2. Jesus The Incarnate Son
2 JESUS THE INCARNATE SON
How should we speak of Jesus? He is the light of the world, as the sun is the light of our earthly world. We do not try to look at the sun. We have to turn away when we try, but it is because of the sun that we see the world. How then do we look at Jesus?
One thing still holds good, whether people are believers or unbelievers, Jesus has a fascination. A constant stream of books appears about Jesus, some of them helpful, some not. Many of them claim to tell us who Jesus really was in contrast to the Jesus that the church talks about.
In a sense one can understand this because our Christian creed passes over the actual life of Jesus with hardly a mention. If you remember, the creed runs: ‘Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.’ There is no word about the actual life and ministry of Jesus. And that of course creates the danger that people will think of Jesus simply as a sort of cipher or factor in a theological equation.
In the eighteenth century the intellectual leadership of Europe turned away from the Christian faith and adopted a new faith, the faith of rational secularism. At the same time, there was a new understanding of history. After the Enlightenment, history was seen in a different way because the doctrine of progress, which was born in that period, caused people to look at the past in a quite different way. So people began to ask, ‘Well, who was the real Jesus? Not the Christ that the church preaches and talks about, but who was this actual man? What sort of man was he?’ The quest was for the so-called ‘historical Jesus’, or the Jesus of history. Hundreds of books have been written, claiming to give us a picture of Jesus as he really was and not as the church presented him.
In one sense this is just a typical example of hubris. When I talk about Jesus as he really was, I really am talking about Jesus as he seems to me, in contrast to all the others who simply do not understand! C. S. Lewis has a nice little phrase on ‘chronological snobbery’. We assume that because we are of the twenty-first century, we consequently understand things better than those of the past, even those closest to Jesus. And so there has been this quest for what was called the ‘Jesus of history’.
What are our sources? What can we know about Jesus? Our sources, of course, are all of them (with one exception that I shall mention) written by people who believed that Jesus was Lord and Saviour and believed in the resurrection. The earliest sources are the Epistles of Paul and the other apostolic writers. We should never forget that these were the first. Their writings are the earliest material we have. Some of them were written with certainty within a decade or two of the resurrection. From these Epistles we do not get a detailed account of the life of Jesus but we do get an account of who Jesus was and what he now means to us.
And then there are the Gospels. In one sense they date back to the earliest times because they are based on stories people told about Jesus. But in their present form they are later than the Epistles. We have to remember that the Christian gospel went rapidly in all directions from Jerusalem and most of it was spread by people unknown to us. The three great churches of the early centuries – Alexandria, Antioch and Rome – were all founded by people we just do not know. Among these founders were people who fled from Jerusalem to avoid persecution but were not apostles, or by missionaries who were simply Christians spreading the gospel and talking about Jesus.
In these and other centres, memories of Jesus accumulated from the stories recounted by those people who had first come and given the good news. Gradually these narratives were gathered together with various churches having different collections. The effort was later made to bring these collections together and to put them into a more orderly shape and from this we have our four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, each of which differs somewhat from the other. They have a great deal of material in common, but each has its own character, because they come from different circumstances and embody the memories of disparate groups of people.
For some people these differences are worrying. If you are in contact with Muslims you will know that they hold this as a charge against Christians. In contrast there is the unambiguous Koran with no doubt about any of the words in it. The four Gospels, however, give somewhat different accounts of what took place. There is hardly any saying or deed of Jesus that has not come down to us in different versions. The Muslims interpret this to mean that we have lost the real Gospel, the Injil as they call it, and therefore the New Testament cannot be trusted.
But as we know, if in a lawsuit all the witnesses for one side gave identical evidence, then we would suspect the lawyers of implanting ideas in them. It is a character of a real historical event that it tends to be reported in varying ways according to the interpretations and perceptions of different people.
In the Gospels we have material from many different memories and sources and we must remember that this material is far closer to the actual event, and therefore much more reliable than anything we have in relation to the rest of the world of the first century. The first manuscripts we have of events such as Caesar’s Wars come centuries after the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. So we can say that the evidence given to us for the actual happenings recorded in the Gospel is far stronger than anything we have for any other part of the world of that time.
All these documents were written by people who believed Jesus was the risen and reigning Lord, the one we praise in our prayers. There is one ancient reference to Jesus by the Roman historian Tacitus. In describing riots in Rome during the first century he records that Christians were suspected of causing the disturbances. Christians, he reported, were a ‘pestilential sect of people’ who believed that somebody called Christ, who had been executed as a terrorist by the Roman governor, was still alive.
That is the only other contemporary, or nearly contemporary, record we have of Jesus. That is what really happened, according to Tacitus. Of course, we have to make up our minds which is the true understanding of what really happened: that one, or the one given to us in the testimony of the apostles.
To attempt to understand the life of Jesus we have to begin, I think, by trying to understand the world into which he came. Imagine yourself as a devout Jewish believer, a child of Israel, living then in what we now call Palestine. Behind you are all the promises of God: the great story of the Exodus, the liberation, the settlement of the land, the giving of the Promised Land to the people, the sins of Israel, the punishment, the dispersion, the scattering to Babylon, Assyria and all over the place, the holy people scattered, the Holy Land desecrated, pagan Roman armies trampling over the Holy Land, the Temple destroyed and only recently rebuilt with Roman approval, but the Holy Land still desecrated by pagans.
Then there were all those promises of God that he would restore his people to the land, make them the great ruling nation of the world, scattering their enemies and putting them to shame. Every page of the Old Testament is full of those promises. But what happened? What was God doing? If God was simply leaving things like that, then he was not God. If you were a devout child of Israel then you had to believe that God was going to intervene, that somehow or other God was going to manifest his sovereignty over all the world and put his enemies to flight. So there was this tingling expectation running through the whole life of the nation.
As in any human society, there was within it a variety, a spectrum. At one end of this society’s spectrum were the priests and the Sadducees. In India, the ruling British government left small princes in charge of local areas just as the Romans did. They made Herod a puppet king under their ultimate control and permitted the rebuilding of the Temple to make the Jews happy. The company of priests, the Sadducees, of which the priests were the central core, were accommodating and making do. In Jerusalem they accepted the status quo and ceased to expect any dramatic intervention.
Then there were the Pharisees who took their religion far more seriously. They cooperated, attended the Temple and took part in the Temple worship. But they believed that the real clue to the future was that Israel should be faithful to the Law, and therefore the synagogue, where the Law and the prophets were taught and studied and where people were encouraged to live exactly according to that Law. That was the way in which one could fulfil God’s purposes and prepare the way for his coming.
And then there was a third group represented by what we call the Qumran documents, discovered in 1947 in the caves of Qumran. They came from a sect which rejected both the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Pharisees were rejected because they were cooperating too easily with the Sadducees and the Sadducees because they were cooperating with Rome. They had formed this community in the desert to wait and pray for the day when God would intervene and scatter his enemies.
Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, there were the zealots or terrorists and revolutionaries, who believed that the only way to fulfil God’s purpose for Israel was to take up arms and drive out the Romans, hoping that God would support them in doing so just as he had supported the Maccabees two centuries earlier.
So there was this spectrum, but throughout the whole of society there was this tingling expectation. I have called it a smouldering volcano. Every now and then a spurt of flame would come out. Small intermittent terrorist uprisings occurred, many of which were put down ruthlessly by the Romans. It was reported that so many people were crucified that the Romans ran out of wood for crosses. But as Jesus warned in so much of his teaching, unless Israel repented, the volcano would erupt and there would be a mighty disaster. That, of course, happened in AD 70. There was this final great revolt which the Romans crushed, thereby destroying the Jewish state, reducing Jerusalem to a pile of rubble.
It is into such a society that Jesus came. And we should remember that first of all, as we know from the Gospels, Jesus was acknowledged as a rabbi. A rabbi was not a member of a professional class like a modern clergyman. He was a layman who had studied, understood and mastered the Scriptures so he could be a teacher of others. It is significant that Jesus was constantly addressed by the Pharisees and others as a rabbi. So during those years he lived in Nazareth he was not just doing the work of a carpenter. In fact, we do not know whether he was one at all. But he was certainly studying the Scriptures and possessed such deep insight into them, and mastery of them, that he was recognised as a rabbi.
What triggered the beginning of the public ministry of Jesus, as we know from all the Gospels, was the coming of John the Baptist. All the sources agree about that. John the Baptist appeared after centuries during which there seemed to be no prophet. After Malachi the people of Israel moaned and groaned that there was no prophet. But here God had raised up someone who was the authentic voice of the Lord, who spoke as the prophets of old had spoken, calling Israel to repent and return to their God. So there was this great movement of repentance, of coming to be baptised afresh – as it were – to make a new start. And the news of this came to Jesus in Nazareth. He heard it as the call of his Father and he came with the crowds to be baptised. Our first sight of Jesus in his public ministry was of his coming as one of a crowd of sinners seeking repentance. Here we have already what we speak of when we say that Jesus took upon himself the sin of the world. He made no distinction between himself and others. He came asking for baptism along with a company of sinful men and women. As we know, John would have restrained him, but Jesus replies: ‘No, this is how God wills it to be.’
At his baptism there is that decisive moment when he is acknowledged by the Father as, ‘My beloved Son’ and then anointed by the Holy Spirit for the start of his ministry. There we have the beginnings of what has become the doctrine of the Trinity.
Immediately Jesus is driven into the desert to wrestle with the awesome question: ‘How does the Son of God act in practice?’ There was that great struggle in the desert where Jesus mastered all the powers that could tempt him away from the Father’s will. And when he completed that great inner spiritual battle and emerged victorious, he returned to Galilee and began to preach the message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of God is at hand.’
What does that mean? It was not news to a Jew to say that God was King, because that was the whole message of the Old Testament. What did it mean to say that the kingship of God, the sovereignty of God, was at hand? It meant that a kingship of God was no longer something in the distant future, or something in heaven, or a kind of theological topic for discussion, but something confronting you here and now.
The kingdom of God, the reign of God, the sovereignty of God, the sovereign power of God is here and now, confronting you, meeting you, but you cannot see it because you are looking the wrong way. So turn around. The Greek word metanoein translates as ‘repent’, which means to make a mental U-turn, to look the other way. This is because you are looking in the wrong direction when you say, ‘God is king.’ You are expecting a different thing. That is not what God is. Turn around, repent and follow. And some of them did with excitement and enthusiasm. But then they began to ask: ‘Where is the kingship of God? We don’t see it.’ And Jesus answers with parables and stories. If you examine those stories you will see that all of them in fact tell the story of Israel but in a new way, subverting Israel’s own story.
I could give a dozen examples, but just take the parable of the wicked landowner (Matthew 21:33–41). The parable of the vineyard in Isaiah was one of the best known parables of the Old Testament. Israel was the vineyard. God planted the trees there to bring forth fruit and he gave it to tenants, to Israel, to his own people, but they failed to give the fruit he asked for and so he sent servants, the prophets, but one after another the people rejected them. So finally he would send his only Son, and what would they do to him? They would kill him. And what would the owner do? Bring the tenants to a wretched end. The Pharisees who heard that quite clearly understood what it meant and that is why they looked for a way to arrest Jesus.
All these parables retell the story of Israel but tell it with a new ending, and the new ending is in the person of Jesus himself. But many people do not understand. When the disciples went to Jesus saying they were puzzled, they were told, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you …’ (Mark 4:11) but to others who are not, it is simply a mystery, a miracle. And then there are what the first three Gospels call the ‘mighty works’ and what the fourth Gospel calls the ‘signs’. These were acts of power through which the mastery of Jesus over all the powers of evil was demonstrated, but never as a means of attracting attention.
Jesus told the people not to talk about his miracles. They were simply the outworking of the love of God. One of the most beautiful examples is at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel when a leper comes and kneels before Jesus and says, ‘Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.’ And Jesus simply replied: ‘I am willing … Be clean’ (Mark 1:40–41). He touched him, and laid his hand upon him. It was a sheer act of the love of God, not part of a missionary strategy, but a sheer act of God’s love and power. But once again, the miracles had a sharp cutting edge. They divided people. You remember John the Baptist asking, ‘Are you the one who is to come or do we look for another?’ And Jesus said, ‘Look what is happening: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised up. And blessed is he who is not caused to stumble’ (Luke 7:20–23).
For some people the miracles were not a revelation of the presence of God; they were something else. First of all, of course, the mission of Jesus was to Israel. He told his disciples to go nowhere except among the lost sheep of Israel because his first calling was to summon Israel to be as God had created it to be. Jesus would be his servant who would suffer. He would bear the sin of the world. The vision that we have, in Isaiah 53, is of the servant of the Lord, there on behalf of all nations, to bring the true knowledge of God to them, by bearing the suffering which comes at that meeting point between a holy God and a sinful world. Jesus sought to call upon Israel to fulfil that for which God had called Israel into being. But Israel would not listen. There were many warnings of what would come if Israel did not repent, and it eventually came in AD 70.
It became clear that God’s purpose for Israel had to be fulfilled in one alone. Jesus himself must be the one who suffered for the sake of the world. Accordingly he prepared his disciples for what was to come, and part of it was the promise of resurrection at the end. One of the great thoughts of the time, certainly in the minds of the Pharisees and those looking for the redemption of Israel, was that there would be a resurrection of the dead. From the time of the Maccabean wars onwards it was believed that those who had died for the sake of the Lord would be raised to life.
Therefore resurrection was a fundamental hope and belief. As we know from the Scriptures, the Sadducees did not accept the hope of resurrection. They were perfectly comfortable with things as they were. They did not need a resurrection in their settled world. But the hope of resurrection was a sign that you did not accept the world as it was, but that you looked for a radically new one.
So Jesus prepared his disciples for what they could hardly bear to have heard: that his mission must end in failure, and that he must suffer on behalf of all. But he also gave them the promise of resurrection. Jesus went forward with utter confidence in his Father. And those two Aramaic words to which I have previously referred, we still hear in the original Aramaic. Those who heard those words could never forget them. The writers of the Gospels wrote in Greek but they uttered those two words in the original Aramaic: Abba – Father, and Amen – Truly. ‘Amen, Amen I say unto you.’ These words uttered a confidence in his Father that nothing could shake, a confidence which enabled him to go forward in absolute faith and obedience to what was, from a human point of view, not merely death but also the total failure of his mission and the impending disaster for which he had prepared and warned his hearers.
Inevitably he went alone to Gethsemane and to the trial and scourging, the mocking and the crucifixion – and the extraordinary prayer: ‘Father, forgive them’ (Luke 23:34). And the verb in that prayer is a verb that means repeated action. At each hammer blow, as the nails were driven into his body, Jesus exclaimed, ‘Father, forgive; Father, forgive; Father, forgive; Father forgive.’
And then we hear that terrible cry: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ The beloved Son was torn from the Father. The beloved Son had so totally identified himself with a fallen world, cut off from God, that he shared in the desolation of that fallen world.
Now when we begin to speak about these things, we are compelled to remember that the cross of Jesus is ultimately a mystery that we can approach but never penetrate. The cross of Jesus is the decisive encounter between a holy God and a sinful world. It is the point where the one true crisis of all cosmic history occurs. We can never fully penetrate what it means. If we could understand it then we could explain evil and if we could explain evil it would not be evil.
If you look at the earliest writings in the New Testament, you will see that the first way in which the cross of Jesus is spoken of is as a mighty victory: ‘Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out’ (John 12:31). The death of Jesus is a mighty victory. It is the power of God and the wisdom of God. And if you look at the early representations of Jesus in the first few centuries in icons and so forth, you will never see the drooping pain-drenched figure of a medieval crucifix. You will always see the figure of a man with his head erect, beating down the power of Satan. That is the first picture of the cross we get both from the New Testament and from the earliest iconography.
But then, of course, we are bound to ask, ‘How has evil been conquered? How has the enemy been put to flight?’ And there we have to turn to the many different metaphors that the New Testament uses, all of which help us but none of which completely explains. There is the metaphor of a ransom: Jesus rescued us from the power of evil. But if you push that too far there are these questions: To whom was the ransom paid? Was it paid to God or to the devil? There were great arguments about that in the Middle Ages.
Take the concept of substitution: Jesus died in our place. That is true. Jesus died for sinners. He took, as Paul said, ‘the likeness of sinful flesh for sin’ (Romans 8:3). But it was not a substitution which left us behind. It was not as if Jesus did something for which we could then say, ‘Thank you very much, that’s okay.’ Jesus did something so that we may follow him and with him go by the way of the cross. He did what no other could do, but he did it not so that nobody else should, but that all should follow in his steps.
Then there is the concept of sacrifice, so much developed in the letter to the Hebrews. This is indeed the one true, full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice. It is the consummation of all sacrifice, but again one has to ask, ‘Why should God require sacrifice?’ To answer this it seems to me that we have to go into the very heart of the whole scriptural testimony, where in the Old Testament we see the agony of God. In the book of Hosea, chapter 11, God says: ‘How shall I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I abandon you? My compassions are struggling within me.’ There is an agony in the heart of God between the holiness of God and the love of God. We realise that God is holy with a holiness that can make no compromise with evil, and that God is love, with a love that can never give up the evildoer. So there was this agony in the very heart of God and the crucifixion of Jesus was, so to speak, the actual working out of that agony within this history of ours.
I am, of course, struggling with something too deep for any human being fully to grasp, because I am persuaded that the cross of Jesus is the ultimate turning point in all human history and all cosmic history, and we can never pretend to have it wrapped up in a neat formula. But at least, it seems to me, one way to look at it is to realise, as I have said previously, that we need a Trinitarian understanding of God if we are to understand the cross. It was by the will of the Father, Son and Spirit, that the Son was torn from the Father’s breast to become part of a world which had turned its back on the Father and become alienated from him. So that right there in history, in the middle of this fallen human history, in our fallen world shut off from God, there was the actual presence of God in the form of sinful flesh. As Paul said, he came as part of our world, and yet as the very presence of God himself.
We know this because Jesus rose from the dead. The Father honoured the obedience of the Son and raised him from the dead. That resurrection cannot fit into any theory of the world based on some other foundation. The resurrection can only make sense if you begin with it. It cannot be part of any understanding of the world, except as an understanding which begins from the resurrection. This is because the resurrection, like the creation, was an utterly new beginning. We know that it was a bodily resurrection because the tomb was empty. If there was one clear thing about the evidence, it was that the tomb was empty. But on the other hand, the body of the risen Jesus was not like our physical bodies, which cannot go through closed doors: it was the foretaste of the new creation, the new heaven and the new earth for which we look.
It is the pledge and the foretaste, the sign that what happened on Calvary was not the defeat of God’s love but its victory. And this secret was shared. It was communicated to those men and women he had prepared to be its bearers. They knew that despite the situation here in history, where evil triumphs and good suffers, nevertheless the final victory was with God. The church was called upon to carry through history that for which Jesus suffered on the cross.
And that is why when Jesus assembled his frightened disciples, he said, ‘As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you’ (John 20:21). He showed them his hands and his side, the scars of the Passion, the wounds that come through bearing the sin of the world. They would be the marks that identify the church as the body of Christ. And then he breathed upon them saying, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ (John 20:22).
As Paul reminds us in Romans 8, the Holy Spirit of God groans within us because the Holy Spirit is given to us that we may share in the Passion of Christ for the world, so that our little sufferings and groanings are taken up into the great groaning of the Holy Spirit. The church was called upon to carry through history that bearing of the sin of the world, so that Jesus could say to them, ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’ (John 20:23 NKJV). The church now becomes the place where this forgiving, reconciling, atoning work of Jesus is carried on through history, so that the church is that place where anyone can be given the possibility of being reconciled to God through the atoning work of Jesus.
I know that to speak about the cross is to talk of something more than any human formula can encompass. We need all those metaphors that Scripture gave us: ransom, substitution, sacrifice. We need them all to help us understand the central truth within the cross. As Paul says, ‘ … the power of God and the wisdom of God’ were at work (1 Corinthians 1:24). In this way we are able to understand that here is the place where evil is finally defeated.
That is the Jesus of history. The Jesus of history is the Christ of faith. This quarrel that has gone on among theologians for the past two hundred years is based on a false presupposition. It is not that there is a Jesus of history whose life we can write as thousands of writers have tried to do, on the one hand, and the Christ of faith, on the other hand, whom we worship and adore in the church.
There is only one Jesus. He is the one we read about in the New Testament. The so-called Jesus of history is simply Jesus looked at from the point of view of a faith other than the Christian faith. It is Jesus looked at from the point of view of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It is no more than that. The one Jesus who is the Jesus of history is also the Christ of faith. He is the one Lord, and there is no other.