Our year is coming to the end. We have the last sprint before Christmas, we have all that planning and buying and cooking to do and then we might have a rest.
This year, like last year, has been a real struggle. Lockdowns do that to you. Plans have been stalled and we all had to stay home. And, there is something inherently bad about the idea of us keeping away from each other. We all need to live life shared. No one likes to be ignored or isolated.
In one of my favourite books by G. K. Chesterton, there is this moment where the hero finds someone else on his side, it says:
Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one[1].Humans are social animals, and we need each other. The rise of social media means we can take photos of ourselves or fling our thoughts into cyberspace just so someone else may see it, and we can share something of ourselves together.
Do you ever feel lonely? I talk to teenagers and they often feel alone and disconnected at home, even if their family is there. They want to be with their friends and branch out away from their parents, and so they cut themselves off from their folks. But loneliness isn’t just a teenage angst thing. With my new role here at St Matt's with the Seniors ministry, I am starting to read about ageing, and this demographic can be awfully lonely. As the family grows and becomes busier and may even move away, some people are left to pass the time without them.
And Christmas, can be a very lonely time[2]. It is meant to come with joy and lights and food and celebrations, but if it isn’t shared, if there is no one about, it can be lonely. And with feeling alone also comes with the feeling of being unloved and over-looked. No one wants to be ignored.
I’m not sure of your situation, and this Christmas maybe hard for you, but I hope that the fact that we have a Christmas at all will help point to a God that doesn’t leave us alone, that doesn’t overlook us, who doesn’t ignore us but instead comes to help us because He loves us.
The Christmas story that we hear every year may reduce our wonder of it. Repetition can be like that. We perhaps need to look to the children who are always excited to hear the same story over and over again. Their sense of wonder is never dampened by repetition or even of Christmas.
Every year we celebrate this crazy notion that God became man. The God, who in the beginning, created the universe, who said let there be light and then there was, the one who set the stars and the planets in motion, the one who made everything, as our John reading said, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). He - the infinite became a baby. The immortal took on flesh.
Today let’s look at who Jesus is and what it means for us to be truly human. For in our passage, we read that the Word, that is God, became flesh. That is, God became a man. God didn’t come as a cow or a dog. He didn’t come as a superman to impress us; he didn’t come as an angel or some alien.
Some people wonder if we are all alone in the universe. If aliens exist and what that means for our faith? But there are already sentient beings beyond us as angles who Jesus didn’t die for. God created humans, in His image. Male and female, He created them. People are the peak of God’s creation; we made it very good. We are God’s loved creatures that He made and He became one of us.
And he had to grow. The source of all power in this universe and the all-knowing God had to grow in strength and knowledge. He humbled himself to become one of us, that is the Christmas story. But why would the almighty God, the only one who didn’t need anything, who didn’t lack anything do this? Why would He humble Himself like that to be a human?
God came down to us because we needed help. We had corrupted ourselves, and each other and the world around us and we needed recusing. We were in darkness. We have dehumanised ourselves. We are not what God intended us to be. We had wandered from the ways God had intended us to live. Just look around there is now death and corruption in this world. It is in darkness and we are all under the curse of death. So God became truly human and took on a body that is also under this corruption. We were all lost and without knowledge of God, so He became one of us to save us and so that we would know Him[4]. As John said: “ No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18). Jesus came to make God known to us.
He did this because He loved us. He doesn’t overlook us, He doesn’t ignore us, He knows. God knows us and what it is like to be human.
We see this, as He was both fully human and fully God.
Jesus was fully human and lived out His life under the same conditions that we put up with. Injustice, hardship, temptation, hunger, tiredness all of that, and yet living in this fallen world He did not fall.
We are so used to our present state that we sometimes forget what it means to be truly human. We say things like “to err is human”, or “nobody is perfect” as if this is a true statement about humanity[5]. But Jesus didn’t sin, he was the ultimate standard of what it means to be a human. He lived this life, as our representative. He lived this life as our substitute so that He could die in our place, to save us because He loved us.
Jesus was fully God because only God can forgive sins[6]. While Jesus was in Israel, He got in a bunch of trouble from religious leaders when He told people their sins were forgiven. This was because everyone knew, only God can forgive sins. But Jesus did a few things that only God can do, like controlling the weather, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind and even raising the dead. Only with divine help can any of us be healed. Only with divine help can anyone escape the darkness and know God. Salvation belongs to the Lord.
In our relationship with God, it was God who was the sinned against party. It was only Jesus who was fully God who could take on the penalty for all sins and remove God’s wrath for us, by forgiving us. And only Jesus could bring us back to Himself. We needed a divine intervention because we couldn’t make our way back to the divine.
And Jesus didn’t just die for our sins. Jesus coming to Earth wasn’t just about Him coming to die for us. The story continues. After Jesus had conquered death and was raised again in a new restored body He ascended into Heaven.
Jesus is still in the flesh as a man in Heaven. I don’t know how much we think about that. God is still in the flesh. Humanity is so loved by their Creator that their Creator is still a human. Jesus resurrected body was a foretaste of what our resurrected bodies will be like.
And Jesus didn’t just save us and nick off. He saved us to take us with Him. Jesus wants us to participate in the divine. Did you catch that bit in our 2 Peter (1:3-4)reading? Peter writes:
His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desiresThrough God’s divine power, we have these promises so that we may participate in the divine nature. This is a bit crazy if you think about it. This is saying that we humans, take some part or share in the divine nature. This passage doesn’t necessarily say exactly what that means.
Athanasius in the 4th century said: “the Son of God became man so that we may become God”[7].
It is a bit jarring and can be misconstrued by what he meant here. He goes on to say that in Jesus taking on shame from men, it means that we might inherit immortality. I think in our 2 Peter verse, it seems to contrast participating in the divine nature with leaving the corruption in the world. One aspect of this is I think it means we are called to be Holy separated from this world. But I think it is also saying that we, in the end, get incorruptible bodies that will last longer than this corrupt world[8]. We get immortality, which is a trait of God.
Because of Jesus, those who trust in Him as the Way, the Truth and the Life, they get eternal bodies, like Jesus. We get these never-ending bodies so that we can be with God forever. That was what humanity was created for in the first place.
God wants us to be part of His family. Before Jesus left, He said he was going to prepare a place for us in His Father’s mansion.
The Christmas story starts with a no vacancy sign[9] and will ultimately end in a mansion with God.
Jesus is fully God and fully man in one person, and will be so forever[10]. His fleshly life has the shape of a U. He comes down as a baby so that we can know God and so that He can rescue us. After He has undone our corruption He rises again in a new body and ascends to the right hand of the Father, so that we can follow Him there.
Dorothy Sayers was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford[12]. She wrote many things including a series of crime novels involving the main character was Peter Wimsey. He was some aristocrat who solved mysteries. In the fifth book in the series, he meets this character Harriet Vane. Harriet was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford and she wrote detective novels. Harriet falls in love with Peter Wimsey and eventually they marry and live happily ever after.
Do you see what Dorothy Sayers did? She had created this world and this character Peter Wimsey, and she felt for him. She saw that he was terribly lonely. So, she wrote herself into her own story to save Peter, to give him love and company. And we may say this is sweet and nice and lovely, for Dorothy Sayers to fall in love with her main character. But that is exactly what God has done for us.
Some may think we don’t have a watertight argument for God, but we have a watertight person in Jesus who is God.
The good news is this story. Every other religion says God is up here and you have to believe in him down here. But only Christianity says God wrote Himself into the story. He saw that something was terribly wrong with us, that we were all under the curse of death and that we were lost. So He entered this world out of love to save us, and to bring us back to him.
This Christmas let's celebrate and be reminded of the God who became man so that we might be with Him. We are not all alone in this world, God is with us, He is Immanuel. He did not overlook us, or ignore us, instead, He came to be with us because He loves us.
Almighty God,
who wonderfully created,
and yet more wonderfully restored,
the dignity of human nature:
in your mercy,
bring us to share the divine life of Jesus Christ,
who came to share our human life,
and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirt,
one God, now and forever. Amen[13].
Lord, we thank you for Christmas and the reminder that you have written yourself into our story to save us because you love us.
We thank you that you are Immanuel: God with us. You don’t overlook us, or ignore us, but instead, you come to be with us. May we be reminded of this over this season and have joy.
[1] G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday. I've given this quote before in a sermon on Friendship
[2] Speak Life are doing a Christmas series this year on the elderly who are lonely over this time:
[3] N. D. Wilson (2013), Myth Wars: C.S. Lewis vs. Scientism
[4] Athanasius was big on these two reasons for Jesus incarnation: to save us from death and to reveal God to us.
[5] Thabiti Anyabwile, NCC Q22: Why must the Redeemer be truly human?
[6] Leo Schuster, NCC Q23: Why must the Redeemer be truly God?
[7] Athanasius, On the Incarnation
[8] Watson, Duane Frederick. & Callan, Terrance, First and Second Peter (Paideia) say: “The most salient characteristic of divine nature is incorruptibility; the immediately following reference to having escaped the corruption in the world…the hope of sharing divine nature is equivalent to the hope of putting on incorruptibility and immortality”. Peter H. Davids, The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude (Pillar) has a more nuanced view that includes the holiness aspect: “it is likely that what 2 Peter has in mind when he claims participation in the divine nature is the reception of an ethical nature like God's, which then leads to immortality.”
[9] I’m pushing back a little from some of John Pipers Solid Joys devotionals that I listen to every day. I took his no vacancy sign line and took it to the New Heavens and the New Earth. Piper just took it to the cross. I wanted to push this idea further in the story past the ascension to the resurrection, where Jesus is still human.
[10] Grudem (1994), Systematic Theology, p529
[11] Soviet Space Propaganda Was Atheistic — But Putin's Cosmonauts Fear God
[12] I took this story (and a bit of the Yurg Gagarin/C.S Lewis story) from Tim Keller when he spoke at Google on his book, The Reason for God
[13] This was taken from A Prayer Book for Australia. I was struck by how much this Christmas prayer fitted in so well with us sharing in the divine.
0 comments:
Post a Comment