There is a problem in how we view Christ today.  Most Christians would agree that He is their teacher, but there is something that slips by with this characterization.  This is because He is also the Lesson.

Jesus Teaches the People by the Sea

by James Tissot, between 1886-1896

There are no teachers who are the actual lesson, but they only teach lessons.  But Christ is both the teacher and the lesson because He did not come to give us some rules to live by.  God did that by creating us with a moral sense, and later He gave the Israelites the Law; the Law was a codification of the morality that He had already implanted in us in creation so that we would refer back to them in the times we have lack of clarity.

How so?

In the Old Testament before the Law, we see people living moral lives such as Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.  We even see those who did not know God distinguishing between good and evil actions such as Pharaoh in the days of Abraham, or Abimelech the Palestinian king, or Laban’s covenant with Jacob after he was deceived by Jacob.  Even Laban with all his deception was capable of good moral actions!

So what is it that Christ was doing?  Was He not coming to teach us how to be good?

No.

Christ was coming to save us from sin.  To give an analogy, it is like a doctor saving your life versus a person throwing himself in front of a bullet to save your life.  One is by healing; the other is by taking what was meant for you.

The idea of salvation in the New Testament is healing, not taking the bullet for you.  Indeed, the Greek word for salvation, which is soteria, also means healing.

So Christ came to correct the fundamental illness in human beings, which is sin.  This can’t be done by rule giving, or trying to follow the rules as all of us have noticed by now.  In the Old Testament, they had the Law, but sin became worse and the Law had little effect.  Even today, children who have clear rules in the home or classroom have a difficult time following them.

The rules are a standard and a diagnostic; they are not the cure.  Rather, they codify what the symptoms of the disease of sin are.

Christ healed us of sin by becoming the exemplar for us to imitate.

Imitation?  What’s so special about that?  Everything, actually.

The Imitation of Christ

One word that we see diffused throughout early Christian literature is imitation.  We see this in the context of the martyrs and how in their deaths they imitated Christ’s death. We see it in the context of Christian living, and how this living is an imitation of Christ.  If you begin reading the writings of the early Church with this word in focus, you will be surprised how frequent it is.

But imitation is just a choice to be like someone else, you may say.  Or, imitation is not necessarily authentic.  Or even imitation is not significant.  But the reality is, mainstream Western culture and education both present a very limited understanding of the significance of imitation, even though insights from modern anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience have confirmed the essentialness of imitation in humanity.

The anthropologist, philosopher, and literary theorist Rene Girard masterfully argued that while there exists in us desires that are biological impulses such as the impulse to eat, how those desires are actualized as in what specific food we eat, is the result of imitation.  He called this mimetic desire.  How we actualize our desires is wholly mimetic.

Girard also pointed out that rivalry arises from such attempts to actualize our desires where the object of our desires shifts to become the people having the same desires by us, and thus sin comes by this mimetic process whether it is envy, or pride, or anger, or sexual indulgence, or gluttony, or murder.  Sin is a contagion with no natural immunity.  Commandments are deterrants to the contagion, but they don’t heal us of the contagion.  They also make us very aware of the contagion like when taking aspirin when we ache, we realize how bad the aches really were.  By the commandments, we also recognize that the contagion of sin is passed between humans.  This is what we see in the Old Testament, and just as in larger cities contagions are severe, so usually in large cities sin is worse than it is in smaller communities.

What heals us is providing the right model for us to imitate, whose object is not people but God.  Authentically imitating this individual heals us.  Christ’s healing happens through His providing the right model for mimetic desire for humans.  He heals us of sin by the same way the contagion entered humanity.

If I may give an image, Christ provides us (the Church) with the antibodies against this contagion.  And the Church as our Mother, just like a mother when she breastfeeds her children gives her immunity to her children through the milk, the Church through the Gospel, Baptism, the Eucharist and the Liturgy, and its reflection upon its history including the lives of its own members gives us Christ.  Without her, we have no immunity against the contagion.  Without Him, she has nothing to give.

The imitation of Christ and the imitation of those who lived a life imitating Christ is an idea that pops up over and over again in the early Church.  This is originally why Christians wrote down the lives of the saints, and especially the sufferings of the martyrs.  It was to allow the Image of Christ to give full expression in how it was manifested in so many lives, and thus we can have that example to imitate.

The imitation of Christ solidifies with what the Church gives us.  What she gives us allows us to focus completely on Him.

Psychology has also added to this understanding of imitation by showing how our essential human traits such as acquisition of language, behaviors, and ways of thinking happen by imitation.  By living in the Church community, we acquire what St. Augustine called “The Lord’s way of speaking,” and we develop lives of prayer, and we think with the mind of Christ and the generations of the Church.

In addition, Neuroscience has discovered an entire neural network that exists in humans called mirror neurons, which means that we are structured to imitate, which is why sin has had such a tight hold on humanity.  But the science also shows that by imitation, things don’t have to be this way.  To interpret that from a Christ-centered lens, it means there is potential for healing through the imitation of Christ.  This engages well with the early Christian emphasis on the imitation of Christ.

The Ground is Love

But how do we properly imitate?  I said authentically imitate above.  How?  That may seem like an unnecessary question based on everything I said above including how sometimes imitation is unconscious.  But this is a fitting question.  The answer is we imitate those we love.  Yes, it becomes unconscious, but it does so because of the free response of love that we have for Christ and the Church.

The love that we have for Christ and those who are His causes us to unconsciously imitate Him (and Him in them).  This true love leads to imitation of life, and thus the healing takes effect in us.

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