Week 3—Sunday Hebrews 2:8-9
Week 3—SUNDAY
“WHY DON’T YOU PREACH PRINCIPLES?”
We are discussing whether principles, apart from the Person, in religion would be sufficient. A Hindu said to me: “Why don’t you preach principles to us and leave out the person of Christ?” The answer is simple and twofold: The principles without the Person are powerless. An exact statement of truth, or an exact statement of ethical moralism, leaves us cold and unmoved. Only as principles are embodied in a person do they become power. And second, we would never have known what the principles meant had we not seen them illustrated in the Person.
We who are persons yearn for the Personal. Browning puts it in these vivid words:
“Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it! O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives Thee; a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to Thee! See the Christ stand!”
“Saul”
Suppose there is no flesh in the Godhead, no Face like my face there—is the Godhead attractive? Will the Godhead evoke loyalty and love? The answer is in the Brahma of Hinduism. We have noted that Brahma has three attributes—truth, intelligence, bliss, but no love. If Brahma, the It, had love, it would relate Itself to people and things. Brahma is the unrelated. Love is absent from the Highest. But love is the highest in humans. Then a person has something higher than that which is found in the Highest. Then God is a disappointment. If love is absent from the Highest, then the Highest will do nothing to help you up the ladder to Itself. You get there if you get there. And you get there by contemplation, by meditation, by self-affirmation: “Aham Brahma”: “I am Brahma.” But that is the Word become word, not the Word become flesh.
O Father, I thank you that I seek the highest in you—love—and find it there. But I would never have found it had I not been shown it—shown it in your Son. In him we see, not merely hear. And the seeing is believing. So I believe. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I see in God my weakness in God’s Strength, my littleness in God’s Greatness—I nestle.