Jesus Christ and man's personal value

Psychologists today speak about a major personal crisis of modern man, faced with a deep sense of frustration, despair and meaningless existence. They call it an 'identity crisis' of which its chief symptom is the modern cry "Who am I?". It is significant that the first American astronauts while being trained for their moon flights, were required to give 20 answers to the question "Who are you?".

In our desperate search for the truth about man, the primary question is "What is man?". Many are the answers which could be summarised in different well-known definitions given by atheist and scientific humanists, nihilists and existentialists.

As to his size, man "is nothing but an accidental coincidence on a minor speck of interstellar dust". As to his ingredients, man "is nothing but fat enough for seven bars of soap, iron enough for one medium-sized nail, sugar enough to fill seven cups of tea, phosphorus enough to tip 2,200 matches, magnesium enough for one dose of salt".

As to his mechanism, he 'is nothing but a complex bio-chemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information'.

As to his likeness, man "is nothing but a naked ape". And as to his humanity, man "is nothing but a helpless orphan cast into the terrifying immensities of space".

Curiously enough, once you reject the reality of God and any thought of man as a special creation by God, one necessarily has to describe man as 'nothing but', giving the impression that there is nothing more to be said about him than just a piece of meat or a human machine in a vast soul-less machine. Thus there is no difference between 'he', 'she' or 'it'. Carrying this kind of philosophical thinking about man to these logical extremes, Sartre was right when he said that 'man is absurd, but he must grimly act as if he were not'.

Unfortunately, this philosophy which devalues and depreciates that which is divine in man and which is shared by atheists, humanists, nihilists and the modern pushers of pornography, is very common today. It is this same nihilistic tendency which in the recent past has led millions of people to the concentration camps during the Nazi regime and made countless other millions just mere slaves in the economic communist machinery. And thanks to this same nihilistic tendency, today we are finding it so easy and practical to eliminate millions of unwanted babies.

But all this shows that the more we accept such nihilistic philosophical views, the more we come to realise that when God is dead, man is dead too, for man is a completely futile being without God.

Christianity on the other hand has always been implacably opposed to all those who in one way or another try to devalue man, because it values man so highly. For Christianity, man is not just a biological accident, a lump of matter, a meaningless speck in the universe, and human life just a brief flash of light between the long darkness that precede the womb, and an everlasting darkness that will follow the grave.

On the contrary, for Christianity man is the image of a personal God, the Creator of the universe, and in that respect he shares God's own nature. The image of a personal God who has revealed himself to him and who has made him with a profound spiritual hunger which cannot be satisfied with anything less than himself. The image of a personal God who placed him upon earth so that by loving Him may one day be united with him in eternity.

Being made in the image of God, unlike the rest of animal creation, man can reason, choose and love, and above all worship God, know God and responsible to his Creator. That is why for Christianity, no one is like man, for man is unique in creation. And each individual, whoever may be, from the very first moment of conception, is of tremendous significance in the sight of a Creator God. Indeed there is no philosophy in the world that gives such dignity and significance to man as the Christian faith.

At the heart of Christianity moreover is the essential belief that God the Father sent his only Son into the world to become a member of the human race. Christianity thus is neither a philosophy, nor a code of ethics, nor social action, but Jesus, the Son of God, who became man like us. One who ate, drank, slept, toiled, prayed, suffered and died like us all. In fact there was no difference between him and the rest of us, save only that he was God and had no sin.

No wonder then that both in practice and in his teaching, Jesus always tried to assert the real value of people. He in fact protested vehemently against the current devaluation of man. Life in his time was cheap. The sick, the aged, the lepers, the poor, the underprivileged, the outcasts, the prostitutes were kept at a distance. But he affirmed the dignity of everyone.

Logically enough he made love towards other fellow beings the corner-stone of all his teaching. In fact he made the commandment "Love your neighbour as yourself", as the necessary complement of the first commandment "Love the Lord your God with all your heart". And what Jesus taught, he carried out in person. Never has anyone lived such a life of self-sacrifice and practical goodness to other people as did Jesus of Nazareth. He went so far as to touch the lepers and defend the prostitutes and sinners - something which was unthinkable in those days.

It was because of his example that Paul later on could say that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus". It was Jesus who both taught and exemplified this quality of love for all men.

Christ throughout his lifetime continually affirmed the dignity of man just because mankind was made by God, loved by God and sustained by God. He emphatically asked: "Are not sparrows two a penny? Yet without your Father's leave not one of them can fall to the ground. As for you, even the hairs of your head have all been counted. So have no fear; for you are worth more than any number of sparrows". To Jesus, the Fatherhood of God is the key to the whole question of personal value. Surely before God the Father, people matter much and far more than any other created thing.

Such was Jesus's remarkable assessment of mankind. Jesus showed us clearly that man is not junk. And this is because man is made in the image of God. If we rule this out, there would be no reason why man should not act like a perfect swine if he thinks that will make him happy. Pascal was right when he said that "apart form Jesus Christ we know not what our life is, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves". But with Jesus Christ we can surely know.