Tag Archives: Hypostatic Union

Praying with Christ

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At various points along the Christian journey, believers must confront questions related to the true identity of Jesus Christ.  Those who persevere and grow, learn to plow through them one by one and in so doing, more deeply discover the personality of the Incarnate Son of God.  Among these questions there is one that is particularly illuminating, especially because it deals with something that has very practical implications for our own spiritual life.  Articulated in various forms, the question goes something like this: “If Jesus was God, then why did He pray?”

The question of the identity of Jesus is not just something that plagues the neophyte, but it was also a question that the Early Church had to face head on.  Although worked out over centuries, we can summarize their findings by articulating a single principle—the distinction between person and nature. 

The Person/Nature Distinction

In his encounter with individual objects in the world, man is confronted with a powerful question: “what is this?”  The answer as to the thing’s what-ness is its nature.  But a nature determines not just what a thing is, but what a thing can do.  A bird can fly because it has a bird nature, an elephant, because it has an elephant nature cannot.  Man can pray because he has a human nature, but a mantis’ nature limits him to merely posturing. 

When the object of one’s inquiry is also a subject, this innate tendency gives rise to a second question: “who is this?”  No longer concerned with the fact that the object has a human nature, the interlocutor turns their gaze to the person himself.  The human nature may determine what the person can do, but it is always the person who performs the action.  The nature, in a very real sense, limits what the person can do.

When we extend the person/nature distinction to the Incarnation, it is especially helpful in addressing our initial question.  The Divine Son, the Word Incarnate is a Person, but He is a Person Who has two natures or two modes of operation.  At any given time we can observe Him using one of those two natures.  He can change bread and wine into His Body and Blood using His Divine Nature, but He can pray using His human nature.  But in either case, it is always the same Divine Person who performs the action.  He simply has two modes of operation.  This is theologically referred to a the Hypostatic Union.

Christ then prayed using His human nature and not His divine.  He prayed as Man and not as God.  And Christ’s prayer, because it is the prayer of a Divine Person, is one of the means that He Providentially determined would be the cause of certain graces to flow into the world.  And in that way His prayer was always effective.  Two examples from His Passion are particularly instructive in this regard.

Two Dominical Examples

The first example of Christ praying shows us something that we naturally intuit.  If Christ prays as man and nevertheless it is God Himself who utters the words, then we should expect His prayer to do something.   During the Last Supper He tells Peter that “Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.  But I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail so that when you have turned back you will strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:32).  It is Our Lord’s prayer, expressed in an absolute manner, that is the cause of Peter’s repentance. 

The second Example shows us something deeper that if we are not diligent we might miss.  In the Garden of Gethsemane we find Christ, again in His human nature, praying that the cup be removed from Him only if it be in accord with the Divine will.  In so doing, Christ is praying in a conditional manner as far as the direct outcome is concerned.  But His prayer is always effective so that it accomplishes something, namely that those who are united to Him through faith and charity be awarded the graces for us to pray boldly and to endure those moments when prayer is not answered according to our will but the will of the Father. 

What this shows us is not just that Christ’s prayer was infallibly effective, but that our prayer is really just a participation in His prayer.  Every grace that we are given through our prayer was first merited by Christ in His.  Because He is God, He saw every instance of our prayer, all of our intentions, spoken and not, when He prayed.  It was in His moments of prayer that He won the necessary graces for us.  It remains for us to simply enter into His prayer with Him and receive what He intended to give us when He invited us in to begin with.

St. Cyril once said, “that which was not assumed, was not redeemed.” What he meant by this is that Christ took to Himself a true human nature with all its needs and redeemed every aspect of our nature. This includes our prayer. Christ prayed so that our prayer was efficacious. This union of Christ’s prayer with our own helps us to understand exactly what we mean when we pray “through Christ Our Lord.”  Our prayer insofar as it is genuine is always through His prayer.  He lives forever to intercede for us because time and eternity have met in the Incarnation.

Most of us are moved deeply by the Gospel accounts of Christ praying even if we are not able to articulate why.  If we merely see it as an example, which of course it is, then we will miss the invitation.  Christ’s prayer is an invitation for all of us to come and pray with Him.  He may have gone off alone to pray, but each one of us was there with Him. 

The Remedy for Desolation

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The first time that God spoke from a mountain, He gave the Ten Words (Decalogue) to His people through the mouth of Moses.  The last time He spoke from a mountain, it was the Mount of Calvary seated on the pulpit of the Cross.  This time, God Incarnate spoke only seven words, each of which represent the last will and testament to His people.  Each of the seven words, spoken by the Eternal Son, has both a timelessness and a timeliness about it.  But there is one in particular, the one packed right in the middle of the seven—“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”—that bears a special focus in our day and age.  For it is in this word that we find the summation of Christ’s Passion.

The return of pagan thought, supplemented by scientism, has born witness to a reemergence of many of the early Christological heresies.  This is, perhaps, put on display in no clearer manner than when the modern theologians try to explain point number four in Our Lord’s great Sermon.  Whether it be the neo-Docetists who say that the Son really didn’t suffer or the Calvinists who claim that Christ suffering was so intense that He yielded to despair, there is a great need of clarity if we are to pluck all of the fruit off of the true Tree of Life.  In order to have the convergence of the timeless and the timely, we must root ourselves in a proper understanding of the Incarnation.  Mysteries only remain mysteries when we are precise in our language and our thinking.  When we make room for ambiguity and imprecision, we come to explain them away like our Docetist and Calvinist compadres.

A Proper Christology

Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who took to Himself a human nature without any change to Himself, we must first admit the impossibility of Him ceasing to be God.  He is a Divine Person Who nonetheless had two modes of action or natures—human and divine.  He performed miracles using His Divine Nature.  He suffered using His human nature.  But in either case, it was He, that is the Second Person of the Trinity, that performed the miracle and suffered.  The union of the two natures in the Person, what we call the Hypostatic Union, means that from the moment of His conception, He had the vision of God.  His soul had the most intimate and unique union that a human soul can have with God and therefore His soul looked upon “the face of God and lived.”  “No man has ever seen the Father, except the One Who is from God” (c.f. John 6:46). If all of what we just said is true, then how is it possible for Him to ever experience abandonment from God?

There is, of course, the connection with Psalm 22.  But we must make sure that we do not put the cart before the horse.  Properly speaking Christ did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament in the sense that He was bound to do certain things.  The prophecies were made because the Eternal Word of God did certain things.  The prophecies are “after” the events in the mind of God.  The Psalm was inspired because Christ would utter those words from the Cross and not the other way around.  In other words, we cannot simply say that Our Lord was reciting a Psalm and leave it at that.  We must address the fact that in a real sense Our Lord experienced abandonment.

There is the obvious sense in which the words are meant.  The abandonment is not so much a spiritual desolation, but the fact that He was turned over completely to His persecutors without any Divine protection or exercise of His Divine Power.  It can also mean, according to Augustine, that the Son was forsaken in the sense that His prayer in the Garden to have the chalice removed was not answered.

Clearing the Way for the Deeper Meaning

By clinging to the truth of the personal union of the Divine and human natures we are able to also posit a much deeper level of meaning as well.  We said that it was one of the laws of the nature of the Incarnation that Christ experienced the Beatific Vision in His soul.  But through a miracle, the reverse of which was described in a previous post about the Transfiguration, He was able to suspend His awareness of the Beatific Vision in His soul.  Thus, according to St. Thomas (c.f. ST III q.46, a.6 ad 4), Christ was, in His human nature, no longer aware of His union with the Father.  The union was still real but He was prevented from having any consideration of it which would have alleviated sorrow.  Instead He focused only on those things that could produce sorrow and desolation such as the malice of sin, the terrible ingratitude of mankind, and all the souls that would be lost despite His sacrifice.   

In short, this desolation, unlike the desolation we “naturally” experience in the spiritual life, was directly willed.  And like all things He did, it had a twofold purpose.  The first is as an example.  By experiencing the most intense of desolations, Our Lord left us an example to follow by not only “hanging in there” but by speaking words for us.  He has given us a prayer to say in Psalm 22 when no prayer will come.  For those who have experienced true spiritual desolation, when absolutely no words come in prayer, this is an invaluable gift.

The second purpose is that by directly willing it and experiencing it, He sanctified desolation for all of us.  Despite not feeling anything except loss, the Christian is assured that by submitting their will to God’s in desolation, they are, in truth, being sanctified by it.  And this ultimately is why having a proper understanding of what Christ did and suffered is important.  By seeing Christ’s desolation as directly willed and not as a precursor to despair, we know we have been empowered to overcome any amount of desolation and avoid despair.  For Christ redeemed every aspect of our lives including spiritual desolation.  All we have to do then is to submit to it in an act of faith and trust, knowing that is part and parcel of Redemption.