Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

In the Gospels the phrase “Son of Man” is spoken only by Jesus himself or is directly attributed to him as speech, in contexts that imply, whatever else, complex reference to himself. It is notable that, as often as he uses these words, no one else uses them to speak of Jesus or to him, not even the Gospel writers in passages of exposition. The Gospels also record as exclusive to Jesus the prefacing of statements with the word “amen.” Together the preservation of these usages suggest care on the part of the writers and the tradition to respect the particularity of his speech and therefore, so far as possible, of his meaning as well. That is to say, the phrase “Son of Man” is retained without paraphrase or interpretation. Another pattern appears to me to have been remembered and preserved. In response to mention of God, the Son of God, or the Christ, Jesus replies with reference to the Son of Man, as if this image should always figure in any conception of holiness. In the nature of the case this occurs most frequently when recognition of Jesus as Christ begins to emerge as a question, later in the Gospels. So its context tends to be called apocalyptic, as if this adjective, without definition, by itself gave a sufficient account of his meaning. The richness of the phrase “Son of Man,” the thousand suggestions in the fact that Jesus adopts it for himself, are lost if he is taken simply to be identifying himself with the anticipated figure of the Messiah.

It is notable also that the sayings of Jesus in which the phrase “Son of Man” appears are reported with a high degree of consistency from one Gospel to the next, though the sequence and the immediate contexts in which these sayings occur can differ markedly. I take this to suggest that they are something ipsissima verba, remembered as teachings with special authority, of greater interest to his tradition than the particulars of circumstance, perhaps even tacitly interpreted by the context in which they are placed by individual writers. A documentary theory that implies dependency on written texts to account for their stability within these significant variations would require a good deal of inelegant splicing. If there were sayings collections behind the Gospels that were written as well as oral, as I assume there were, it would still be remarkable that only Jesus uses this phrase, which is, in its ordinary meaning, perfectly commonplace, meaning simply a man, a human being. He spoke the language of his time and people, in awareness of the associations particular words and phrases acquired, through scriptural contexts and their elaborations, and in the streets as well. In the ordinary course of things, embedded as they were in centuries of use, their senses would interact. It is surely among the mysteries of Incarnation that Jesus could take on human language as well as human flesh, and that he could find it suited to his uses. The problem, if that is the word, of putting divine utterance into plain language gives particular interest to a phrase he turned to frequently, as he did to the phrase “Son of Man.” If we grant that it is Christ we are speaking of, then we must be struck by his insistence on just this phrase.

The phrase had, of course, an extraordinary meaning, drawn from Ezekiel and Daniel, later elaborated in the extrabiblical 1 Enoch. I note here that this is a slender basis for establishing its meaning when Jesus used it. It is usual to say that in apocalyptic writings the Son of Man, or “one like a son of man,” appears in the last days. But this seems not to be what disciples hear when Jesus says these words. Seemingly they would be readier, if not better able, to interpret his presence and his teaching if they did hear it. Or they would have taken it up as a title, or at least have pondered it, asked him about it, if the apocalyptic associations of the phrase seemed to be important from the perspective of Jesus’ contemporaries. Scholarship tends to see in the Gospels the appropriation of this language by their writers or the early church for messianic uses. I suppose this could account for its being unassimilated into the narrative. But the fact that the phrase is so distinctively Jesus’ could as well mean that it is Jesus himself who makes the appropriation, from vernacular speech as much as from Scripture, giving the phrase a meaning that is in fact not wholly prepared in Scripture or apocalyptic. This reading is no more speculative than others. I assume that Jesus was, at very least, a man of unusual gifts. If Shakespeare’s language is not exhaustively anticipated by his precursors and contemporaries, there is no reason to assume that the language of Jesus must be.

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It is striking that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews interprets the phrase not in the context usually called apocalyptic, but as it occurs in Psalm 8, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man [here Adam ] that thou visitest him?” The writer of Hebrews says, “It has been testified somewhere,” then quotes the psalm at length. About the writer’s suppression of the name of David as the psalmist, Calvin says, “Doubtless he says one , or some one, not in contempt but for honour’s sake, designating him as one of the prophets or a renowned writer.” If this is an instance of tact, it is consistent with the fact that discretion in Scripture can reflect a special veneration, as for example in respecting usages unique to Jesus. Calvin says that for various reasons in Hebrews, Psalm 8 “seems to be unfitly applied to Christ.” He concludes, “The meaning of David is this, — ‘O Lord, thou hast raised man to such dignity, that it differs but little from divine or angelic honour; for he is set a ruler over the whole world.’ This meaning the Apostle did not intend to overthrow, nor to turn to something else; but he only bids us to consider the abasement of Christ, which appeared for a short time, and then the glory with which he is perpetually crowned; and this he does more by alluding to expressions than by explaining what David understood.” The writer of Hebrews says, “He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brethren.” This comes shortly after an extraordinarily exalted account of the nature of Jesus, “through whom also he [God] created the world,” and who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.” If the psalm is considered as being helpful to an understanding of Christ in his humanity then human nature and circumstance are its primary subject. This makes it only more fitly applied to Christ, whose humanity gives extraordinary power to the question “What is man?”

It is at this point that this discussion has meaning beyond explication de texte . “What is man?” can be translated without loss into certain other questions — What are we? What am I? In order to broach the matter in the plainest terms, let us say for just a moment that in our addressing it God is not a given. There is no disputing the fact that we human beings have abilities not found in other animals, for example, the ability to split atoms. While this is factually true of very few of us, generations of thought and experiment, and the material wealth we create as civilizations, have enabled those few. So their achievements are in a sense communal. We can preserve and transmit learning and technique with amazing efficiency, for weal and woe. Our brilliance manifests itself in forms that are moving and beautiful, which does not alter the fact that we are a clear and present danger to ourselves, and to every creeping thing that creepeth on the face of the earth. This is an inversion of the dominion over the earth celebrated in the psalm, but dominion nevertheless, in its most radical sense. In other words, we are fully as exceptional as the psalmist would have us believe. There is something inversely godlike in our potential de-creation of the biosphere.