Note: This is the second article in a three-part series on masculinity. It is perhaps strange that a woman authored these articles, although there is certainly no dearth of men writing and speaking about femininity, so perhaps it is not so strange after all. Sometimes someone with an outside perspective can speak truth into areas that are too close for us to fully perceive, and it is my hope that these articles do precisely that. I hope that these words do not seem “like the dripping of a leaky roof in a rainstorm” (Proverbs 27:15) but instead that they reflect Proverbs 27:17 – “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

My previous article focused on what God revealed to us about his plan for masculinity through the story of the first Adam. This understanding is partial and has been corrupted by sin; however, God revealed perfect manhood in the incarnation of Jesus, the second Adam.

Hungers for God’s Word

Jesus showed us that authentic masculinity involves a hunger for knowledge of God and his words. Even as a child enthralled by a bustling city, Jesus found his way to the Temple to learn about his Father. As he grew, his knowledge of God’s word infused his understanding of God’s purposes for him and his conversations with others. In fact, Jesus’s mind was so embedded in the Scriptures that some of the Divine Word’s own final utterances referenced Psalm 22 and applied the passage to his own suffering. We saw Jesus’s example played out in the life of Pope Francis who recognized the intimacy and power of the Bible: “The Lord gives you his word so that you can receive it like a love letter he has written to you…His word consoles and encourages us. At the same time, it challenges us…His word has the power to change our lives and to lead us out of darkness and into the light.”

Prayerful

Jesus also shows us that a man who embraces God’s plan for manhood prays. Throughout the gospels, we are told that Jesus periodically withdrew from the demands of life to spend time with his Father in prayer. His to-do list was not short. In fact, there were days when it involved feeding crowds of people anxious for his teaching. Yet, time with God in prayer remained a priority for Jesus. His prayers were simple, direct, honest, and authentic. They included gratitude and thanksgiving as well as petitions for himself and those around him. Jesus even prayed for us! He prayed with the confidence that God always heard him, but he did not use prayer as leverage to satisfy his own desires. Instead, through prayer, he submitted to the will of God, even when it involved his own death. Jesus’s prayers were not merely words, but transformative encounters. His prayer was a testament to the truth of Pope Francis’s remark that “Prayer opens the heart to the Lord, and when the Spirit enters, it changes your entire life from within.” Fortunately, Jesus taught us to pray like him when he shared the Our Father Prayer. By praying like Jesus, men become able to subject themselves to the will of the Father. As Daniel Amiri wrote, “A true man desires nothing except for the will of God, which man has discerned in prayer.” Prayer is the compass that guides a man’s life.

Communal

Men who seek the masculinity God intended for them nurture close, authentic, and intimate friendships. As was discussed in the first article, God is a relational God. The Trinity itself is a relationship in unity. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jesus prioritized close relationships with a select group of men and women and lived in community with them. This group of friends spent time together traveling, celebrating, feasting, doing God’s work, and supporting one another. His friends learned from him and helped him to do more than he was physically able to do alone. But apart from the measurable benefit of this community, there is a real sense of comfort and companionship in the Gospel accounts of Jesus and his friends. During the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang together. Jesus washed their feet and, as on many occasions, they reclined together at the dinner table. They shared life together which is why when Mary Magdalene saw Jesus in the Garden after his Resurrection, she clung to him. If he had been a distant savior to her – an ‘other’ – she would have bowed at his feet and perhaps kissed them in reverence, but she would not have clung to him. Such an intimate expression of relief and joy is reserved for those who love one another and live in fellowship.

Missionary

The life of Jesus teaches us that true manliness is found in men who are witnesses to truth. Pope Francis once suggested that “Everyone can ask themselves: Am I a witness to the truth, or am I more or less a liar disguised as a true person?” Jesus’s answer to that question was clear. In everything he did, he remained faithful to the truth, even when it damaged his field of influence and cost his life. This devotion to truth was not merely superficial: Jesus was concerned with the truth that lay at the very heart of things. He was not only concerned that people acted in accordance with the truth, but that their minds and hearts were conformed to it. He prized authenticity. During his first days as Pope, Pope Leo XIV has spoken repeatedly of the need for us to be a missionary Church that brings the Good News to all people. Real men embrace this role as Christ’s ambassadors and dedicate themselves to spreading his truth.

Obedient

Because Jesus was courageously faithful to the Truth, he was obedient. During his forty days of fasting in the desert – hungry and weakened – Jesus remained obedient to God even when tempted to bend the rules a bit. This obedience was present even as a child, when the Bible tells us he was obedient to his parents (and thus God’s commandment). Of course, we see this cooperation with God’s will in its fullness when Jesus consented to his crucifixion so that the redemption of the world was made possible.

Brave

At times, Jesus’s obedience and witness to truth required courage. He risked human condemnation to do God’s work, stood up for those who were being mistreated, touched lepers, remained steadfast when challenged by the Pharisees, and faced a horrific death without resistance.

Bravery was an essential aspect of Jesus’s masculinity, but did not derive from it. Instead, his courage flowed out from his rich prayer life, his selfless love, and his confidence in his standing as God’s beloved Son. At his baptism and the Transfiguration, God declared his love and pleasure in Jesus. It was Jesus’s knowledge of this love that made him brave. So often today, men feel that they must be brave simply because they are men. But just as was true for Jesus, while true manhood involves bravery, it does not bestow it. Instead, bravery comes from affirming relationships and there is none more powerful than a relationship with the God who sends us the Holy Spirit. As Pope Francis said when reflecting on the transformation of the apostles after the Crucifixion, “If we have the Holy Spirit within us, we will have the courage to strive forward, to win countless battles – not through our own strength but through the Holy Spirit who is with us.”

Emotional

As the ultimate model of masculinity, Jesus was deeply emotional and experienced a full range of emotions. Too many men today feel that anger is the only emotion that is appropriate for them to express. While Jesus did experience anger – righteous anger at the mistreatment of God and his people that led him to act but not sin – this was not his only, or even his primary emotion. Throughout his life, Jesus felt and expressed pity, sadness, frustration, patience, anticipation, dread, joy, love, and tenderness. Jesus was fully human and his emotions were an essential part of his humanity. His willingness to experience and express them showed that he was not afraid of his humanity.

Championing

As a man in the ancient world, Jesus was in a position of power over women and he used that power to defend and elevate women. When Mary was criticized for anointing Jesus with expensive oil, Jesus defended her action to the point of saying that it had universal and lasting significance and when a woman was brought to him and charged with adultery, Jesus told the accusers to consider their own sins, resulting in her release. At a time when women’s roles were primarily relegated to the home, Jesus went out of his way to talk to them and involve them in his salvific plan. For example, he blessed a Samaritan woman who was shocked that he spoke to her and allowed women to sit at his feet as he taught. He had compassion on a woman who had been bleeding for years (and touched him although she was presumably ceremonially unclean). It is not a coincidence that, after his Resurrection, Jesus appeared first to women, nor is it accidental that, while men frequently debated with Jesus and even tried to alter his course of action, two women are the only ones who are recorded as being able to change his mind: his mother, Mary, and the Syrophoenician woman who begged him to give “crumbs” to the Gentiles. Jesus valued women, saw them as his helpers, and, just as he did his disciples, he gave women important roles in furthering his kingdom.

Jesus used his relative privilege to help other vulnerable members of society, as well. Perhaps heightened by his own poverty, Jesus was sensitive to the plight of the poor. He noticed and highlighted the value of a poor woman’s gift and in one of his parables, he elevated a poor beggar named Lazarus while condemning a rich man’s sinful neglect of his suffering neighbor. Jesus repeatedly expressed the preferential option for the poor that Pope Francis frequently spoke of and that Pope Leo is now echoing. Our Savior called on his followers to be generous to the poor, telling them that how they treat the poor is how they treat him.

Additionally, while Jesus was humble and chose to enter the world through a poor family, he recognized that God’s covenant with Israel and his own work on earth gave the Jewish people – himself included – a spiritual advantage. While the linguistic, economic and social complexities of the story of the Syrophoenician woman often cause us to view this interaction as a contradiction of Jesus’s more welcoming actions, the reality is that he included non-Jewish people in his ministry prior to this conversation, so what was going on in this passage was not about Jewish superiority. For example, when traveling through an area that was heavily populated with Gentiles (which is why they were raising pigs), Jesus freed a man from demons by sending them into a herd of swine. When the man asked Jesus if he could accompany him, Jesus instead sent him to share the Good News in the Decapolis which was primarily pagan. Eventually, Jesus himself went to the Decapolis and healed a man born deaf and unable to speak. At another time, when a centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant, Jesus agreed and praised him for his faith. Throughout his ministry, Jesus engaged with and healed those that his own people rejected and resented. He even used a member of a hated people group – the Samaritans – to teach one of his most well-known lessons. Just as he did with women and the poor, Jesus used his role to embrace and restore dignity to society’s most vulnerable.

Sacrificial

Jesus’s willingness to use his own power to care for the powerless was one aspect of the selflessness that characterized his masculinity. From his moment of birth, Jesus scorned wealth, power and status opting to be born into a poor, displaced, working family of no influence. He poured out his life teaching and healing others until he finally gave it up for us on the cross. His life and death were defined by sacrifice in service of God and others. Like him, men who wish to embrace God’s plan for true masculinity must pick up their cross and follow. In his 2019 article, “Christ is the Path to True Manliness,” Daniel Amiri wrote, “We become true men to the extent that we participate in the love of Christ through the work of the Spirit in everything we do, even the seemingly small or unimportant things, laying down our lives for the good of others.” This selflessness will look different for all men since God has bestowed varying gifts and places us all in different circumstances, but it reflects Christ and is a part of what allows men to be made in God’s image – the image that made the original creation of man good. Amiri went on to write, “True masculinity is about servanthood, it is about building up communities, it is about continuous sacrifice to the will of the Father.”

In all these things, Jesus was our perfect model.

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Image: Gerolamo di Romano called Romanino, “Descent of Christ to Limbo” (detail of Christ helping Adam to rise), 1533-34, affresco, Church of Santa Maria della Neve, Pisogne (BS), Italy. CC BY-SA 3.0.