The Reality of Christ
The Lord Jesus inaugurated the “new and
living way” for us
dia , on account of, “his flesh” (Heb. 10:20).
It was exactly because of “the flesh” of the Lord’s humanity that He opened
up a new way of life for us. Because He was so credibly and genuinely human,
and yet perfect, the way of His life becomes compellingly the way we are
to take. Once we grasp this, we can better understand the anathema which
John calls down upon those who deny that Jesus was “in the flesh” (2 Jn.
7-9). We non-trinitarians understand, quite correctly, that Jesus saved
the world on account of being human - for all His Lordship and spiritual
unity with the Father. If He had been of any other nature, salvation would
not have been possible through Him. He in all ways is our pattern. It is
our humanity that enables us to go into this world with a credible, convincing
and saving message. We have to be enough of a man ourselves in order to
save a man. We are not asking our hearers to be super-human. The way senior
churchmen seem to lack a genuine, complete humanity has led so many to conclude
that because they cannot rise up to such apparently austere and white-faced
levels, therefore Christianity for them is not an authentically human possibility.
Our message is tied to
us as human people, just as the message
of Jesus
was Him, the real, human Jesus. The word was made flesh
in Him as it must be in us. This is why nowhere in the Gospels is Jesus
described with a long list of virtues - His actions and relations to others
are what are presented, and it is from them that we ourselves feel and perceive
His righteousness. The teachings of Marxism, e.g., can be separated from
Marx as a man. You can accept Marxism without ever having read a biography
of Karl Marx. But real Christianity is tied in to the person of the real
Christ.
If the message of Jesus is defined by us merely as ideas and principles,
then we will inevitably find that ideas and principles lack the turbulence
of real life - they are abstract. The principles of Bible Truth will be
found to be colourless and remote from reality - unless they are tied
in to the real, concrete person of Jesus. God forbid that our faith has
given us just a bunch of ideas. The principles of the Truth, every doctrine
of the Truth, is lived out in Jesus - and it is this fact, this image
of Him, which appeals to us as live, passionate, flesh and blood beings.
A person cannot be reduced to a formula. It is a living figure and not
just dry theories that actually draws people, and in that sense
is "attractive". And only a real, living person can be encouraging
in life. Principles as mere abstractions cannot encourage much of
themselves.
Jesus
is our representative - a distinctive Bible doctrine. We are counted as
being in Him. This means that His life is counted as being our life -
and only because He was human and we now are human can this become true.
The wonder of this is that so many people have acquired a new personal
quality through their association with the risen Jesus - for all their
human failures, humiliations, setbacks. No longer is it so important for
them to ask 'Who am I? What have I achieved in this dumb life?' Rather
it is all important that we are in fact in Christ and sharing in His
life and being. Life has become so achievement and efficiency orientated
that many of us feel failures. Only by achievement, it seems, can we justify
ourselves in society. We have become caught up in a machine of life that
robs us of our humanity. Our initiative, spontaneity, autonomy, our essential
freedom - is lost. Yet if we are in Christ, secure in Him, part of His
supreme personality, then our lives are totally different. We are no longer
ashamed of our humanity. We are affirmed for who we are by God Himself,
justified by Him - for we are in Christ. This is the real meaning, the
wonderful implication, of being truly 'brethren-in-Christ'.
By losing our life, we gain it. But the life we gain is the life
of Jesus, and therefore life has meaning and purpose, not only in successes
but also in failures. Our lives then make sense; for we have and live
the true life, even if we are destroyed by opponents and deserted
by friends; if we supported the wrong side and came to grief; if our achievements
slacken and are overtaken by others; if we are no use any more to anyone.
The bankrupt businessman, the utterly lonely divorcee, the overthrown
and forgotten politician, the unemployed middle aged man, the aged prostitute,
or criminal dying in prison...all these, even though their persons and
lives are no longer recognized by this world, are all the same joyfully,
gleefully, recognized by Him with whom there is no respect of persons;
for they are in His beloved Son.
Genuine Humanity
I remember the cold, Russian winter’s day when it finally burst upon
me that the Lord Jesus really was human. Because He was genuinely human,
so genuinely so, I suddenly started thinking of all sorts of things which
must have been true about Him, which I’d never dared think before. And
in this, I believe I went up a level in knowing Him. He was the genuine
product of the pregnancy process. He had all the pre-history of Mary in
his genes. He had a genetic structure. He had a unique fingerprint, just
as we all have. He must have been either left-hand or right-handed (or
ambidextrous!). Belonged to a particular blood group. Fitted into one
psychological type more than another. He could have forgotten things at
times, didn't understand absolutely everything (e.g. the date of His return,
or the mystery of spiritual growth, Mk. 4:26,27 could have made a mistake
when working as a carpenter, cut His finger. But He was never frustrated
with Himself; He was happy being human, comfortable with His humanity.
As I walked through that long Moscow subway from Rizhskaya Metro
to Rizhsky Vokzal, the thoughts were coming thick and fast. Why did He
look on the ground when the woman [presumably naked] caught in the act
of adultery was brought before Him? Was it not perhaps from sheer embarrassment
and male awkwardness? He shared the same unconscious drives and libido
which we do, with a temper, anxiety and ‘anxious fear of death’ (Heb.
5:7) as strong as ours. He was a real man, not free from the inner conflict,
effort, temptation and doubt which are part of our human condition. No
way can I subscribe to a Trinitarian position that “there was [not] even
an infinitely small element of struggle involved” when the Lord faced
temptation (1). He was tempted just as we are - and temptation surely involves
feeling the pull of evil and having part of you that feels it to be more
attractive than the good.
The fullness of the Lord's humanity is of course supremely shown
in His death and His quite natural fear of that death. Perhaps on no other
point do human beings show they are humans than when it comes to their
reaction to and reflection upon their own death. I would go further and
suggested that the thought of suicide could have even entered the Lord's
mind. It's hard to understand His thought about throwing Himself off the
top of the temple in any other way. His almost throw away comment that
"My soul is very sorrowful, even to death" (Mt. 26:38 - heos
thanatou) is actually a quotation from the suicidal thoughts of Jonah
(Jonah 4:9) and those of the Psalmist in Ps. 42:5,6. Now of course the
Lord overcame those thoughts but their very existence is a window into
the depth and reality of His humanity.
I suspect I can see through that huge gap between writer and reader,
to sense your discomfort and alarm, even anger, that I should talk about
the Lord Jesus in such human terms. I can imagine the splutter and misunderstanding
which will greet these suggestions. I am not seeking to diminish in any
way from the Lord’s greatness. I’m seeking to bring out His greatness;
that there, in this genuinely human person, there was God manifest in
flesh. The revulsion of some at what I’m saying is to me just another
articulation of our basic dis-ease when faced with the fact the Lord Jesus
really was our representative. I believe that in all of us, there’s a
desire to set some sort of break between our own humanity, and that of
Jesus. But if He wasn’t really like us, then I see the whole ‘Christ-thing’
as having little benefit in our world that seeks so desperately for authenticity
and human salvation.
The human, Son of God Jesus whom we preach is actually very attractive
to people. There’s something very compelling about a perfect hero, who
nevertheless has a weak human side. If He were really like us, then this
demands an awful lot of us. It rids us of so many excuses for our unspirituality.
And this, I’m bold enough to say, is likely the psychological reason for
the growth of the Jesus=God ideology, and the ‘trinity’ concept. But if
this perfect man was indeed one of us, a man amongst men, with our very
same flesh, blood and plasm… we start to feel uncomfortable. It’s perhaps
why so many of us find prolonged contemplation of His crucifixion - where
He was at His most naked and most human - something we find distinctly
uncomfortable, and impossible to deeply sustain for long. But only if
we properly have in balance the awesome reality of Christ’s humanity,
can we understand how one man’s death 2,000 years ago can radically alter
our lives today. We make excuses for ourselves: our parents were imperfect,
society around us is so sinful. But the Lord Jesus was perfect - and dear
Mary did her best, but all the same failed to give Him a perfect upbringing;
she wasn’t a perfect mother; and He didn’t live in a perfect environment
- and yet, He was perfect, and bids us quit our excuses and follow Him.
According to the Talmud, Mary was a hairdresser [Shabbath 104b],
whose husband left her with the children because he thought she’d had
an affair with a Roman soldier. True or not, she was all the same an ordinary
woman, living a poor life in a tough time in a backward land. And the
holy, harmless, undefiled Son of God and Son of Man… was, let’s say, the
son of a divorcee hairdresser from a dirt poor, peripheral village, got
a job working construction when He was still a teenager. There’s a wonder
in all this. And an endless challenge. For none of us can now blame our
lack of spiritual endeavour upon a tough background, family dysfunction,
hard times, bad environment. We can rise above it, because in Him we are
a new creation, the old has passed away, and in Him, all things have become
new (2 Cor. 5:17), precisely because He blazed the trail - blazed it out
of all the limitations which normal human life appears to impress upon
us - undeflected and undefeated by whatever distractions both His, and
our, humanity placed in His path. And He’s given us the power to follow
Him.
He wasn’t a God who came down to us and became human; rather is He
the ordinary, very human man who rose up to become the Man with the face
of God, ascended the huge distance to Heaven, and received the very nature
of God. It’s actually the very opposite to what human theology has supposed,
fearful as they were of what the pattern of this Man meant for them. The
pre-existent view of Jesus makes Him some kind of Divine comet which came
to earth, very briefly, and then sped off again, to return at the second
coming. Instead we see a Man from amongst men, arising to Divine status,
and opening a way for us, His brethren, to share His victory; and coming
back to establish His eternal Kingdom with us on this earth, His earth,
where He came from and had His human roots.
Take a passage much beloved of Trinitarians, Phil. 2. We read that
Jesus was found (heuretheis) in fashion (schemati) as
a man, and He humiliated Himself (tapeinoseos), and thereby was
exalted. But in the next chapter, Paul speaks of himself in that
very language. He speaks of how he, too, would be “found” (heuretho)
con-formed to the example of Jesus in His death, and would have his body
of humiliation (tapeinoseos) changed into one like that of Jesus,
“the body of his glory”. We aren’t asked to follow the pattern or schema
of a supposed incarnation of a God as man. We’re asked to follow in the
path of the Lord Jesus, the Son of man, in His path to glory. Repeatedly,
we are promised that His glory is what we will ultimately share,
at the end of our path of humiliation and sharing in His cross (Rom. 8:17;
2 Cor. 3:18; Jn. 17:22,24).
The Challenge of Christ’s Humanity
There is an incredible challenge in the fact
that the Lord Jesus had human nature and yet never sinned. He rose above
sin in all its forms, and yet was absolutely human. It seems to me that
many Christadelphians feel that their calling is to rise above both sin,
and also their own human nature. And this results in their belief that
spirituality is in fact a denial of their humanity. In extreme forms,
we have the white faced nun who has been led to believe that being spiritual
equals being white faced, passionless, and somehow superhuman. In a more
common expression of the same problem, there are some elders who believe
it to be fatal to show any emotional conviction about anything, no chinks
in their armour, no admission of their own human limitations or understanding.
For this reason I see a similarity between the ‘lives of the saints’ as
recorded in Catholic and Orthodox writings (replete with white faces and
large holy eyes, hands ever folded in prayer, never making a slip) - and
the glossy biographies of Evangelical leaders which jump out at you from
the shelves of Protestant bookstores. They too, apparently, never set
a foot wrong, but progressed from unlikely glory to unlikely glory. All
this arises from an over-emphasis upon the Divine rather than the human
side of the Lord Jesus. The character of the Lord Jesus shows us what
it’s like to be both human and sinless. If we seek to rise above being
human, we are aiming for something that doesn’t exist. The Lord Jesus
wasn’t and isn’t ‘superhuman’; He was and is the image of God stamped
upon humanity, and in this sense the New Testament still calls Him a “man”
even now. We need not take false guilt about being human. We should be
happy with who we are, made in the image of God.
Duncan
Heaster
