A God who becomes Man, Men called to become God, death overcome by life… But what is this Christian faith? Elements of answers with Edouard George, a Catholic priest in Val-d’Oise.

Believing in God is just believing in God, right?

Yes, it’s true. It’s true: the Christian faith is first of all believing in God. Believe in this completely mysterious God. This reality of God which surpasses us, which envelops us… The God of life, the creator God…

Throughout time, Man has always sought to know this God, to get a little closer to this divinity, and even to win “the good graces” of God, through rites, through sacrifices, through prayers… Man is religious.

Even today, even if atheism is a little diffuse, everyone senses deep down that there is something beyond it. There may not be a “Creator” but there is a “force”, an “energy”… And being a Christian, it’s true, is in part, on the one hand, recognizing: yes, there is a God.

So believe in God and that’s it?

Not only because there is a man, Jesus Christ, who completely bursts into this relationship between Man and God. It is not simply humans who seek this somewhat distant and somewhat transcendent God: it is God himself who becomes man! It is God himself who sends his Son, Jesus Christ.

And what does this “God-made man” mean? This means a total questioning of our image of God, of our representations of God. God is not at all what we imagined! God is other than our representations of a powerful, dominant God, a strong God… It becomes the God of Jesus Christ: a God who is born in a manger, who becomes a baby, who has a body, who has emotions human… A God who will end up dying on the cross! A God who is very close to everyone. He is not a slightly “cosmic” God in his galactic sky, he is a precise God who takes the face of Jesus of Nazareth.

Believing in Jesus changes everything! It’s not the same thing at all! It takes us to another way of believing: it’s the Christian faith!

But a God who becomes man is he still a god?

But yes: it is this God in whom we believe. We have no other revelation from God than that which Jesus wanted to give us. The peak of this revelation is when Jesus dies and resurrects: it is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

It is not for nothing that the Cross has become the symbol of Christians. With the cross, you have this vertical dimension: the relationship with God which is universal, and inhabits all Man, all cultures, of all times… Man who seeks God. But the difference is that, for Christians, it is God himself who descends among Men, who comes to live among Men, this horizontal world. The Cross is therefore the meeting of divinity and humanity. There is an indestructible alliance between this “world of God” and this “world of Man”, which is sealed in this man Jesus Christ on the cross. He thus achieves the perfect unity of Man and God.

To be a Christian is to look every day or carry on oneself this Cross of Christ, it is to welcome the way in which God wants to reveal himself. We hadn’t imagined that: it was a scandal! This is completely unthinkable! It’s even horrible to think that a God could die on the Cross!

Jesus die on the Cross what does that change for me?

It changes: the Son of God himself dies. It is not one man among others who dies: it is the Son of God. Death is the great enigma and the great cruelty of our lives: the death of our loved ones and our own death. It’s a constant anxiety. And that’s the big question of life, too…

The fact that this God dies for us transforms our way of living and dying. Believing is truly a matter of life and death. Being a Christian: that goes so far! There is something radical. We cannot say that we live in the same way, that we die in the same way when we believe in Jesus Christ who died and rose again. There is something that affects our existence until then!

The heart of the Gospel is: “He who was dead is alive!” » The starting point is: “He is alive!” » The one who was dead, the one we knew, as we know each other, he was a man in his own right: he is alive! “He is alive”, that means: everything he said, everything he believed, everything he demonstrated about God’s tenderness, His closeness, His Love… is stronger than the dead. Jesus alive means that love is stronger than death: love is eternal!

Ultimately, what does it mean to be a Christian?

We become Christians through baptism. “Baptized” means: “dived”. Immersed in what? In the death and resurrection of Christ. In fact, in a way, when we are Christian, our death is behind us! We enter another world: it is the same and yet it is no longer quite the same. We enter the world of the resurrection of Christ.

And so, we say “yes” to this eternal life, starting today. We say “yes” to the love of God because all the opposition to the life for which we were made, all the opposition to love which is the essential reality of human life is as if plunged by baptism into the water of baptism, in the death of Christ! So that, when we emerge from the water of baptism, divine life manifests itself. This is true throughout our lives and obviously, it is also true after our death. And it is this whole thing that we call “Eternal Life”.

If we take the Christian faith and try to summarize it, to synthesize it, we can say – forcefully, without fear – even if it is completely incomprehensible and prodigious, that God became man, God became one of us so that we humans can become God! Jesus Christ became man so that we might share His Life, the Life of God, and that we might become like him, in the image of God, that we might share this eternal Life which has always been that of God and forever.

To believe that Man is called to become God is… incredible!

In fact, being a Christian is not about making efforts to reach God: it is God who has come to join us. There is a total inversion compared to all the religious models that I know, where Man strives to climb towards God, to climb to the top of the mountain to touch Heaven: through his efforts, through his rites, through his sacrifices, by a righteous life. Here, it’s the opposite. God joins us. Through the gift he gives us, he renews us, he transforms us and he raises us little by little to himself. 
It starts with baptism. It is the whole Christian life that is an elevation, with open hands, to welcome this gift of God.

But how do we do it, concretely?

If everything that has been said is true, the Christian faith cannot be an individual affair. The Christian faith is necessarily a collective affair. God does not seek this proximity with men side by side: He seeks to form a people, to form as a body, a united reality of all men, of all women, of all times.

And it is true that the Church is a bit like the beginning of this project. It’s a bit like a germ that tries, painfully, to live this, to tell others, striving to live from this goodness of God that it receives, to bear witness to it, to take care of the poor and little ones. This is not to say that she would do everything better than the others. This is to say that everyone, all humans are called to this. God’s dream is to unite humans, all humanity in his Son.

But when we see the world as it is, it’s hard to believe it!

It’s true: from a human perspective, it’s possible to be terribly pessimistic. When we look at everything that is happening, everything that has happened… We can be very anxious about the future… And that is completely legitimate. But I believe that the Christian faith is the act of faith in the resurrection of Christ which speaks of this victory of love over death and of life over evil. The Life of God is stronger, the love of God is stronger than all the rest.

So it is possible – and it is almost a little provocative – to hope. We hope in Man because we hope in God first. Our faith is not in humans and their abilities, it is in God; God who sends his resurrected Son. This Son whose resurrection is a victory.

Welcoming this faith every day transforms our view of the world. And, to be a Christian, today and more and more, is first of all to be a man, a woman of hope.