‘Behold the Human Being’

Abstract

Chapter Four demonstrates how Christ’s word from the Cross, ‘It is Finished’, refers back to the opening verses of Genesis, where, unlike every other aspect of creation, which is brought into existence by an imperative, a divine fiat—‘Let it be!’—the particular project of God is given in the subjunctive, ‘Let us make a human being’: a project only completed when Christ lays down his own life in an act of love, unwitting confirmed by Pilate, ‘behold the human being!’. The first part of the chapter shows how this theme is developed by John over the course of the Gospel, most notably in the ‘woman’ who appears in Cana and at the Cross, and in John 16, where she is in travail until a human being is born into the world. This theme is also traced in the Apocalypse, and in writers following on from John: Ignatius of Antioch writing on his way to martyrdom, Melito of Sardis in his Paschal celebration, and Irenaeus of Lyons as a fundamental feature of his account of the whole economy of God leading, in the end, to the true human being. The second part of this chapter explores how this understanding of the human being informs the enigmatic figure of the Son of Man, as he steps dramatically into view at the beginning of the Gospel and appears frequently thereafter, examining John Ashton’s new proposal for interpreting the Son of Man, as a stage in the composition of the Gospel before the idea of Incarnation came to the fore, but argues instead that the Son of Man is the true human being, uniting heaven and earth, ascending the cross to descend as the flesh he offers to the faithful.