"Ecce Homo" — An Advent Meditation
The audio version of the essay remains on hiatus this week. Beginning this week, Dr. Horner presents a series of four Advent reflections.
As Mike noted in our most recent newsletter, for the four weeks of Advent, I would like to offer a few meditations provoked by the incarnation of the Son of God. This does not mean, however, that we are setting aside our inquiry into the conditions of human flourishing. To the contrary, I can hardly think of an event in human history that has more significance for how we think about being human than when the Creator of all things became human himself.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” the Apostle John tells us. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind… And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1.1-4, and 14)
The Creator of all things became one of us. What greater affirmation of our embodied humanity could we imagine? The One who made us came as one of us to restore us to all we were meant to be. What clearer statement of our worth in the eyes of God could we hope for? What clearer example of human flourishing could there be than for the Son of God to become flesh and make his dwelling among us?
Perhaps the Apostle John had this thought in mind when he recounted the moment, on the eve of Jesus’ death, when Pontius Pilate pointed to Jesus and declared, “Ecce homo,” (Behold the man). We don’t know what the words meant to Pilate, but whatever they might have meant to him at the time, we have come to recognize these words as running very deep indeed. “Behold,” the Apostle is saying through Pilate: “Look at a man who shows you what it means to be fully human.”
The Apostle, however, is not the only great thinker to use this phrase. If you know the words, “Ecce homo,” it is probably because you know either the writings of the Apostle or the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche not only cites this phrase in the Twilight of the Idols, he also uses it as the title of his final book. The Apostle and the philosopher, however, employ this phrase to very different ends.
The Apostle points to Jesus because he sees Jesus as embodying what we are meant to be as human. Nietzsche, by contrast, thinks there is no way we are meant to be; there are only possible ways we might imagine ourselves. He sees us as self-fashioning beings who manage to become only what we imagine ourselves to be. There is no purpose given to us, only purposes that we create for ourselves. There is no inherent good, only goods we choose because of their utility or because of the pleasure they yield. There is no truth that we need to discover about what it means to be human, only truths that we create for ourselves as individuals and communities. There is no way that humans are meant to be and, therefore, no meaning to be discovered, only meanings for us to create.
The only example to follow in Nietzsche’s world, then, is that of Zarathustra, who serves as our example because he knows there is no way we are meant to be. “My taste,” Zarathustra tells us, “– not good, not bad, but my taste of which I am no longer ashamed and which I have no wish to hide. ‘This is my way; where is yours?’ – thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way – that does not exist. Thus spoke Zarathustra.”
In this understanding of the world, the Christian appears in Nietzsche’s texts as “the pitiful journeyman moralist,” a despicable figure who “knows how man ought to be.” The Christian emerges as the one clearly immoral figure, the “bigoted wretch” who points to Jesus and declares “ecce homo.” The idea that there is a way that humans are meant to be is the one immoral position to hold in Nietzsche’s world and it remains true in our own world today.
Nietzsche’s second use of the term Ecce homo, however, appears as the title of his final book, in which he declares himself unabashedly to be “a destiny” – a destiny that “is to be found in my Zarathustra.” Writing explicitly against Christianity, against “the concept God,” and against “the crucified,” Nietzsche begins to sound exactly like the journeyman moralist he despises. He declares bluntly: “It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being.” “In all seriousness,” he writes, “nobody before me knew the right way.” I am “a destiny.” There is, then, in Nietzsche’s world, a right way after all. There may not be a way we are meant to be as human, but there is a way we ought to be. We ought to be people who reject the idea that there is any way we are meant to be. We ought to live above morality and fashion a self as a work of art.
Nietzsche speaks through Zarathustra, points to himself, and declares ecce homo. The Apostle John, speaking through Pontius Pilate, points instead to Jesus and tells us to consider him. I invite you to read all of Nietzsche you can and consider the ways of Zarathustra. I also invite you to ponder the text of the Apostle and consider the words of Pilate.
But, beware. I warn you. Jesus’ example will stretch you. The Son of God died—and not only on a cross at the end of his incarnate life. He died in the incarnation itself and in every day of his life on earth. He died to self and lived to others, for his Father’s sake, and in doing so, he showed us what it means to be fully human. He embodied humility and meekness, patience and kindness. He was a peace maker who loved his enemies. The teacher, who told his disciples to deny themselves and take up their crosses daily, was no hypocrite. He lived the life to which he calls us, and he did it every day.
Remember, as Pilate gestured in Jesus’ direction, he was pointing to a humble, broken man who had just been mocked and stripped and beaten and now stood in the purple robe of a supposed king, bloodied by a crown of thorns. In the face of Pilate’s questions, he remained meekly quiet, and within hours he was nailed to a cross and left there to die, executed as a criminal, mocked by his enemies, and abandoned by his friends, meekly submissive and self-giving to the extreme.
This humility, this giving up of himself, this dying as a way of life was not new in these final hours of Jesus’ life. It was a way of life for him. Despite being condemned by his “virtue signaling” critics, he loved tax collectors and sinners; he loved women who were invisible to others; he welcomed the children even when his own followers tried to hinder him.
His way of being in the world, moreover, grew out of his way of coming into the world. Descending from the realms of glory into the sadness of our broken world, the Son of God was born into poverty, born in a barn because there was no room for him in the inn, born among the livestock and visited by lowly shepherds, raised as a child of an otherwise nameless mother and father in an otherwise nameless town. He was “despised and rejected by men, and we esteemed him not.”
Consider him.
“If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion,”
Consider him.
“Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”
Consider him.
Have this attitude among yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped;rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (Philippians 2.1-8)
Consider him.
Behold what it means to be fully human. Nietzsche called it “slave morality,” despised it, and presented Zarathustra as our destiny. John, by contrast, experienced it, accepted it, and found his way to the foot of the cross. Come to the manger. Come to the cross.
Ecce homo.
Dr. Richard Horner
Executive Director
Study Center Resources
The last meeting of the Christian Imagination reading group for the semester will be this coming Tuesday, December 1st at 8PM via Zoom. This time around we will be discussing C. S. Lewis’s essay, “The Weight of Glory.” You can use this link to log into the meeting Tuesday evening.
Recommended Reading
— Brad East reviews Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought and Alan Jacob’s Breaking Bread With the Dead. The former was the first book we read in the Christian Imagination reading group this semester and we will start off the spring with the latter:
If the quality of one’s thinking depends upon the quality of those one thinks with, the truth is that few of us have the ability to secure membership in a community of brilliant and wise, like-hearted but independent thinkers. Search for one as much as we like, we are bound to be frustrated. Moreover, recourse to the internet—one commonly proffered solution—is far more likely to exacerbate than to alleviate the problem: we may find like-minded souls, yes, but down that rabbit hole lies danger on every side. Far from nurturing studiositas, algorithms redirect the energies of the intellect into every manner of curiositas; far from preparing a multicourse feast, our digital masters function rather like Elliott in E.T., drawing us on with an endless trail of colorful candies. Underfed and unsatisfied, our minds continue to follow the path, munching on nothing, world without end.
Is there an alternative?
Jacobs believes there is.