Q&A: Last semester I took a course on Mary, Mother of Jesus. The professor insisted that Jesus has been redeemed. What the professor was leading up to was that we should look to Jesus and not to Mary as the model of those redeemed.
Father J. Patrick Gaffney, SMM
G.F., Richmond, VA.
Jesus, Our Lord
My guess is that your teacher wanted to emphasize current Christological thought.
Since Jesus truly shares in our nature (cf Heb 2:14), emptying himself of the external manifestation of divinity (cf Phil 2:6-11), he lives within the confines of our creatureliness. His entire life is a becoming, a growing; the final becoming is the resurrection. It is then that Jesus, the enfleshed Word, in his transformed, glorified being-with-the- Father, becomes the sender of the Spirit. John speaks of this becoming when he says; “As yet the Spirit had not been given because Jesus was not yet glorified”. (7:39).
Having taken on the opaqueness of this humanity – in revolt against God from the beginning – this man Jesus must experience a constant transformation by the Spirit so that he will become more and more transparent of who he is from the first moment of his conception, the personal epiphany of the Eternal Wisdom of God. His resurrection is the permeating of his entire humanity by the Spirit and in the Spirit.
Some contemporary theologians call this process whereby this man Jesus becomes “the first- born from the dead” (Col 1:18), the redemption and/or the justification of Jesus.
Not the Redeemed, But the Redeemer
The choice of terms is confusing to say the least. It employs redemption, justification, in a broadly analogous way when compared to redemption and justification as applied to us. Although sharing in our humanity with its limitations, sharing in this family which is in rebellion against God, he himself is clearly sinless. To be “redeemed” means fundamentally to be freed from sin; to be “justified” means to be transferred from sinfulness into the life of grace. “Redemption,” “justification,” cannot in its strict sense be applied to Jesus who is the externalization of Infinite Holiness within our human family.
It would be better to employ the scriptural term, “glorification” for this becoming of Jesus mentioned above. To be strict of terms, Jesus, the God-Man, cannot be one of the “redeemed”. Although Jesus, a member of the human family while remaining our God, is definitely the New Adam; the first-born of the dead, the first to be glorified; this should not be called his redemption / justification; for it not only muddies the strict definition of the terms but unnecessarily confuses. He is the redeemer of all and of Mary in an eminent way (the Immaculate Conception). Our Lady remains the first of the redeemed, the model of those redeemed in the redeemer, Jesus the Christ.
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