THE BEAUTY OF HIS DEITY
Today is the fourth installment in our series on the “Beauty of the Lord.” In my first sermon I stressed the humanity of Christ, because that’s where we initially meet him, and it’s part of what draws us to him. He is truly one of us, someone we can relate to, understand, and learn from. But I also mentioned in that sermon that it became very obvious to his followers that Jesus was so much more than “just one of us.” In the end, those closest to Jesus found themselves actually worshipping him.
Today, most people are more than willing to accept the fact that Jesus was truly an historical human being. They even admire him as a great teacher or prophet, but they struggle mightily with the Christian claim that he was also, at the very same time, “God-come-in-the-flesh.” People assume that all the references in scripture to Jesus’ divinity were a later product of his overly devoted disciples, whose veneration of their master led them to invent this dogma. And to some extent, I can sympathize with where these people are coming from.
Yet when you read the gospel accounts, it was often the people closest to Jesus, those who loved him the most (including his own family), who were among the most blind or resistant to the reality of who he was. They were often just as baffled and confused about Jesus as the crowds that followed him. So where did this whole notion of his deity come from? Well, when you actually listen to the gospels, you discover that it came from Christ himself.
First, there was his overall behavior. As we have observed in this series, although his humanity was authentic, it was not broken like ours. He was someone the disciples could be with, talk to, enjoy, and yet for much of the time they were completely out of step with him. Jesus wasn’t crippled by their skewed perceptions and harmful behaviors. When we look at Jesus in the gospels and then take an honest look at ourselves, we can identify with Peter in Luke 5, when he pleaded with Christ, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Second, there are those specific actions of Jesus that at first blush seem to usurp some of the primary functions of God. For example, he went around forgiving people of their sins, something that his enemies called blasphemous, since (as they put it) “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And you know what? They were right. Now you might say to me at this point, “Well, didn’t Jesus command us to always forgive one another? So isn’t Jesus just doing what he taught?” No, he is not.
Let me explain. Imagine you are standing in your front yard and a neighbor becomes angry with you for something you didn’t do. Let’s say this neighbor really looses his temper and calls you some really bad things. But then the neighbor discovers his error, and apologizes. If you truly accept his apology and forgive him, you’ve done the Christian thing. But suppose that during his outburst of anger I should happen to walk by. I see what is going on, and when your neighbor apologizes, suppose that I suddenly interrupt and say to him, “I forgive you.” Now how would that sound to you? Wouldn’t it sound like the height of arrogance, since you’re the injured party, not me.
In fact, the only third party who could appropriately pull off such an act is God alone, for we all know that God is ultimately the offended party in all our sins. King David commits adultery with another man’s wife, then has her husband killed to cover it up, and then lies to the whole nation about it. He has injured a whole bunch of people from whom he needs forgiveness, and yet how does he express his repentance in Psalm 51? He says, “Against you [O God], and you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” This is why Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer to daily ask God to forgive us for sins that we commit against other people. Yes, we need to ask forgiveness from those we hurt, but ultimately all our sins are an assault on God, since all moral goodness originates from him.
So when Jesus went around forgiving people of their sins, that was a very shocking thing to do. But that wasn’t all. He also went around declaring what was true and right without reference to anyone or anything other than himself. Even the prophets of the Old Testament were careful to preface their statements with “Thus sayeth the Lord…” But Jesus would simply preface his teachings with “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you…” And consequently we are told that the crowds were amazed at his authority, while his enemies kept asking, “Who does this guy think he is?”
But third, and most important of all, there is Jesus’ own self-disclosures about his relationship to God, which began early in his ministry. He used two very significant labels to describe himself. On many occasions he called himself “the son of man.” But at other times he called himself “the son of God.” And he didn’t use this second title in the universally generic sense of “a son of God,” but in the grammatically “absolute sense” of the (unique) Son. As he put it at the end of Matt 11:
All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Probably one of the most helpful explanations by Jesus of what he meant by “the Son” is found in the 5th chapter of John’s gospel, where he lays aside all metaphor and talks in concrete terms about his relationship to God. He has just healed a cripple on the sabbath and his enemies are upset by this apparent violation of the law of Moses. And so we read:
…because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”
Even these orthodox Jews of Jesus’ day recognized that God worked every day—even on the Sabbath—holding the world together and sustaining it. They understood that Sabbath law was intended for human beings to keep, not God. But here comes Jesus claiming that he has this very same privilege as God. He doesn’t deny that he has just “worked” on the Sabbath by healing this man. Nor does he try to justify his actions by saying, “Hey, I’m just trying to imitate God by doing a little good on the Sabbath.” Rather, he asserts that because God is his father, he operates in the same way. This was a very shocking assertion that his enemies jump on in the next verse:
For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Now in one sense, their deduction was absolutely correct. Jesus was laying claim to some kind of equality with God. But in another sense, they completely misunderstood him. In their fiercely monotheistic view of God there were only two options left open for Jesus. He could either deny any equality with God, or, if he doesn’t, he’s setting himself up as another, rival God (much like the Roman emperors of that time often did). Either Jesus walks back from his claim, or polytheism has raised it’s ugly head once more in Israel.
What they could not see, and what Jesus goes on to describe, is a third option—the uniquely Christian, Trinitarian option. What Jesus tries to convey is that the Father and Son exist together in an organic, essential oneness. Listen carefully to his reply:
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed.”
Jesus doesn’t back down, but neither does he operate on his own as another, independent god. His every move is dictated by what the Father is doing. And that includes two key aspects of the Father’s own deity. What are the two most common descriptions of God in the Old Testament? He is called the creator of all that exists, as well as the holy judge of all the earth, which is to say God alone has life in himself, as well as moral perfection. And so listen as Jesus lays claim to both functions in the next verse:
“For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son…”
As Jesus would say later in this same chapter of John, “the Son has life in himself”, and he will ultimately be the judge of all the earth. This is an extraordinary claim. It ought to arouse in us the thought, “Wow, it sounds like God has handed his core prerogatives over to the Son. Why would he do that?” The answer is given by Jesus in the next verse:
“…so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.”
And in that one statement we have one of the most radical sayings of Jesus ever uttered. He is calling us to worship the Son together with the Father. Not as two beings, but as one. Indeed, later in this gospel Jesus will pull it all together by claiming, “I and the Father are one.”
We could explore other examples of Jesus’ own self-disclosure, but in the end it was the sum total of both Jesus own words and deeds that led to the great Christological claims of the New Testament, such as the apostle Paul writing to the Colossians: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.” Or as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews put it: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
Now I would be doing you a disservice today if I were to imply that the deity of Christ is a simple and easy reality to understand and embrace. It most certainly is not. It’s a truth that has always been hard to understand, not to mention articulating. It took three centuries for Christians to come up with a way to express it that both preserved the profound mystery of God-in-Christ, and yet provided some boundaries that protected both Jesus’ very real humanity and his complete deity. The final formula (as expressed in the Nicene Creed) has been a wonderful buffer against all the erroneous theology that has plagued the church from the beginning, but it doesn’t make the reality any easier to grasp. As St. Augustine put it way back in the 5th century, we use frail, inadequate words to describe the God who came to us in Christ not because we want to, but because we have to. Human language and thought are all we have to work with.
But the very impossibility of fully capturing the incarnation of Christ is, in itself, a witness to the fact that it’s not a human invention. Otherwise a simpler story would have been settled on, with a simpler explanation. In fact, this is precisely what the early heresies of the church tried to do. In an effort to make Christ easy to believe in, they either violated his true humanity or his true deity. But as Jesus himself taught, we are called to hold both of these realities together in a seamless unity.
But if this whole topic is so difficult talk about, why am I claiming that there is a beauty in it? To put it simply, I run into a lot of people today who want nothing to do with organized religion of any kind, but who are still hungry for God. Yes, with some of them, their rejection of organized religion is a convenient way to enjoy the comfort of knowing that life is bigger than just this material world (which it is), but without all the bother of a God who might meddle or interfere in their lives.
But with many other people, there is a genuine hunger to know God up close and personal, but they don’t know where to find him. He remains illusive, mystical, distant—the great “whatever.” Their basic awareness of God is not wrong in itself, but the scriptures warn us repeatedly that God, in his essence, is beyond our understanding. And so the question that haunts these people is whether God wants to make himself know at all, and if so, how and where?
This is precisely where a mature, living Christian witness can be so powerful. By pointing people toward Christ, seekers are given the chance to see for themselves the beauty of God as revealed in Christ. The handful of dots they may have picked up in their search for God are suddenly connected as they witness the depth and breadth of God’s beauty in the person of Christ. As the apostle Paul put it:
We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
Several weeks ago we reflected on the beauty of Christ’s humanity—how he reveals what a true humanity looks like. Today, in reflecting on the beauty of Christ’s deity, we discover what God truly looks like—all powerful and yet gentle, holy and yet approachable, just and yet merciful, a God whose heart is broken by our sin and suffering, who enters into our very suffering through Christ, so that he might rescue us from it.
In Christ we discover a God who is both infinitely beyond our comprehension, and yet who chooses to dwell “among us”—visible, knowable, and deeply approachable; a God who is both a holy mystery and yet a beauty we can know, draw near to, and worship, a God who invites us to become beautiful like he is.
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus was asked by Philip, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Isn’t this the desire of all of us here today, to finally see God?
And how does Jesus answer? “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
If you want to see God, look deeply at Christ, and in that gaze you will discover the wondrous beauty of the Lord.
All praise and honor be to him, both now and forever,
Amen