The Psychology of Jesus

Part 4, A Baptismal Identity

In the first post of this series I mentioned how the gospels are notorious for not revealing much about Jesus' inner life. This makes any description of "the psychology of Jesus" a highly speculative task. 

And yet, the mystery here might actually be a clue. That's the suggestion of the theologian Arthur McGill: 

In the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection--these are not read as windows in Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth...However, this portrayal is understood to be a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing. 

Phrased differently, Jesus stands before us a non-neurotic human being. A non-anxious human being. Positively stated, Jesus is tranquil and secure within himself. Thus, following McGill, the lack of depiction of Jesus' inner life in the gospels isn't due to biographical oversight or disinterest but is, rather, "a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing." The neurotic storms that make our egos loud and noisy didn't seem to plague Jesus. Jesus appeared to posses what psychologists describe as a "quiet" ego. 

As we'll get to, the security of Jesus' identity and the quietness of his ego liberated him from both basic and neurotic anxiety. And lacking these fears, Jesus stood free from the devil's power. But before turning to how Jesus' psychology related to anxiety, let's step back to analyze how this identity was accomplished.

Readers of The Slavery of Death and regular readers of this blog/newsletter will already be familiar with the argument I'll make here, leaning upon Arthur McGill and David Kelsey. Specifically, McGill describes what he calls Jesus' "ecstatic identity." I've preferred Kelsey's description of an "eccentric identity." To combine the two, I'll share McGill's descriptions of Jesus' psychology below but replace "ecstatic" with "eccentric." Here, then, is the secret to Jesus' psychology:

[T]he center of Jesus' reality is not within Jesus himself. Everything that happens to him, everything that is done by him, including his death, is displaced to another context and is thereby reinterpreted...He himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus does not confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him. In that sense Jesus lives what I call an eccentric identity.

If this is so, the issue becomes how this psychological configuration, this eccentric identity, is achieved. McGill continues: 

In all the early testimony to Jesus, this particular characteristic is identified with the fact that Jesus knows that his reality comes from God...Jesus never has his own being; he is continually receiving it...He is only as one who keeps receiving himself from God.

I've talked about Jesus' eccentric identity ever since the publication of The Slavery of Death. Regular readers know this is a drum I tend to beat. It shows up in Hunting Magic Eels and takes center stage in my upcoming book The Shape of Joy. With my students, however, I describe Jesus' eccentric identity as his "baptismal identity." I think the narrative of Jesus' baptism makes what might seem to be an abstract notion more tangible and concrete.

When Jesus approaches his baptism he does so prior to any performance or accomplishment. There are no bullet-points yet on his resume. Prior to stepping into the hero games of life, the neurotic striving to establish and secure his identity, Jesus dips under the waters of Jordan. There Jesus surrenders himself to the Father, dies to himself. The neurotic slate of the ego is wiped clean. Upon coming up out of the water the Spirit falls upon Jesus with the Father's declaration, "This is my beloved child." 

Here is Jesus’ baptismal identity, I tell my students. Jesus doesn't neurotically strain to establish his ego over against the world. Rather, Jesus receives his identity from the Father. Instead of an anxious inner struggle asking himself "Who am I?" Jesus has his identity gifted to him: "This is who you are." 

In this, Jesus' baptismal identity is his eccentric identity. Jesus is one who continually receives himself from the Father. As McGill describes it, in the waters of Jordan the grounding of Jesus' self is displaced and relocated. The center of Jesus' reality is shifted away from himself and found within the Father. His identity is flipped inside out. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, borrowing from Augustine, Jesus is not incurvatus in se, "curved inward" upon himself. Jesus' baptismal identity is, rather, excurvatus ex se, "curved outward" and eccentrically grounded in the Father. 

This baptismal identity is the secret to Jesus' psychology. In the posts to follow I'll describe how this identity creates a non-anxious posture in the face of our never enough problems, how a baptismal identity quiets the ego and creates a capacity for sacrificial love.