Truly Human in a Partially Human World

What does it mean to be truly human? Without using philosophical abstractions or complex terminology, I am impelled to reflect on this question, as we celebrate the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. The story of Jesus is one of light and darkness, good and evil, hope and fear, an ambiguous existence of living within the stream of opposites. It is a tragedy when preachers insert God into Jesus’ life, as if he were ontologically divine and appearing in human form. They say things like: “Jesus knew he was God but went to the cross knowing that he would be raised from the dead” or “God gave Jesus the power to save us on the cross.” The tragedy is the diminishment of human nature in the face of the divine. The story of Jesus is not about divinity; it is about humanity, our humanity. 

Jesus was thoroughly human and thoroughly Jewish. His mission and vision were driven by a deep sense of God’s immanent, relational love, empowering his life. He grew in wisdom through faith and trust in the God of Israel. He worshipped in the Temple and followed Jewish law. He reached a point in his life when he felt called to public ministry, to preach the vision growing within him, a new Israel, a new inclusive community, a new way of being human in a new world. What makes Jesus truly human was not only his fidelity to the call but his descent into the darkness of the desert: the desert of human violence, the desert of his own heart, the darkness of false attractions. The forty days in the desert speak of a confrontation with the forces of evil, resistance to the lures of worldly power and riches, and a renewal of his “yes” to the invitation of the Spirit of God. 

Jesus was not the first incarnation of divine love but the second one. Mary, a symbol of the cosmos itself, was the first yes to accepting divinity into the chaos of humanity. Divine love must be received, and receptivity requires space within. Nature does this without complaint, bending its roots toward the life of God. But humans are conflicted, tortured by an ongoing conflict between ego and freedom. To be human does not come naturally; it is a choice for love beyond measure and such love requires absolute freedom. Jesus lived into this freedom in love by overcoming darkness, refusing the limits of the law that excluded people, stretching the law to include people left out, and essentially showing us that the spirit of love is the highest law to follow. To live, authentically, according to Jesus, is to follow the compass of the heart, even when the direction goes against cultural or institutional demands.

Ultimately, it was love that got Jesus into trouble. He loved to the point of tears and did not hold back those tears in the face of death. He healed the unclean, embraced women and raised the dead to life. The humanity of Jesus reveals the openness of the soul to the infinite love of God. His humanity is our humanity; his divinity is our divinity as well. Jesus is not the great exception to what we are but the epitome of what we can become. His final discourses in the Gospel of John beautifully convey his fears and his hopes—and ours as well: “I must go,” he said, “so that the Spirit may come” (Jn 16:7); the Spirit will lead you to truth, freedom, and the heart of God. “Do not cling to me but go…” (Jn 20:17). “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (Jn 14:12). The greatest fear we have as humans is to be forgotten, an existential nightmare that ultimately leads to nothingness. We want our lives to count for something, not just in our lifetimes but after our deaths. After all, what is the value of this earthly struggle, if not for the sake of the future? The life of Jesus is not only a way to live in the present moment; it is a way into future life: “I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.” 

We all want the fullness of life but often it eludes us. We are constantly distracted by the false self, to use Thomas Merton’s term, the self that I think I need to be, and seldom committed to the true self, that self that is known by God alone, in whom my freedom lies. The passion reveals to us the difficult path of becoming truly human: facing the death of the false self, unwilling to scapegoat God by seeking alternate gods of power and wealth, standing for truth in the face of opposition, willing to forgive our enemies, and to ask forgiveness of those we have wronged, and finally, to love unto death because the God who is human can only be realized in love. Love is only an idea, a possibility, until it is chosen and brought into a new reality. 

Jesus showed us that suffering through love unto a greater good, a greater hope, a greater vision, is the only way forward. “There is no other path than through the burning love of the Crucified,” Bonaventure wrote. There is no God who will come to save us; God did not save Jesus from death. God, as an overarching transcendent power, died on the cross and rose into new life, the life of the God-man. There is no God up above in the heavens; indeed, there is no extraterrestrial realm of heaven. Heaven is this world clearly seen. Heaven begins within and culminates in eternal life. The way to heaven is the way of Jesus who shows us that suffering through love unto a higher love is the path toward the fullness of life. Teresa of Avila wrote, “I die because I do not die.” Facing fear, darkness and death itself is not the end but the beginning of the fullness of life. God can only become God when we resist the forces that strangulate love. 

Our culture militates against the truly human. Social media and the markets of capitalism lead us to believe that what we are is imperfect and in need of improvement. Transhumanism aims to enhance human life by overcoming our biological limits and aiming for godlike power. But Jesus shows us that it is precisely our limits that define our humanity. We fail, we do bad things, we make wrong decisions — and the tech industry promises to relieve us of these burdens. Yet it is precisely in failure that we begin anew. In the world of capitalism, we are products for consumption and algorithms for manipulation. But the core of our human identity is not appearance, usefulness, or success. It is the true self before God. “For me to be a saint is to be myself,” Merton wrote. The world we have built and buy into does not allow us to live as ourselves, with our warps and foibles; the space for forgiveness, truth, and acknowledging our failures is shrinking. Instead, we are pressured to treat ourselves as something flexible, redesignable, and sellable. If the new product is not superficially appealing, we opt out. Human dignity becomes an empty shell with no real content.

We would do well to come down from the rafters of idealism and nostalgia and face the brute reality of being human. Being human is what Jesus was about, and it is what we are called to embrace: to reconcile our constant need to scapegoat, blame others, hurl vindictive remarks and reduce others to dust — recognizing that all of these impulses reflect a split psyche and a dishonest self that is not yet fully human. 

If Mary was the first incarnation of divine love, and Jesus the second, then we are called to be the third. When we walk the path Jesus walked — choosing love over power, vulnerability over control, forgiveness over vengeance — we do not merely imitate Christ; we become Christ. The divine love that was received by Mary and embodied by Jesus seeks a third dwelling place: the human person who says yes to the fullness of life, even when that yes leads through suffering.

The cross of Jesus is the symbol of this becoming. It is the place where opposites are reconciled and the soul is forged in love. It is a difficult symbol because it points to a deeper truth about our reality: that the richest moments of human life emerge in breakdown, in the darkness where the false self finally dies. We are asked to remain here, in the tension of the cross, as we make our way into freedom — confronting our own demons, reconciling the opposing energies within, and striving for wholeness of personhood. As Carl Jung noted, what is not reconciled within is projected without, and the world is forced to live with our untamed demons, our wild gods.But the cross is also where God is most fully revealed — not only in the form of love but in the entropy of death itself. Creativity thrives on entropy; only when things break down does life find a way to break through. Evolution is a via dolorosa, suffering through the tragedies of existence into something higher and more wondrous. And we, by taking up this path, become part of that cosmic unfolding — the third incarnation of a love that will not stop until it fills all things.