GOD’S KENOTIC LOVE
St. Paul had grasped the essence of God’s self-giving love as a kenosis, an emptying. That Greek word contains a great mystery for us. God’s outpouring did not begin only on the Cross when He, whose state was divine, did not cling “to His equality with God but emptied Himself to assume the condition of a slave … even to accepting death, death on a cross…” (Ph 2:6-8). God’s kenosis began when He freely poured Himself out in a multitude of wonderful creatures whom He created “good.” Man and woman were to harmonize this richness, constantly experiencing God’s outpouring love as they used each creature. Man communicated with God through the intellect and will God had implanted in him. The Book of Genesis describes in mythic language how man turned away from God. He no longer believed in God’s emptying love. He sought his autonomous independence. He would take the gifts but refuse to see them as a part of God’s emptying love for man. God had planned the whole world to be united in His own Divine Life, but man turned away from the plan of God. Through sin the world is groaning in disharmony. As St. Maximus the Confessor expressed it:
“All existence is splintered into antipodes of the created world and the uncreated God, the sensible and the intelligible, earth and heaven, the world and Paradise, masculine and feminine. Instead of diversity in unity as willed by God, the cosmic reality of death that so graphically separates man’s soul from his body reigns over the universe, separating and dividing what was meant to be united.”
St. Paul describes the world of man’s “bondage to sin” as being caught in the “sarx” (flesh) state. It is man and his world in all their creaturehood in contrast to God. It is man, not only in his distance and difference from God, in his mortality and weakness, but also in his utter estrangement from God through sin. “All have sinned and lack the approval of God” (Rm 3:23). Again Paul describes man’s existential situation: “Sin entered the world through one man, and through sin, death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned” (Rm 5:12). But God so loved this world that He gave it His only begotten Son (Jn 3:16). Into this world, groaning in travail, God sent His Son. Although personally sinless, Christ came “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rm 8:3). For our sakes “God made sin of Him who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become God’s holiness” (2 Co 5:21). Christ took upon Himself this same estrangement. Although united intimately with the Father, Christ in His earthly existence was in some sense not fully one with His Father. He who was infinite “localized” Himself within the humanity that Mary His mother fashioned for Him.
God’s infinite love and mercy condescends (synkatabasis) to insert itself within the human race. God made good that which man in the darkness of his sinful misery could not accomplish (Rm 15:8-9; 11:32; 5:8). St. Irenaeus in the second century develops the role of Jesus Christ and also Mary in union with Him as one of anakephalaiosis, a recapitulation, an undoing of the work of Adam and Eve, a fulfillment going even beyond that originally planned by God if man had never sinned. He writes simply that the end of the Incarnation and redemptive process is: God became man in order that man might become God.
“Christ has, therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy and crushing him who at the beginning had led us away captive in Adam… in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life through a victorious one.”
The process of God’s mercy becoming incarnated in Jesus Christ to lead us back has been most clearly and powerfully portrayed by that pillar of orthodoxy in the early Church: St. Athanasius. Defending the full divinity of Jesus Christ against the Arians, Athanasius highlights the condescending mercy of God in Christ Jesus who comes down to us (synkatabasis) in order to share with us His divine sonship.
“The Son of God became the Son of man in order that the sons of men, the sons of Adam, might be made sons of God. The Word, who was begotten of the Father in Heaven in an ineffable, inexplicable, incomprehensible and eternal manner, came to this earth to be born in time of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in order that they who were born of earth might be born again of God in Heaven … He has bestowed upon us the first fruits of the Holy Spirit, so that we may all become sons of God in imitation of the Son of God. Thus He, the true and natural Son of God, bears us all in Himself, so that we may all bear in ourselves the only God.”
The Incarnation is the acting out in human, concrete form of God’s infinite mercy. His Hesed Covenant is no longer posited on His word of fidelity spoken to His Chosen People through His Prophets. Now God’s very own Word leapt out of the Trinity and “pitched His tent among us” (In 1: 14). He emptied Himself of His Shekinah (glory) and became an empty receptacle to be filled at each moment of His human growth with the loving mercy of His Father. He takes upon Himself our state of estrangement from the Father.
The condescending mercy of God adapts itself to man’s condition. “When the appointed time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons” (Ga 4 :4-5). Now in human language, especially the language of love that speaks the loudest and clearest, suffering unto death, God’s love would be spoken for each person who would care to hear this Word of love. God’s plan to heal man’s loneliness is to give him His only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to act out in terms of human suffering, the infinite love of the Father. We have now no other way of knowing the Father but through His Word made flesh.
The kenosis of God’s merciful love for us reaches its peak of emptying in the total giving of Jesus to us on the Cross. Seeing God pour Himself out completely, “obedient unto death, the death of the cross” (Ph 2:8), we can believe in God’s fidelity toward us in all our needs. God truly is love (I Jn 4:8; 16). We can believe that God has pursued our adulterous hearts like Hosea and still He espouses us as His Bride: the Church. “That is why I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart … .I will betroth you to myself forever, betroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love” (Ho 2:16; 21).
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
