THE VIGIL
John called sinners to wash in the river
before repenting. Jesus presented Himself to John to be baptized. Did He then
acknowledge Himself a sinner?
The texts are explicit: the prophet
preached the baptism of repentance in remission of sins. He who went to him
acknowledged Himself a sinner; he who goes
to wash, feels himself polluted.
The fact that we know nothing of the life of Jesus from
His twelfth to His thirtieth year, exactly the years of fallible adolescence,
of hot-blooded youth, has given rise to the idea that He was in that period, or
at least held Himself to have been, a sinner like other men. The three
remaining years of His life are the most brightly lit by the words of the
four Gospels because in thinking of the dead, what we most vividly remember are
their words and deeds during the last days of their lives. Nothing of what we
know of those three years gives any indication of this supposed existence of
sin in Christ's life between the innocence of its beginning and the glory of
its ending.
There is not even the appearance of a conversion in
Christ's life. His first words have the same accent as the last. The spring
from which they run is clear from the first day; there is no muddy sediment of
evil. He begins with frank absolute certainty, with the recognizable authority
of purity. You can feel that He has left nothing confused back of Him. His
voice is clean and clear, a melodious song not roughened by the sour lees of
voluptuous pleasure, or by the hoarseness of repentance. The transparent
serenity of His look, of His smile and of His thought is not the calm which
comes after the clouds of the tempest, or the uncertain whiteness of the dawn
which slowly conquers the malign shadow of the night: it is the clearness of
Him who was born only once, and remained a youth even into His maturity: the freedom
from obscurity, the transparency, the tranquility, the peace of a day which
ends in night, but is not darkened until evening: eternal day, childhood intact
and untarnished until death.
He goes about among the impure with the
natural simplicity of the poor among sinners, with the natural strength of the
sound man among the sick, with the natural boldness of health. On the other
hand, the man who has been converted is always at the back of his mind a little
troubled. A single drop of bitterness, a light shadow of impurity, a fleeting
suggestion of temptation is enough to drive him back into anguish. He always
feels a doubt that he may not have rid himself wholly of the old Adam, that he
may not have wholly destroyed but only stunned the other, who lived in his
body. He has paid so much for his salvation, and it seems to him so precious
but so frail, that he is always afraid of putting it into jeopardy or of losing
it. He does not shun sinners, but he approaches them with an involuntary
shudder, with a scarcely confessed fear of fresh infection, a dread lest the
sight of the vileness where he also took delight will renew unbearably the
recollection of his shame, will drive him to despair of his ultimate salvation.
When a servant becomes a master he is never on familiar terms with his servants. When a poor man becomes rich he is not generous with the poor. A
converted sinner is not always a friend of sinners. That remnant of pride
which sticks fast in the hearts even of saints mingles with his compassion. Why
do sinners not do what he has done? The way is open to all, even to the
wickedest, the most hardened: the prize is great, why do they remain down
there, plunged in black Hell?
And when the converted sinner speaks to his brothers to
convert them, he cannot refrain from dwelling on his own experience, his
fall, his liberation. It may be only that he wishes to be helpful, rather than
to brag himself, but in any case he is always eager to point to himself as a
living and present example of the sweetness of salvation.
The past can be renounced,
but not destroyed. It reveals itself
almost unconsciously in the very men who begin life with a second birth of
repentance. In the story of Jesus no sign of a different way of life before
conversion ever shows itself in any allusion or in any implicit meaning, is not
recognizable in the smallest of His acts, in the most obscure of His words. His
love for sinners has nothing of the feverish determination of the preaching
penitent. It is a natural love, not a dutiful love. It is brotherly love without
any implications of reproach, spontaneous friendly fraternity needing to make
no effort to overcome disgust. It is the attraction towards the impure of the
pure who has no fear of being soiled and knows that He can
cleanse—disinterested love—love felt by the saints in the supreme moments of
their holiness—love beside which all other
love seems vulgar—such love as no man saw before Jesus! Love which is rarely
found again, and only in memory and in imitation of His love—love which will
always be called Christian, and by any other name—never! Divine love—Christ's
love! Love! Agape!
Jesus came among the sinners, but He was no sinner. He
came to bathe in the water running before John, but He had no inner stain. The
soul of Jesus was that of a child, so childlike as to outdo thinkers in wisdom
and saints in sanctity.
He was no rigorous Puritan. He never felt the terror of the morally
shipwrecked man barely saved from destruction. He was no over-scrupulous
Pharisee. He knew what was sin and what was right and He did not lose the
spirit in the labyrinth of the letter. He knew life; He did not refuse life
which though not a good in itself is a prerequisite condition of all good
things. Eating and drinking are not wrong, nor looking at people, nor sending a
friendly look to the thief lurking in the shade, nor to the woman who has
colored her lips to hide the traces of unasked kisses.
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