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1. Our Experience of our Limitedness
When man knows about God and experiences his own limitedness, the vanity of his efforts, and the insurmountableness of the obstacles that are placed before him, then these experiences of his limits become an indication for him of a beyond. His passing time becomes for him the sign of God’s eternity; his barriers, the sign of infinity. Thanks to his limits, he is kept constantly reminded and warned. And yet, his human capabilities and experiences, for all their limitedness, do not stand in opposition to what God is and is capable of. After all, God created man in his image, and an image cannot be in contradiction to what it represents. What is contradictory, what is next to incomprehensible about man, what cuts short every comparison, is sin. Sin has turned man’s eyes away from the original model, detached his life from God, and plunged him into solitude.
2. Christ’s Assumption of our Limitations
The Son of God assumes human nature just as he happens to find it, with the consequences of sin, but without sin. He overcomes the weariness that he feels after long travels and night watches by the strength of a human obedience to God. This obedience cannot simply be regarded as a power that he takes over from his divinity. He does not allow himself the freedom of constantly elevating his assumed human nature beyond its limits. He puts up with more than others because he loves more; he endures more because he is more obedient. He gives us this love and this obedience so that we can learn not to stumble continually over our limits but rather to stretch them a little in order to serve God better and fulfill more adequately the task he has set for us. But here below, this overcoming of one’s limits occurs little by little. It is not, for instance, the beginning of a gradual conquest of the laws of the body by the spirit or a systematic displacement of our limits in the direction of infinity. For humility, patience, and the love that bears all things are virtues that God has bound together with our limits and our experience of limits. How could someone who managed constantly to overleap his own limits still be humble? How could someone be patient if impatience always spurred him to further successful achievements? There is a measure that is laid on us. We can use this measure only (as a gift) in love for God, rather than inordinately grasping it for ourselves. This measure, which is entrusted into God’s hands (as is our nullity), not only makes us newly aware of our finitude, but it also makes us forget ourselves and feel secure within God’s embrace, in the very way that the Son revealed to us through his human existence. Perhaps no one was ever so lonely as he was during his forty-day fast in seclusion and temptation. And yet this solitude flows back into solidarity with us. It was not a severance of every connection; rather, it was a task of love, and love never separates; it unites even when desert and solitude are the means of achieving unity. Whoever saw him there would have seen only that he was alone. However, he took us with him into his prayer; we are there with him. His Holy Spirit has overcome all the limits of our own spirit—our being here and not there. We are carried and taken along by the Son and thus are no longer ‘‘here and not there’’; rather, we are ‘‘both here and there at once’’. The perception that we are ‘‘here and not there’’ is a function of our reason, which is bound to human laws. Through our know it-all attitude we often impose a finitude on our understanding and love by speaking the word ‘‘impossible’’ whenever we experience our limits. What we set down as physically impossible—‘‘I can only keep going or stay awake for so many hours’’—is already overcome in the Spirit of the Lord. Consequently, we do not need to waste any time on it, and we should not think and talk incessantly about our limits. Ever since God became man, we have been able to find the unlimited within our limitations.
3. The Removal of Limits in Christ
We can imagine, for example, that we have reached the limit of our power to stay awake and thus are no longer able to say a certain prayer that we had made up our mind to recite. We can then recommend this prayer in faith to God and his saints. Angels can pray it for us, and God can also hear our good intention and grant it; he can make us understand that we have been heard, regardless of the fact that we ‘‘know for certain’’ that we did not say the prayer ourselves. As a matter of fact, it may be that God prefers to have the power of our prayer and of all that we undertake in his name begin precisely at the point at which we have run up against our limits, that point at which we have become too weary in his service—wherever that may be—to bring to completion what we would have liked. Christ suffered this ‘‘not being able to carry on’’ to the point of death. Death was the limit of this incapacity, and he went to this limit. He did not set the limit of his death himself; he would have gone as far beyond the limit of death as the Father willed. And precisely at the limit of death the salvation of the world begins, and the perfect fulfillment of the Father’s will emerges into view. God’s victory came at the limit of death. His absolute infinity breaks through at the point of our absolute finitude.
Consequently, all the limits that we know from our existence, or, in another way, from the existence of Christ, are landmarks. Humanly speaking we would say: Here we run into a stone wall. Here is where our property stops and our neighbor’s field begins. The landmarks placed in fields mark property lines. However, when it is a question of spiritual property, such demarcations are no longer valid; rather, they have been abolished. What is mine is also yours and his. There is the communion of saints, the Church, in which the Lord shows something of the limitlessness of his divinity and the eternity of his love. In this realm one can pray and sacrifice in place of another, or both can do the same work together. One can be ‘‘done’’ in the other, just as we are redeemed in the temptation of Jesus or in his Cross and just as the twelve-year-old Messiah truly burst through the boundaries for us on the way to the Father and made it possible for us to follow after him. The Church is the place where all limited beings are gathered together in freedom from limitation. Insofar as their limits are removed, they are in principle saints. Insofar as they live in accord with this freedom from limitation, they also bring to fulfillment the holiness that has been granted them.
