This site is best viewed using Mozilla Firefox browser.

Religion

2009-05-01 11:45:00

How could Jesus become more “all-wise”

Question: In Luke 2:52, it states, “And Jesus advanced in wisdom, and age, and grace with God and men.” I can understand how He would advance in age from his human nature, but how could He advance in wisdom? If God is all-knowing and all-wise, how could He be more all-knowing and more all-wise?

Answer: Through the Christian centuries learned theologians and scholars have pondered this statement, which St. Luke learned from the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Apostles. Jesus is a divine person, the Son of God. He has two natures, the one divine and the other human, joined in one divine personality. Jesus does not have a human personality. This is a divine mystery, which the bishops and theologians struggled to understand, or at least to express in human terms, during the course of the first six ecumenical councils. In the Christian religion the word “mystery” means: a truth revealed by God, which we cannot fully understand. Lengthy books have been written about this mystery, attempting to penetrate the inner life of God. And still we know very little about God, apart from what God has revealed of himself in the Bible. The fifth Ecumenical Council held at Constantinople in the year 553 confessed that “there is but one person, which is our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the Trinity.” The Trinity refers to the fact that there is only one God. Yet somehow in this one God, there are three distinct persons, which the Bible designates as the Father who generates the Son, and the Son is begotten from the Father, and the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from both the Father and the Son. All three have existed forever, having no beginning and no end, and the Source of all life and everything created. This is the primary truth of the Christian religion. Thus in Jesus’ human nature everything is to be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject, not only his miracles, but also his sufferings and even his death: “He who was crucified in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is true God, Lord of glory, and one of the Trinity.” Thus spoke all the bishops at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. In his human nature Jesus had a human soul, as well as a human body. His human soul is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, it could not be unlimited: it was exercised in the historical conditions of Jesus’ existence in time and space. This is why the Son of God could, when he became man, “increase in wisdom and age and grace (favor) with God and man,” and would even have to inquire for himself about what a person in the human condition can learn only from experience and study. (cf: Mark 6:38 and 8:27; also John 11:34.) This corresponded to the reality of his voluntary emptying of himself and taking the form of a slave” (Epistle to the Philippians 2:7). But at the same time, this truly human knowledge of God’s Son expressed the divine life of his person. St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662) wrote: “The human nature of God’s Son, not by itself but by its union with the Word, knew and showed forth in itself everything that pertains to God.” Such is first of all the case with the intimate and immediate knowledge that the Son of God become man, has of the Father.” The Son in his human knowledge also showed the divine penetration he had into the secret thoughts of human hearts (cf Mark 2:8 and John 2:25). By its union to the Divine Wisdom in the person of the Word Incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come from heaven to reveal to humanity. What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal. Thus Jesus stated when questioned about the end of the world: “As to the exact day or hour, no one knows it, neither the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but only the Father.” (Mark 13:32). In this question we are dealing with profound theology, difficult to understand but truth based on faith in the divine person of Jesus, and in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus sent to the Church in order to enlighten her with God’s truth