Jesus’ Life & Work: How He Entered & Engaged the World
“The answer to the question, ‘What is the ultimate secret of the universe?’ is this man Jesus.”
Lesslie Newbigin
You may have read the analogy that the only way that Shakespeare could have met Hamlet is if he had written himself into the story as a character. This seems to have been the idea behind incarnation - God meets man as Jesus met persons. The human body is the carrier of the soul, no one really meets another without the help of the body. The ultimate reality, God, found himself in a situation where it would be necessary to connect to the human being. Something more personal than a voice in the shadows of the Garden of Eden. Something more real than a flood, a few plagues, a burning bush, a booming voice, and two tablets with ten rules.
Orthodoxy presents us with well-crafted statements after the fact that attempt to describe the persons of the Trinity and their deliberations. These statements present us with the temptation to confuse the imperfect explanation of a mystery with the perfect mystery itself. It took the church three hundred years and seven major councils to write a statement about the identity of Jesus. Theologians, philosophers, skeptics, and interested parties have picked at it ever since. I don’t think we know, or should even pretend to know, at what point the three personages of the Godhead decided to make Jesus the fully human, fully God person that would enter the world as a baby. Scripture doesn’t tell us that and we should not pretend that it does. Additionally, since God exists outside of time and space in a simultaneous reality, the entire discussion of a timeline is a fool’s errand.
The entire discussion about the Trinity and God’s decision making apparatus reminds me of the battle in the middle ages between the Catholics and the Protestants. I think it was said that a Catholic would rather spend a thousand years in purgatory than risk Hell by becoming a Protestant. Protestants were even stronger, they would have rather gone to Hell than be a Catholic. In truth, they both were of the same species, just different backgrounds and societal pressures made the decisions for them.
Today, we don’t take our doctrine as seriously because individual autonomy has won the day over there being an objective moral order. The world is not neutral ground, it is now much like the first century. Israel was odd man out - a single God, a personal God, a God with rules, a God who watched over his chosen people, a God who didn’t seem so ready, as his many rivals, to exploit his subjects. Then God intervened by becoming a person with a body who chose weakness, obscurity, and sacrifice that separated him from everyone else and everything else.
The church it seems is primarily seeking relevance, attempting to make a difference. Earlier today I read a statement from Dallas Willard that leads me to believe we may have taken a wrong turn.
“Decide to do what you know God wants you to do. Undertake everything you do on God’s behalf.” [1]
Then a second thought set my mind on fire.
We are his disciples, we follow him and his example, and our mission, what we seek, is on his behalf!
And what is that exactly?
“Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges, he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.” [2]
Jesus’ Entrance
Jesus entered into the world humbly and sacrificially, not in a hurry and not seeking relevance. I think of Eugene Peterson’s book Subversive Christianity which set the two goals of being an unnecessary and irrelevant person. It seems the first goal of how God chose to fully express himself to us was in a humble human form.[3] And in some attitudinal way, is how his disciples are to enter life and mission.
There is precious little that has been studied or written about Jesus’ first thirty years on earth. It is instructive in its obscurity. I have read one book called something like Jesus: The First Thirty Years - a valiant attempt to fill up two-hundred pages with thirty pages of information. Using our calendar, that is roughly 10,950 days of living prior to his baptism and start of his public ministry which lasted, once again about 1,095 days. Not even one presidential term in the United States. So many politicians want their reelection crowds to chant, “Four more years, four more years,” because they need more time to finish their agenda. What leader, or even the most common person, has not pleaded with the electorate or God for more time to finish their work? When Jesus came to that point, that was not his argument. His argument was to avoid the spiritual death, the becoming sin, the burden of experiencing death. Spiritual death was repugnant to him as it is to all humans because we are meant to live and life is stamped on our souls. But in the end, he actually did what was in God’s interest, he relinquished his soul, “Father, not my will, but your will be done.” And finally, “Father into your hands, I commend my spirit.”
This is the first lesson of discipleship as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that pampered rich boy from German royalty, said:
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die.”
The first human impulse, and indeed the church’s first impulse, for relevance is somewhat anti-Christ.
