Incarnation – Divinely human 29.03.15
Two tourist coaches at Ocean Terminal – two cultures (Cologne and Forfar) –
two very different ways of understanding the same bit of human activity. In
Lent I have attempted to grapple with the cultural / contextual background of
some of our Christian beliefs and ask how we might grapple with them in our
own culture and context. When it comes to ‘Living the Questions’ of the
Christian faith there’s no bigger question that ‘who is Jesus’. It’s certainly
what many will have been asking on Palm Sunday as Jesus arrived in
Jerusalem – and affects how we feel about it today.
It’s instinctive to ask what those who knew Jesus, or those who were closest
in time to his life thought – after all, they should know. For the first Christians
Jesus was divine, and their New Testament canonical writings collectively
point to this unambiguously. John’s Gospel begins with the classical Christian
claim, the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, that God sent his only
begotten Son into the world, and that this Word or Son, was one in being
with God. God himself was the subject of this life of love, self-giving, death
and rising again - to understand Jesus as simply a good and inspired young
man who was given up to death for us would have been something akin to an
Aztec sacrifice. The first Christians were convinced that this Jesus was the
divine Son and so were drawn into a Trinitarian theology. In this sense, what
we think about Jesus (our ‘Christology’) helps us to define God, and vice
versa. Patterns of the earliest Christian worship also demonstrate this
conviction [the study of the early commitment to the divinity of Jesus has
been Larry’s major area of work for many years].
Since then, there’s been a long process of wrestling with reconciling Jesus’
humanity and divinity. . After long and sometimes acrimonious debates the
Church gave a final definition of its Christology at the Council of Chalcedon in
Asia Minor in 451 CE, affirming belief in Jesus Christ as one person in two
natures, the Chalcedonian Definition declared that he has two natures in one
person; it also insisted on the completeness of his two natures: Godhead and
manhood. However, given the absolute commitment to the divinity of Jesus,
it’s not surprising that there evolved a long tradition in the Church which,
through its devotion emphasized the divine nature of Christ at the expense of
his humanity.
From the 19th century there has been a great expansion of ‘Humanitarian'
christologies: The Jesus of History – which work ‘from below up’, that is to
say, which begin with the humanity of Jesus and which may or may not go on
to show that the evidence leads to a recognition also of his divinity. Many
theologians and philosophers over the centuries have rejected the divine
identity of Jesus, preferring to see him as a human visual aid for God, a man
who was either adopted by God or elected beforehand. There has always
been this Unitarian strand of opinion that Jesus is best understood as a good
man, and of course the Jewish view that he was a charismatic rabbi who felt
very close to God. This kind of interpretation began to be normalised in
theological schools with the European Enlightenment. For those of us
privileged to study New Testament theology and Christian Doctrine, there is
an enormous world of theological and philosophical writing to be fallen upon
from this era and onwards – atheistic rationalism vying with the romantic
movement – biblical criticism jousting with metaphysics. In the last 50 years
we’ve had Liberation theology picturing Jesus as a political liberator….
Feminist theology that takes both a positive and negative view of the
maleness of Jesus…. Post-modern theology which would consign Christian
claims to the uniqueness of Jesus into the sea of relativism. In recent decades
there has been the work of The Jesus Seminar – a revamp of the ‘quest for
the historical Jesus’ (from which stable the Living the Questions provocateurs
emanate, and of which Marcus Borg was a contributor) - which could be said
to be related to the mid 20th century popularisation of liberal Christology,
The Myth of God Incarnate, which in turn could be said to have replayed the
19th century tune of stripping away the miraculous from the NT so as to
produce Jesus the man, with a divine meaning, or myth, for us.
I can already feel the thunderbolts raining down in response to such a
meagre rendition of the story of the debate about the humanity/divinity of
Jesus. If I were to say that the debate might not immediately enlighten the
man or woman on the number 22 bus, it would not be intended as an anti-
intellectual remark. But we might well, and perfectly reasonably feel that we
have little option but to take refuge in the creeds and the liturgies of the
church, and perhaps rightly acknowledge that the Incarnation is a
magnificent mystery – into which we pitch our lives – that’s what faith is and it’s something that some of us are more fascinated to wrestle than
others.
Yet, what are we to say - if at times we must – about the incarnate – the flesh
and boneness of the Word of God.
In his 1956 poem ‘The Incarnate One’ Edwin Muir critiqued the Orcadian
Calvinism of his childhood:
The windless northern surge, the sea-gull’s scream
And Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae.
[I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd’s dream]
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
How could our race betray
The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake
Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?
The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
[See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument].
Are not even the highest of Christologies – the most exalted and
transcendent visions of the redemptive 2nd person of the Trinity, he who is
the Word of God, at the centre of creation – lost to us if Christ is not with us,
in the Jesus of flesh and bone, in our bodily experience of the very matter of
creation and all of God’s creatures? So I would want to say something again
about how it’s in the humanity of Jesus that we can understand our own
journey in this life.
When asked about my faith, I prefer to say that I am a Jesus person, rather
than a church person. I like to think that if had encountered Jesus in his time,
I would have gone with him (no doubt I’d have melted away before he got to
Jerusalem…). I am compelled by Jesus, the compassionate, intense, witty,
courageous, rash, articulate young man, who still confronts and challenges
the world. Time has not dulled how when I read about him, remember him in
the eucharist, meditate upon his words, and imagine him, he lives in my soul.
My encounter with him has shaped important aspects of my life, my career
choices, my relationships, - and the way I understand the meaning and
purpose of life. When I have found myself in dark valleys, my experience of
Jesus helps me pick up the pieces and learn from my mistakes. Wherever I go,
whatever I do, the influence of Jesus is potentially always with me. It is
something that has had to evolve and change with life’s progress – I’ve had to
critically examine the traditions about his life in order to know him as
authentically as I can. It would be miles easier if reading the gospel story was
as obviously mythological as, say, the myths of the Greek gods. But the myth
of Jesus is entwined with history, and the finest scholars have to struggle to
work out what’s being said and why. Yet it is when we recognise, and catch
glimpses of the human Jesus that the journey of faith becomes personal to
us.
In the gospel stories, it does seem as though Jesus had bad days. To say that
Jesus was perfectly divine and perfectly human rather denies his humanity –
if he was perfect, he wasn’t really one of us. Sometimes he sounds arrogant
and short-tempered. Once when he hungry he saw a fig tree that wasn’t in
season and withered it with a curse. Once he disowned his family who had
come to see him. Once he compared a gentile woman to a dog licking up
crumbs under a table. If Jesus was human, then his body was subject to the
same biochemical rushes as the rest of us. The same ego to control, the same
discouragement to absorb.
When Jesus found himself in the wilderness for these 40 days we call Lent, he
had an experience that we can relate to: he found God within himself. And
Jesus often repeated that his innermost experience was something that was
available to those who would follow him: ‘the glory that you have given me I
have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you
in me, that they become completely one…’ (John 17:22-33)
The most compelling implication is that a normal, flawed human being can
discover God within him or herself…. The awakening of the innermost soul to
its divine nature. Jesus often asked people to do impossible things – to love
their enemies, to take up their cross and follow him, to give up all their
possessions. When the disciples expressed amazement at this, he said ‘For
mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible’ – and so taught
that we need to recognise God within ourselves – identify our deepest selves
with God – we have to find ways to stop letting our fears, or our possessions
define who we are, and let God define us….the path which St Paul described
as ‘It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’
A classic tactic of aging clergy, is to harp back to theology they read 30 years
before… usually because it’s the last theology they read – so at the risk of
being so accused, one book was very influential for me.
D M Baillie – ‘God was in Christ’ (1948)
THE INCARNATION AS THE PARADOX OF GRACE - ie that every good thing in
us – or every good thing we do is an expression of God. The paradox is that
when we ascribe this goodness to God, we don’t have to deny our human
personality or let go of personal responsibility. (cf pp114) This paradox, as we
find it in our own lives is a glimpse of the same paradox, on a much grander
scale, in the life of Jesus..
’This paradox in its fragmentary form in our own Christian lives is a reflection
of the perfect union of God and man in the Incarnation on which our whole
Christian life depends, and may therefore be our best clue to the
understanding of it_ In the New Testament we see the man in whom God
was incarnate surpassing all others (men) in refusing to claim anything for
Himself independently and ascribing all the goodness to God. We see Him
also desiring to take up others (men) into His own close union with God, that
they might be as He was. And if they (these men) enter in some measure
through him into that union, experience the paradox of grace for themselves
in fragmentary ways, and are constrained to say, 'It was not I but God,' may
not this be a clue to the understanding of that perfect life in which the
paradox is complete and absolute, that life of Jesus which, being the
perfection of humanity, is also, and even in a deeper and prior sense, the
very life of God Himself? If the paradox is a reality in our poor imperfect lives
at all, so far as there is any good in them, does not the same or a similar
paradox, taken at the perfect and absolute pitch, appear as the mystery of
the Incarnation? pp117-18
This is what’s called ‘degree christolology’…..Not that you have to do a
degree to understand it, but the idea that we can all find the presence of the
divine within us – and that Jesus was the ultimate expression of that mystery.