January 2, 2011
The Holy Name (transferred)
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21

Let us pray.  Gracious God, we are humbled that Jesus Christ left the throne room of heaven, became flesh and lived with us, because of your great love for us. Thank you for demonstrating what it means that we’re created in your divine image. Our understanding is imperfect, and our expressions of divine purpose and grace are far from being fully authentic and whole.  Yet, Christ’s presence among us is an example that continues to inspire us, compel us and move us to be manifestations of your love and mercy.  Empower us by your Spirit to be children of the light, radiant with the spirit of Christ shining through us.  Amen.

Every year about this time we fall victim to the compulsion to change something about our lives, through the peculiar exercise known as the New Year’s resolution.

Rarely does these work – at least not in any instantaneous way.  There’s nothing magical or particularly spiritual about taking down one wall calendar and putting up another.  Real change – change that matters – takes time.  It usually happens along the lines of that old saying, “two steps forward, one step back.”  It demands a tremendous amount of support from others.  Still, that clean expanse of numbered white boxes on that new calendar – uncluttered by the jotted reminder notes, cross-outs and erasures of the previous year’s living – holds the promise of fresh opportunities and renewed hope.k

When Jesus came to earth, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”  The Word: clean, pure, elemental.  Living among us: yes, living among the likes of us. Human words are a mostly forgettable grouping of trivia, curses, one-upmanship and pleas for attention.  Yet, the Word of God is like that first event inscribed on a pristine calendar page.  There it is, it stops us in our tracks.  There are no doubts.  No distractions.  Absolutely no ambiguity.

No wonder, then, that the church has struggled, throughout the centuries, to capture the miracle of Jesus’ Incarnation in human terms.  And as much as we try, we never quite succeed.  Our words only falter and break under the weight of sheer divinity – and true humanity.

In the Incarnation event, God gives us not mere words but The Word.  Resolving, in this new year, to know that singular Word better could make all the difference.
With that in mind, I want to reflect this morning about what it is that Jesus’ humanity and divinity reveals about our own.

And to keep it interesting, I will tell you at the very start that it involves a good deal of conspiracy.  Lots of intrigue.  No small amount of mayhem.   And yes, even murder.

And you thought annual meetings were rather boring events!

In his new book Jesus Wars, Philip Jenkins tells the page-turning story of all the wrangling about Jesus’ divinity and humanity that took place at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.  Jenkins recounts how bishops, monks, emperors, the powerful wives and mothers of emperors and passionate laypeople tortured and killed each other in a conflict that was as much about imperial politics as it was about the question of Jesus.

The popular view of the early church councils, perhaps even your own, that is if you think about them at all, has probably been influenced and promoted by skeptical scholars and novels such as Dan Brown’s.

In The DaVinci Code, Brown writes about the conflicting understandings about Jesus and how they were equally considered.  It’s important to remember, however, that the early ecumenical councils were not meeting to just cobble together a new understanding of Jesus, nor did the bishops gather to vote on a decision between alternative views.  By the time of the First Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), which produced the Creed with which we are all familiar, and, later, Chalcedon, the traditional, biblical view of Jesus’ nature as “fully human and fully divine” was already widely accepted as truth in most places, and the alternative views about Jesus were the products of fringe movements.  The councils merely codified and gave language to beliefs that were already commonly held as a means of further defining the boundaries of orthodoxy.

To put it in a more modern context, while Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics practice Christian faith somewhat differently and have their own doctrinal emphases, their views on the nature of Christ are essentially the same, grounded in a biblical framework that has been carried forward in two millennia of Christian tradition.  When Mormonism emerged in the United States in the mid-19th century, with its views of Jesus as a kind of divine being subordinate to God – a lesser God – it wasn’t as though the other Christian traditions saw it as an alternative to be equally considered.  Instead, Joseph Smith’s view of Jesus was rejected as a heretical by comparison.  The violence against Mormons, like that of the ancient councils against their contemporary heretics, is still a black mark on the American chapter Christian history.

And this is nothing new.  Alternative versions of Christianity emerge in just about every generation, but every variation eventually bumps up against the traditional view of Jesus’ nature and is assigned an unorthodox alternative not so much by the decisions of councils but by the depth and strength of the traditional biblical view itself.

So what’s the big deal, you ask?  Christians of all varieties have always agreed that, in some sense, Jesus was both divine and human, so does the degree really matter?  Some Christians have been arguing for centuries that humanity and divinity are mutually exclusive; therefore, Jesus had to be more of one than the other.  Others simply want to push the mystery button and consign the whole thing to the realm of silly human speculation.

However there is a reason why Jesus’ nature is such a big deal for Christians. What’s at stake in the question of Jesus’ humanity and divinity isn’t only our understanding of the nature of God and the person of Christ but also the nature and vocation of ourselves as human beings made in God’s image.  The opening lines of the gospel of John point us toward an understanding of the relationship between humanity and divinity that’s a basis not only for orthodoxy but for our own identity, as well.

You may recall from our Gospel reading from Christmas day, that John begins “[i]n the beginning,” which calls us immediately back to the story of creation (John 1:1).  Jesus, the “Word,” was both “with” God and “was” God; thus, John pretty much puts the question of Jesus’ divinity to rest right at the start.  “The Word” was both present and participating in creation itself, says John (v. 3) – a point Paul also makes (Colossians 1:15-16; Philippians 2:6), which indicates that John certainly wasn’t alone in his theological understanding of Jesus.  For John, as well as the other New Testament writers, to see and hear Jesus is to see and hear God (John 5:37-38; 8:19; 14:9-11).

It’s interesting to note that many of the early heresies surrounding Jesus’ nature were focused on denying the fullness of his humanity while promoting his divinity.  At Chalcedon, for example, the Monophysites wanted to claim that Jesus was the merger of two natures into one that was primarily, if not exclusively, divine.  The earlier Docetists went a step further, claiming that Jesus only appeared to have a physical body and was a pure spirit who couldn’t physically die.

Others, of course, were on the opposite spectrum – bishops such as Arius, who argued at Nicea that Jesus was a created being and that only God the Father could be considered as fully divine.  For many people, then as now, it was difficult if not impossible to conceive of God being fully invested in human form and participating in the messiness of human life.  In a lot of theological circles, humanity has long been seen as something very separate from the divine.

Remember, though, that John starts his gospel with the words, “In the beginning,” which call the reader back to the very beginning of creation and, especially, to the creation of humanity.  John seems to want us to view Jesus’ humanity and divinity and our own humanity and relationship with God through the lens of what God created humans to be in the beginning.

In Genesis 1, God makes these first humans “in God’s own image” and calls this creation “very good.”  Genesis chapter 2, in the second story of Creation (yes, there are two!) provides another account, this one saying that God created Adam, Hebrew for “man,” out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life.  Both narratives make it clear that God is pleased with this human creation – a reflection of God’s own being.  These humans have been created for relationship with God.

But it is not only their physical creation that matters here, however; so does their vocation.  God’s first commandment was for these humans, God’s own image, to reflect God’s care for the creation by exercising dominion and stewardship over the whole endeavor.  God doesn’t see these people as being “only human” but, rather, “fully human” – the full representation of God’s own image, character and vocation.  They aren’t equals with God, as Genesis 3 will clearly reveal, but they’re invested with a status of divine favor.  John is perhaps thinking of the “breath of life” in Genesis when he says, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:4).  From the very beginning, humans have been given the capacity to relate to God and to receive his “abundant” life (John 10:10).  Humans aren’t God, but they’re made to be indwelt by his presence – their full humanity enabled to be filled by the Holy Spirit (John 14:17).  Although many see our humanity as a curse, we forget that God created us for his own “very good” purpose and for relationship with him.

Genesis 3, of course, reveals that the first humans sought to be like God – to be more than they were created to be – and instead wound up being less than the image of God and less than human.  Our own heretical theology comes into play when we believe we’re “only human” because we sin, when the Bible reveals that sin is what makes us less than human.  After all, sin is inherently dehumanizing: War turns people into targets, lust turns people into objects of pleasure, greed turns people into commodities.  Our humanity isn’t the problem; it’s our sinful disregarding of our humanity that gets us into trouble.

Jesus didn’t do that, of course.  In his life, death and resurrection, Jesus revealed what it meant to be fully human and, at the same time, fully indwelt and one with the Divine.  He isn’t merely a perfect icon to admire but an example to follow in how to fully engage one’s capacity for relationship with God. In John’s gospel, Jesus is constantly trying to teach his disciples how to be one with him and one with the God he reveals in his own person.

Jesus does more than model full divinity and humanity, however.  By becoming human and by dying a human death on a cross, the naked and bleeding Jesus experienced the ultimate dehumanizing act on our behalf.  In Jesus, God would go through the very death that ends human life, but then he would rise from the dead, defeating death and offering the amazing and wonderful hope that the curse of death, which now ends our humanity, will someday no longer be in the way of an eternal, resurrected, embodied, fully human life with God – the way it was meant from the beginning.  “In him was life,” says John, “and the life was [and is] the light of all people” (vv. 4-5). We are given the light of God’s Spirit to be lived out in our fully human lives – lives that are meant to reflect both the human and the divine.

Wrangling over the nature of orthodoxy has never been unimportant, but ultimately our understanding of Jesus has to be as much embodied as believed. As the great missionary E. Stanley Jones once said, “The Christian faith is not a set of propositions to be accepted – it is a Person to be followed.”