Advent Sermon Series Part 2

Here's the second part of my Advent sermon series

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 2

Jesus as Divine:  What Are We to Make of the Incarnation?

Scripture:  Matthew 1:18-24; John 1:1-5, 14

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Last Sunday afternoon my son Matt asked me what I had preached on that morning.  I said it was the first part of a sermon series titled “Who Are We Waiting For?”  He replied “How can you stretch an answer that is one word into three sermons?”  I replied:  “Experience.”  Then I explained that while “Jesus” is the answer to this series’ title question, that answer is actually quite complex.  Today we get into some of that complexity.  In Part 1 of this sermon series titled “Who Are We Waiting For?” I insisted at considerable length that before Jesus was anything else he was a real human being.  That is true, and it is important; but for the Christian tradition it is not a complete answer to the question of who Jesus is for us.  It is not a complete answer to the question “Who are we waiting for?”  Jesus was a human being, yes; but the Christian tradition  has said almost from the very beginning that, while not ceasing to be a human being, Jesus was also much more than a mere human being.  Almost from the very beginning the Christian tradition has said that Jesus of Nazareth was God Incarnate, God become human.  What are we to make of that contention?  Does it have any meaning for us?  To those questions we now turn in this second part of our Advent sermon series.

Although many progressive Christians today see Jesus as merely a man (trust me, I see them all the time in my work on our Conference Committee on Ministry), I remained convinced that the classic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is indispensible to true Christianity.  Although its classic theological formulation didn’t come until the fourth century CE, the doctrine of the Incarnation has its roots in the New Testament.  We heard some of those roots in our readings this morning.  In Matthew’s birth story Jesus is called Emmanuel, which means God with us.  The prologue to the Gospel of John that we also heard says that something it calls “the Word” was actually God and that the Word then became flesh, that is became a human being in Jesus.  However it is stated, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus was, at the same time, both fully human and fully divine.  That he was God but that he was also fully and completely human.  Human and divine, not human or divine. 

How in heaven’s name are we to understand that contention, that someone who was human like us was also God Incarnate?  To get at how we are to understand the Incarnation we have to start, I think, with understanding the experience that the first Christians had of Jesus.  Clearly both during his lifetime when he was physically present with them and after his death when he was spiritually present with them, the earliest Christians experienced the presence of God in Jesus in some unique way.  In him they saw a revelation of the nature and will of God unlike anything they had experienced before.  They felt the very presence of God in him in a way they had never felt before.  They somehow knew that he communicated truth about God in a unique way, and they felt that he not only taught that truth, he somehow was that truth. 

This experience came first, then the earliest Christians struggled to find language with which to express that experience of the presence of God in Jesus.  We see them doing that in our Gospel readings this morning.  Matthew turned to the prophet Isaiah and found the term Emmanuel, God with us.  The author of the Gospel of John turned to the wisdom tradition of Israel and found the Word, John’s term for a concept that in earlier Jewish literature was called Wisdom.  Later, the bishops gathered at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE would use more philosophical language, the language we know from the Nicene Creed, primarily that he was “of one substance” with God the Father.  Whatever language Jesus’ followers found to express their experience of the human being Jesus being somehow also God, their language for him was always grounded in an experience of him that precedes the language.  The language is symbolic, that is, it points beyond itself to a truth that can never really be captured in human language.  That truth is found first of all not in language but in an experience, the experience of Jesus’ followers then and now that in him and precisely in his humanity we meet God in a unique way.  As is the case with all human truth, experience comes first.  The experience of Jesus as manifesting the presence of God comes first.  Then we try to find language to express that experience.

That really is what the Incarnation, what the understanding of Jesus as divine, is all about.  We aren’t to understand it literally.  We aren’t to think literally that somehow there was a human Jesus and a divine Jesus both living in the same body.  Rather, we are to understand that in the human being Jesus we see and come to know God.  My favorite way of putting it is to say “if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.”  Jesus is divine because in him we see God, we see what God is like.

And just as Jesus being truly human really matters, so does Jesus being truly divine in this symbolic sense also matter.  To understand how it matters, think of Jesus as being all about relationship.  As a human being he shows us how we are to relate to God.  We see the human Jesus relating to God in faithfulness to God’s calling to him, in faithfulness in proclaiming and living out the Kingdom of God, in a life of prayer, and in a life of compassion for all of God’s people.  As human Jesus shows us how we are to relate to God.

As divine Jesus shows us how God relates to us.  A mere human being can reveal to us a lot about being human, but a mere human being can’t really reveal anything to us about God.  It is in his divine nature that Jesus shows us who God is.  Because we confess him as God Incarnate we see in him not only ideal humanity.  We see also as much of the nature and will of God as we humans are capable of comprehending, we see how God relates to us humans and to all of creation.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we can understand his teaching as coming not just from another human being but from God.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we come through him to know God as compassionate, nonviolent, passionate about justice, and always forgiving of our human failings.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we see the way in which he turned the wisdom of the world on its head not just as the teaching of a fellow human being (however wise and prophetic a human being we may think him to be) but as the teaching of God. 

And here’s the main thing for me:  Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in him how God relates to human life and more importantly to human suffering and to human death.  Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in his death not merely the death of a martyr, although surely it was that.  We see how God relates to us when we suffer and when we die.  We see God not preventing human suffering and death but entering into them, sanctifying them, and being always present with us in them.  We see all of that in Jesus on the cross, and we couldn’t see any of it without our confession that Jesus is God Incarnate.  When we reduce Jesus to a mere human being his death loses all of its meaning for us; and for me, that is a loss of immense magnitude that takes much of the meaning out of Christianity.  We lose our hope in the face of our mortality.  We lose the comfort that God’s presence can bring when we suffer and when we die, as we all surely do.  In times of grief and pain I have looked to Jesus on the cross and known that God feels my grief and my pain and is present with me in them, and that knowledge has brought me great comfort.  But that knowledge has brought me that comfort because when I see Jesus on the cross I see so much more than a fellow human being.  I see God in human form entering into human suffering and death and demonstrating in fullest measure God’s solidarity with us in those unavoidable human conditions. 

So I say to all of my progressive Christian colleagues who want to make Jesus only a man:  I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t work.  It takes most of the meaning out of our ancient and sacred faith.  Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, yes; and that matters.  It matters a great deal.  But for us Christians he was also God Incarnate, and that matters as well.  It too matters a great deal.  For us Jesus truly is Emmanuel, God with us.  He is the Word of God made flesh.  That isn’t just good news.  It is the best news that there ever was or ever could be.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.