So
why did God identify with Jesus and save us through Jesus? Put simply, there
was no other way to do it. What we really have in the conversations about
messiah are continuations of conversations we found in the prophets, particularly
surrounding the prophetic problem and the problem of evil, or put another way,
we have two kinds of sin we have to find a cure for, in order to effect
salvation for mankind: moral sin and metaphysical sin (notice how all our
earlier conversations now seem to come into close contact in these New
Testament messianic dialogues). Metaphysical sin, the not rightness of the
universe, makes belief in God difficult. How can we believe in God in this evil
world, how can we love Him if He abandons us to this terrible darkness? Paul's
answer is eschatological, John's is to make Jesus' death the beginning of a
cosmic transformation, an idea I think has merit and I'll return to later. But
none of these answers is really satisfactory to the question of theodicy. I find
more substance in the Church
Fathers' fascination with God's kenosis, His self-emptying (Philippians 2:1-11)
into the man of Jesus Christ, as a central reason for maintaining Christ's
Divinity. Certainly, they did not posit this as the answer to cosmic evil, and
instead adopted eschatological answers as did the prophets and Paul did, but
for us it can serve as an answer to that pressing problem. Paul sees the
darkness in the world, and posits Jesus as central to answering the question
'why is everything so bad'...the answer I glean from that meditation on the man
Jesus is this: God is far different than what we expected Him to be. God is not
like the Babylonian king, but is much more
like the suffering servant, the Crucified Carpenter. God reveals to us this: I
identify with this man Jesus. If you want to understand Who and What God is,
and how God operates in the world, look at the whole of Christ's life. No
doubt, the resurrection represents triumph, an act of creation and redemption.
But look at what it takes to bring that creation and redemption about:
suffering and death. God is that which exposes itself to the evils of the
world, shows it undeserved love, and thereby ultimately transforms it. God's
acts of creation are in and through His self-exposure to suffering and evil,
and the taking on the consequences of evil into Himself. God is more like the woman in labor pains, than the
sculptor or clock maker. God's power is suffering love, and that being the
case, there are some things we just cannot expect God to be able to do. One of
those is to ensure that we will be able to escape life without suffering.
We
cannot expect more from existence
than God gets. Bonhoeffer said once "cheap grace is grace without the
cross...costly grace is the gospel. Grace cost God, it cost God the life of His
only Son, and nothing can be cheap to us that is costly to God". I would
expand this to say that we cannot expect to exist, to be, especially to exist
in the midst of goodness, without suffering, since even God cannot exist
without it. Jesus could not have known it, but even in His greatest moment of
defeat, when all He thought was going to happen failed to, He was fulfilling a
salvific role. I have already mentioned the moment on the cross when Jesus
cries out "Eloi Eloi, lama sabacthani", or "My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me?” Traditionally, Christianity has tried to paint this
moment as a moment of Jesus greatest humanity, but I say no, in this moment you
get the clearest image of what Divinity really is all about. Understand God as
a man turning to God in defeat, and you'll understand the whole of the gospels.
We now can get a clear view of how Jesus can be all God and all man. Jesus is
God's Word come to life, God revealing who God is through a human being. In
much the same way I can give you a diary that will show you who I am and what
I'm about...a way of getting to know me perhaps even more
effective than direct contact with me, God gives us a human being who shows us
what it really means to be God. So in one sense Jesus is, just a man, just as
my diary is just paper and ink. But in another sense, it is the very heart and
soul of God revealed, as well as God's activity in the world explained. Just as
that diary in a real sense is my very self, my very soul, poured out on paper.
In
this context, the juxtaposition between political messianism and Jesus'
messianism takes on an important role. Christ's appearance was not incidental,
He came at a time when many had adopted the view that Caesar was Divine, and
Roman Power was something like "The Kingdom of God" made manifest.
God's decision to self-identify with the carpenter on the Cross is a decision
also to DIS-identify with the Caesar and with all political and military power.
It is as if God said "is that what you think God is? I'll show you what
God is, but you're probably never going to be able to accept it fully".
Jesus' self-identification with the suffering servant was His living out God's
Nature within Him. It was His revealing who God was, however unconsciously. And
there is also a lasting moral relevance to all this. One can find it in Matthew
25. God's identification with the lowest and the weakest brought with it a call
to treat these people as continued manifestations of God on Earth. To live in
service to the weakest is to live in service to God, in that sense Jesus death
also reinforced His call to a new moral community, which was radically
different from the other human communities He encountered. This is what is
known as the 'transvaluation of human values', the transformation of rational
ordering of values into something IRrational, where the lowest is made highest,
and the least important is made most important, it is an inevitable result of
God's decision to reveal Himself in Christ.
This
kind of Being, One who creates through suffering and by self-exposure to evil
and danger, One who redeems us by taking the consequences of evil into Himself,
is not one we can rightly get angry at for the evils of the world. To do so is
to blame the victim. Now we understand the prophetic insight that we can
discover God through our sufferings without resorting to the absurd formula
that therefore God sent our suffering. Reconciliation after the prophets had to
be two-sided, we needed God to be something we could accept and love, and we
needed to be made acceptable to God. This kenosis idea is a hint of the answer
the first half of that formula.
Before
I begin talking about the second half, our own reconciliation to God, I want to
address one issue that probably is bubbling under the surface. Often I am asked
how we can worship a God that is not omnipotent, not like that Babylonian King
in terms of power. I have had some put the question this way: well in what
sense is that God at all, in what sense is such a god "worthy of
worship"? Whenever I hear these comments I cannot help but think of the
Romans putting a crown of thorns on Christ's head, and mocking the idea that He
is a king. I do not know what 'worthiness of worship' amounts to, what I do
know is that knowledge of a love this great forces me into a position of
worship, and prayerfulness, even more
than the idea of some omnipotent Divine potentate. "Amazing Love, how can
it be, that you my King would die for me?" God doesn't have to bother with
us, He doesn't have to relate to us intimately, and share in our own pains, but
He does, because He loves us and wants to help us make of ourselves something
meaningful and valuable. God as Christ is the source of all love, and the very
ground of meaning and value. The very idea commands my worship, the very
thought of this suffering love calls me to worship and prayer. Indeed, God as
this man also means more
responsibility for me, and less guarantees in life, it may mean that life in a
world with God is harder, rather than easier, than the alternative. We must now
take up our cross and bear it. I think we get angry at Christ; we get angry
that God isn't what we thought He would be. We wanted someone who would give us
political prestige, a Divine Potentate who could tend our every whim and smite
our enemies. Christ frustrates human concerns and desires...a fact that is in
itself concomitant with the important prophetic experience. Christ just isn't
the kind of king we wanted. But, I would argue, He's the King we need. The God
we yearn for, in our deepest hearts.
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