Jesus
Christ As Reconciler of God To Man
I
have suggested that the central conversation in the New Testament surrounds the
question of what it would mean for Jesus to be savior, and that the question of what
a messiah must be is the question Jesus struggled with, as did the majority of
those who came after Him. It is, indeed, a question we must continue to
struggle with today. One common practice is to try to go back and discern what
Jesus and His immediate followers thought about this question, and try to adopt
that view, trusting Jesus' self-understanding over and above later commentators.
I would argue that this is a massive mistake, at least from a conversational
point of view. The point is that whatever God was saying and doing in and
through Jesus, whatever it means for Jesus to have salvific significance is
something that remains huge, difficult, and mysterious. Jesus
self-understanding was the first, not the last, important word on the subject.
Jesus struggle within Himself and with His followers began the process, began
the conversation, and every thing that has come since has been important
commentary, and often has been grounded in God itself. We can only understand
who and what Jesus Christ was when we look at the entirety of the New
Testament, and consider much of what has come since. A wide array of influences
plays a role in my own comprehension of Christ, and I will be bringing much of
it to bear as I give my own understanding of what it means to say "Jesus
Christ is my Lord and Savior."
Let
me say that I think that Jesus sowed the seeds of His identification with God
Himself within His own self-understanding of Messiah. To be sure, Jesus did not
think of Himself as Divine, and He always put the focus on The Father rather
than Himself; but in some ways Jesus' own convictions led logically (when put
into the context of what happened later) to the idea of Jesus' divinity. Jesus'
rejection of political messianism and His own adoption of the "Man From
God" and "Suffering Servant" messianic theologies are of supreme
interest here. Jesus' conviction was that God and God alone could save mankind.
The moral community Jesus sought to form was never going to usher in the
Kingdom by it's own power, rather it was merely setting the stage for actions
Jesus thought could be accomplished by God alone. He believed military and
political power to be a satanic temptation, which in theological terms
translates into the idea that there is no moral or human answer to the problems
of evil or the intractability of sin. Put simply, Jesus contended that people
could not save themselves. The repentant 'remnant' He hoped to form was more like an attempt to fulfill scripture so that
the rest of the transformation could then proceed. His own role was to proclaim
that God alone could bring about the change His followers wanted to see, and to
represent God's call to perfect faith, obedience and repentance. In short
Jesus' role was to clarify God's place in human salvation, and to remove from
his disciples any trust in man's own power to usher in The Kingdom.
Of
course, the usage of the "Man From God" theology naturally conjured
up the image of a semi-divine individual, since that is how we see the man from
God presented in the words of the prophets. Jesus probably thought that the
miraculous healings that were taking place around Him were fulfilling this
aspect of scripture (Matthew 11:4-6), anyone who read those writings would
notice that the Man From God or the Son of Man spoken of in the prophets had
power of cosmic proportions. But its not clear to me that Jesus emphasized this
cosmic element in His own self-understanding, and rather focused on the cosmic
consequences of His work. In other words, He kept the cosmic power in the hands
of God, while still appropriating for Himself the special mediating role of the
Man From God or Son of Man.
More
important in my view, Jesus seems to have adopted the Suffering Servant idea
after John's arrest. I suspect that He expected His suffering to culminate with
a fulfillment from God Himself. The humble acceptance of the cross was an act
of obedience to God' perceived Will, but nothing ended as Jesus originally
suspected. As we move on, we'll see that this juxtaposition of the suffering
servant idea with political messianism will be vital to my own addition to the
conversations about Jesus' significance. For now, let me say that I find the
insistence on God alone as savior to be compelling, and the doubts about any
political or military solution to the human problem reflect my own feelings
about sin.
The
resurrection event, in my view, is the Rosetta Stone to understanding the
nature of salvation. I don't pretend to have any notion about what the
resurrection is or isn't beyond a direct revelation of Christ's continued
presence with the disciples and confirmation of His place as savior. But
whatever it amounts to, without this event, without God making Jesus' salvific
significance clear to the early followers of Jesus, His story would be one of
ultimate failure, and deserve barely a footnote in history. But in and through
that confirmation of His significance, we can cast His entire life in a new
light. The resurrection confirmed that Jesus is our savior; it functioned as
proof that He was Messiah and that through the Messiah God had begun the work
of Redemption, and that The Kingdom had started to take form. But Jesus'
conviction implies that God alone could do that. The move from Paul onwards
towards assigning Jesus a position closer and closer to God, was a natural
outgrowth of those convictions looked at through the lens of the Resurrection.
In Jesus the man, we have God Himself acting decisively to grant mankind
salvation, but only God can save us. So whatever else is true of messiah, and
thus of Jesus, He must in some sense be God, for God alone can be our Savior.
This
reasoning isn't explicit in Paul, but I suspect Paul's own moral pessimism and
his general metaphysical picture is part of the reason why he winds up
associating Jesus more and more with the Divine in a special way. I have
already commented that I myself find a lot in Paul's views that are concomitant
with my own experiences...the cosmic nature of sin, moral pessimism, etc. I
also think that Pauline and Johannine emphases on the cosmic drama involving
Jesus is vital to our own understanding of what it means for Jesus to be
Messiah. And while I agree for reasons I'll state in a moment that Jesus death
and resurrection are central to His salvific power, I do not think they are
solely what matters, and can't imagine why anyone would. God's confirmation of
Jesus as Messiah, and thus His implicit self-identification with Jesus is about
Jesus in toto, Jesus the man from birth to death and resurrection. In fact, if
we didn't glean anything from Jesus' teachings that had salvific import, we
wouldn't have been able to run down the logic that gets us to the conviction
that Jesus is Divine, a conclusion that buttresses Paul's overall view. Here
the Gospel writers I think got it right. With John I also find a lot of value
in his emphasis on the Logos, for reasons I've stated before and for reasons
dealing with messianic theology I'll deal with in a moment.
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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