with the edict, Mary and
Joseph set out from the village of Nazareth
for the village of Bethlehem, which lies about
five miles on the other side of Jerusalem.
Five hundred years earlier the prophet Micheas
had prophesied concerning that little village:
And thou,
Bethlehem, of the land of Judah,
Art
far from the least among the princes of
Judah,
For
out of thee will arise a leader who is to
be
The
shepherd of My people Israel.
MATTHEW
2:6
Joseph
was full of expectancy as he entered the city
of his family, and was quite convinced that he
would have no difficulty in finding lodgings
for Mary, particularly on account of her
condition. Joseph went from house to house
only to find each one crowded. He searched in
vain for a place where He, to Whom heaven and
earth belonged, might be born. Could it be
that the Creator would not find a home in
creation? Up a steep hill Joseph climbed to a
faint light which swung on a rope across a
doorway. This would be the village inn. There,
above all other places, he would surely find
shelter. There was room in the inn for the
soldiers of Rome who had brutally subjugated
the Jewish people; there was room for the
daughters of the rich merchants of the East;
there was room for those clothed in soft
garments, who lived in the houses of the king;
in fact, there was room for anyone who had a
coin to give the innkeeper; but there was no
room for Him Who came to be the Inn of every
homeless heart in the world. When finally the
scrolls of history are completed down to the
last words in time, the saddest line of all
will be: 'There was no room in the inn.'
Out to the hillside to a stable cave, where
shepherds sometimes drove their flocks in time
of storm, Joseph and Mary went at last for
shelter. There, in a place of peace in the
lonely abandonment of a cold windswept cave;
there, under the floor of the world, He Who is
born without a mother in heaven, is born
without a father on earth.
Of every other child that is born into the
world, friends can say that it resembles his
mother. This was the first instance in time
that anyone could say that the mother
resembled the Child. This is the beautiful
paradox of the Child Who made His mother; the
mother, too, was only a child. It was also the
first time in the history of this world that
anyone could ever think of heaven as being
anywhere else than “somewhere up there” when
the Child was in her arms, Mary now looked
down to Heaven.
In the filthiest place in the world, a stable,
Purity was born. He, Who was later to be
slaughtered by men acting as beasts, was born
among beasts. He, Who would call Himself the
“living Bread descended from Heaven,” was laid
in a manger, literally, a place to eat.
Centuries before, the Jews had worshiped the
golden calf, and the Greeks, the ass. Men
bowed down before them as before God. The ox
and the ass now were present to make their
innocent reparation, bowing down before their
God.
There was no room in the inn, but there was
room in the stable. The inn is the gathering
place of public opinion, the focal point of
the world’s moods, the rendezvous of the
worldly, the rallying place of the popular and
the successful. But the stable is a place for
the outcasts, the ignored, the forgotten. The
world might have expected the Son of God to be
born—if He was to be born at all—in an inn. A
stable would be the last place in the world
where one would have looked for Him. Divinity
is always where one least expects to find
it.
No worldly mind would ever have suspected that
He Who could make the sun warm the earth would
one day have need of an ox and an ass to warm
Him with their breath; that He Who, in the
language of Scriptures, could stop the the
turning about of Arcturus would have his
birthplace dictated by an imperial census;
that He, Who clothed the fields with grass,
would Himself be naked; that He, from Whose
hands came planets and worlds, would one day
have tiny arms that were not long enough to
touch the huge heads of the cattle; that the
feet which trod the everlasting hills would
one day be too weak to walk; that the Eternal
Word would be dumb; that Omnipotence
would be wrapped in swaddling-clothes;that
Salvation would lie in a manger; that the bird
which built the nest would be hatched
therein—no one would ever have suspected that
God coming to this earth would ever be so
helpless. And that is precisely why so many
miss Him. Divinity is always where one
least expects to find it.
If the artist is at home in his studio because
the paintings are the creation of his own
mind; if the sculptor is at home among his
statues because they are the work of his own
hands; if the husbandman is at home among his
vines because he planted them; and if the
father is at home among his children because
they are his own, then surely, argues the
world, He Who made the world should be at home
in it. He should come into it as an artist
into his studio, and as a father into his
home; but, for the Creator to come among His
creatures and be ignored by them; for God to
come among His own and not be received by His
own; for God to be homeless at home—that could
only mean one thing to the worldly mind: the
Babe could not have been God at all. And that
is just why it missed Him. Divinity is
always where one least expects to find it.
The Son of God made man was invited to enter
His own world through a back door. Exiled from
the earth, He was born under the earth, in a
sense, the first Cave Man in recorded history.
There He shook the earth to its very
foundations. Because He was born in a cave,
all who wish to see Him must stoop. To stoop
is the mark of humility. The proud refuse to
stoop and, therefore, they miss Divinity.
Those, however, who bend their egos and enter,
find that they are not in a cave at all, but
in a new universe where sits a Babe on His
mother’s lap, with the world poised on His
fingers.
The manger and the Cross thus stand at the two
extremities of the Savior’s life! He accepted
the manger because there was no room in the
inn; He accepted the Cross because men said,
“We will not have this Man for our king.”
Disowned upon entering, rejected upon leaving,
He was laid in a stranger’s stable at the
beginning, and a stranger’s grave at the end.
An ox and an ass surrounded His crib at
Bethlehem; two thieves were to flank His Cross
on Calvary. He was wrapped in
swaddling-clothes in His tomb -- clothes
symbolic of the limitations imposed on His
Divinity when He took a human form.
This is the sign by
which you are to know him;
you will find a
child still in swaddling-clothes;
lying in a manger.
Luke
2:12
He
was already bearing His Cross—the only cross a
Babe could bear, a cross of poverty, exile and
limitation. His sacrificial intent already
shone forth in the message the angels sang to
the hills of Bethlehem:
This day, in the
city of David,
A Savior has been born for you,
The Lord Christ Himself.
LUKE 2:11
Covetousness
was already being challenged by His poverty,
while pride was confronted with the
humiliation of a stable. The swathing of
Divine power, which needs to accept no bounds,
is often too great a tax upon minds which
think only of power. They cannot grasp the
idea of Divine condescension, or of the “rich
man becoming poor that through His poverty, we
might be rich.” Men shall have no greater sign
of Divinity than the absence of power as they
expect it—the spectacle of a Babe Who said He
would come in the clouds of heaven, now being
wrapped in the cloths of earth.
He, Whom the angels call the “Son of the most
High,” descended into the red dust from which
we all were born, to be one with weak, fallen
man in all things, save sin. And it is the
swaddling clothes which constitute His “sign.”
If He Who is Omnipotence had come with
thunderbolts, there would have been no sign.
There is no sign unless something happens
contrary to nature. The brightness of the sun
is no sign, but an eclipse is. He said that on
the last day, His coming would be heralded by
“signs in the sun,” perhaps an extinction of
light. At Bethlehem the Divine Son went into
an eclipse, so that only the humble of spirit
might recognize Him.
Only two classes of people found the Babe: the
shepherds and the Wise Men; the simple and the
learned; those who knew that they knew
nothing, and those who knew that they did not
know everything. He is never seen by the man
of one book; never by the man who thinks he
knows. Not even God can tell the proud
anything! Only the humble can find God! As
Caryll Houselander put it, “Bethlehem is the
inscape of Calvary, just as the snowflake is
the inscape of the universe.' This same idea
was expressed by the poet who said that if he
knew the flower in a crannied wall in all its
details, he would know 'what God and man is'.
Scientists tell us that the atom comprehends
within itself the mystery of the solar system.
It was not so much that his birth cast a
shadow on His life, and thus led to His death;
it was rather that the Cross was there from
the beginning, and it cast its shadow backward
to His birth. Ordinary mortals go from the
known to the unknown submitting themselves to
forces beyond their control; hence we can
speak of their “tragedies.” But He went from
the known to the known, from the reason for
His coming, namely, to be “Jesus” or “Savior,”
to the fulfillment of His coming, namely, the
death on the Cross. Hence, there was no
tragedy in His life; for, tragedy implies the
unforeseeable, the uncontrollable, and the
fatalistic. Modern life is tragic when there
is spiritual darkness and unredeemable guilt.
But for the Christ Child there were no
uncontrollable forces; no submission to
fatalistic chains from which there could be no
escape; but there was an “inscape”—the
microcosmic manger summarizing, like an atom,
the macrocosmic Cross on Golgotha.
In His First Advent, He took the name of
Jesus, or “Savior” it will only be in His
Second Advent that He will take the name of
“Judge.” Jesus was not a name He had before He
assumed a human nature; it properly refers to
that which was united to His Divinity, not
that which existed from all eternity. Some say
“Jesus taught” as they would say “Plato
taught,” never once thinking that His name
means “Savior from sin.” Once He received this
name, Calvary became completely a part of Him.
The Shadow of the Cross that fell on His
cradle also covered His naming. This was “His
Father’s business” everything else would be
incidental to it.
PREHISTORY NOW HISTORY
“The Word became Flesh.” The Divine Nature,
which was pure and holy, entered as a
renovating principle into the corrupted line
of Adam’s race, without being affected by
corruption. Through the Virgin Birth, Jesus
Christ became operative in human history
without being subject to the evil in it.
And the Word was
made flesh,
and
came to dwell among us;
and
we have sight of his glory,
glory
such as belongs to
the
Father's only-begotten Son,
full
of grace and truth.
John
1:14
Bethlehem
became a link between heaven and earth; God
and man met here and looked each other in the
face. In the taking of human flesh, the Father
prepared it, the Spirit formed it, and the Son
assumed it. He Who had a temporal generation
in time. He Who had His birth in Bethlehem
came to be born in the hearts of men. For,
what would it profit if He was born a thousand
times in Bethlehem unless He was born again in
man?
But all those who
did welcome Him,
He
empowered to become the children of God.
JOHN
1:12
Now
man need not hide from God as Adam did; for He
can be seen through Christ’s human nature.
Christ did not gain one perfection more by
becoming man, nor did He lose anything of what
He possessed as God. There was the
Almightiness of God in the movement of His
arm, the Infinite Love of God in the beatings
of His human heart and the Unmeasured
Compassion of God to sinners in His eyes. God
is now manifest in the flesh; this is what is
called the Incarnation. The whole range of the
Divine attributes of power and goodness,
justice, love, beauty, were in Him. And when
Our Divine Lord acted and spoke, God in His
perfect nature became manifest to those who
saw Him and heard Him and touched Him. As He
told Philip later on:
Whoever has seen
Me has seen the Father.
JOHN
14:9
No
man can love anything unless he can get his
arms around it, and the cosmos is too big and
too bulky. But once God became a Babe and was
wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a
manger, men could say, “This is Emmanuel, this
is God with us.” By His reaching down to frail
human nature and lifting it up to the
incomparable prerogative of union with
Himself, human nature became dignified. So
real was this union that all of His acts and
words, all of His agonies and tears, all of
His thoughts and reasonings, resolves and
emotions, while being properly human, were at
the same time the acts and words, agonies and
tears, thoughts and reasonings, resolves and
emotions of the Eternal Son of God.
What men call the Incarnation is but the union
of two natures, the Divine and the human in a
single Person Who governs both. This is not
difficult to understand; for what is man but a
sample, at an immeasurably lower level, of a
union of two totally different substances, one
material and the other immaterial, one the
body, the other the soul, under the regency of
a single human personality? What is more
remote from one another than powers and
capacities of flesh and spirit? Antecedent to
their unity, how difficult it would be ever to
conceive of a moment when body and soul would
be united in a single personality. That they
are so united is an experience clear to every
mortal. And yet it is an experience at which
man does not marvel because of its
familiarity.
God, Who brings together body and soul into
one human personality, notwithstanding their
difference of nature, could surely bring about
the union of a human body and a human soul
with His Divinity under the control of His
Eternal Person. This is what is meant by the
passage:
And the Word was
made flesh,
And
came to dwell among us.
JOHN
1:14
The
Person which assumed human nature was not
created, as is the case of all other persons.
His Person was the pre-existent Word or Logos.
His human nature, on the other hand, was
derived from the miraculous conception by
Mary, in which the Divine overshadowing of the
Spirit and the human Fiat or the consent of a
woman, were most beautifully blended. This is
the beginning of a new humanity out of the
material of the fallen race. When the Word
became flesh, it did not mean that any change
took place in the Divine Word. The Word of God
proceeding forth did not leave the Father’s
side. What happened was not so much the
conversion of the Godhead into flesh, as the
taking of a manhood into God.
There was continuity with the fallen race of
man through the manhood taken from Mary; there
is discontinuity through the fact that the
Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos.
Christ thus literally becomes the second Adam,
the Man through whom the human race starts all
over. His teaching centered on the
incorporation of human natures to Him, after
the manner in which the human nature that He
took from Mary was united to the Eternal Word.
It is hard for a human being to understand the
humility that was involved in the Word
becoming flesh. Imagine, if it were possible,
a human person divesting himself of his body,
and then sending his soul into the body of a
serpent. A double humiliation would follow:
first, accepting the limitations of a
serpentine organism, knowing all the while his
mind was superior, and that fangs could not
adequately articulate thoughts no serpent ever
possessed. The second humiliation would be to
be forced as a result of this 'emptying of
self' to live in the companionship of
serpents. But all this is nothing compared to
the emptying of God, by which He took on the
form of man and accepted the limitations of
humanity, such as hunger and persecution; not
trivial either was it for the Wisdom of ~God
to condemn Himself to association with poor
fishermen who knew so little. But this
humiliation which began in Bethlehem when He
was conceived in the Virgin Mary was only the
first of many to counteract the pride of man,
until the final humiliation of death on the
Cross. If there were no Cross, there would
have been no crib; if there had been no nails,
there would have been no straw. But He could
not teach the lesson of the Cross as
payment for sin; He had to take it. God
the Father did not spare His Son -- so much
did He love mankind. That was the secret
wrapped in waddling-bands.
THE NAME “JESUS”
The name “Jesus” was a fairly common one among
the Jews. In the original Hebrew, it was
“Josue.” The angel told Joseph that Mary
would:
Bear a son, whom
thou shalt call Jesus,
For
He is to save His people from their sins.
MATTHEW
1:21
This
first indication of the nature of His mission
on earth does not mention His teaching; for
the teaching would be ineffective, unless
there was first salvation.
He was given another name at the same time,
the name “Emmanuel.”
Behold, the virgin
shall be with child,
And
shall bear a son,
And
they shall call Him Emmanuel,
(which
means God with us).
MATTHEW
1:23
This
name was taken from the prophecy of Isaiah and
it assured something besides a Divine
presence; together with the name “Jesus,” it
meant a Divine presence which delivers and
saves. The angel also told Mary:
And behold, thou
shalt conceive in thy womb,
And shalt bear a son,
and shalt call Him Jesus.
He shall be great, and men will know Him
for the Son of the Most High;
The Lord God will give Him the throne of
His father David,
and he shall reign over the house of Jacob
eternally;
His kingdom shall never have an end.
Luke 1:31-33
The title "Son of the Most High" was
the very one that was given to the Redeemer by
the evil spirit which possessed the youth in the
land of the Gerasenes. The fallen angel thus
confessed Him to be what the unfallen angel said
He was:
Why dost thou meddle
with me, Jesus
Son of the Most High
God?
MARK 5:7
The salvation that is promised by the
name “Jesus” is not a social salvation, but
rather a spiritual one. He would not save people
necessarily from their poverty, but he would
save them from their sins. To destroy sin is to
uproot the first causes of poverty. The name
“Jesus” brought back the memory of their great
leader, who had brought them out of Israel to
rest in the promised land. The fact that He was
prefigured by Josue indicates that He had the
soldierly qualities necessary for the final
victory over evil, which would come from the
glad acceptance of suffering, unwavering
courage, resoluteness of will and unshakable
devotion to the Father’s mandate.
The people enslaved under the Roman yoke were
seeking deliverance; hence they felt that any
prophetic fulfillment of the ancient Josue would
have something to do with politics. Later on,
the people would ask Him when He was going to
deliver them from the power of Caesar. But here,
at the very beginning of His life, the Divine
Soldier affirmed through an angel that He had
come to conquer a greater enemy than Caesar.
They must still render to Caesar the things that
were Caesar’s; His mission was to deliver them
from a far greater bondage, namely, that of sin.
All through His life people would continue to
materialize the concept of salvation, thinking
that deliverance was to be interpreted only in
terms of the political. The name 'Jesus' or
Saviour was not given to Him after He had
wrought salvation, but at the very moment He was
conceived in the womb of His mother. The
foundation of His salvation was from eternity
and not from time.
[This article is
excerpted from Life in Christ,
chapter 2, Copyright 1958 by Fulton
Sheen, and first published in Great
Britain 1959 for Peter Davies Ltd by The
Windmill Press Ltd, Kingswood, Surrey.]
Archbishop Fulton
J. Sheen (1895-1979) was an American theologian
and bishop, first in New York City and then in
Rochester, New York. He became well-known for
his preaching, especially on television and
radio. He hosted the night-time radio
program The Catholic Hour for
twenty years (1930–1950) before moving to
television and presenting a weekly program
called, Life Is Worth Living. The
show ran from 1951 until 1957, drawing as many
as 30 million people on a weekly basis. He wrote
73 books and numerous articles and columns.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta always kept a copy of
Sheen’s book, Life of Christ, with
her wherever she traveled for daily reflection
and meditation. |
