Aaron Riches

In the womb of the Virgin Mary, God __ecomes_ human, receiving from her the body that makes possible the __assion_ of God; while on the Cross, through the Jewish flesh given of Mary, the divine Son is truly crucified. In the same way, in the Eucharist, Christians receive the very flesh the Logos received of Mary and united to himself, that __ruly life-giving flesh of God the Word himself._ Only insofar as God receives the passability of human flesh does he become crucifiable and sacramentally givable.

To illustrate the nature of this theandric reciprocity, Thomas invokes, as an example, the physical touch of Jesus__ hand: __e wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed the leper with a touch._ The touch of a human being is not in itself miraculous, and even in Jesus this human action is not humanly healing. The miraculous fact of the healing power of this human touch, rather, as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, __roceeds from God as the principal cause and from Christ__ human nature as the instrumental cause._ Jesus works divine things humanly. More ultimately, Jesus wills the divine will of salvation humanly. And so he wills theandrically in the sense that what he wills has an __nfinite value_ that __erives from the divine suppositum that is the agent which operates_. The deifying effects of the Incarnation are thus contingent on the theandric fact of the interpenetrating unity of divine-human operations.

To suggest that the grief of Christ issues from his perfect wisdom andcharity would confirm that true sorrow is human and therefore cannotcorrespond to despair, since the hopelessness of despair would yield nothingabout which to sorrow. If life is meaningless, there is no reason tomourn. Truth is what makes grief authentic and real, and so it followsthat Truth Incarnate, come down from heaven to our vale of tears, wouldgrieve at the highest pitch. The __ragic experience of the most completedesolation_49 depends on __he knowledge and experience of the Father._50Or as Adrienne von Speyr puts it: __he Father is never more present thanin this absence on the Cross.

Orthodoxy, however, entails a revolution in our metaphysical conception of the relationship between God and humanity, and therefore between the uncreated Unum and the maior dissimilitudo of the creature before the Unum. Properly understood, the apostolic confession of the unity of Christ does not stand midway between a __oo unitive Christology_ on the one hand, and a __oo differentiating Christology_ on the other; rather, it wholly recapitulates the nature of the difference of man before God.

The specific sufferings of Jesus do not amount to redemption: rather, redemption is wrought through the uniqueness of the person who suffered and the perfect charity for which, in which and by which he suffered. The uniqueness of the suffering of Christ, then, lies in the pro knobs, which is bound to the freedom through which the Son endures __very human suffering_ on account of love. To say that Jesus endured __very human suffering_ does not mean that he specifically suffered every thing that every person ever did or could suffer, but the he __ums up_ in this Passion the suffering so fate world, mystically including them in his own suffering and recapitulating them in the form of perfect love. The whole weight of this psychological and physical dereliction of humanity is, in Christ, suffered and sorrowed now within God himself, in the sense that the human sufferings of Christ are __ne_ with the divine filial relation that constitutes his unity with the Father.