2-21 The Importance Of The Humanity Of Christ
The extent of Christ's humanity is brought out by the RV translation
of 1 Tim. 2:5. "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men,
himself man, Christ Jesus". Paul is writing this after the
Lord's ascension and glorification. A mediator might be thought of as
being somehow separate from both parties; but our mediator is actually
"himself man", so on our side, as it were. Having received Divine
nature doesn't take anything away from the Lord's appreciation of our
humanity, to the extent that Paul here [for all the other exalted terms
he uses elsewhere about Jesus] can call Him even now "himself man". 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). The
Lord's relationship with His cousin John provides an exquisite insight
into both His humanity and His humility. The people thought that Jesus
was John the Baptist resurrected (Mk. 6:14). Perhaps this was because
they looked somehow similar, as cousins?
Fear Of Death
And
exactly because of that, He had a quite genuine "fear of death" (Heb.
5:8). This "fear of death" within the Lord Jesus provides a profound
insight into His so genuine humanity. We fear death because our human
life is our greatest and most personal possession... and it was just
the same with the Lord Jesus. Note that when seeking here to exemplify
Christ's humanity, the writer to the Hebrews chooses His fear of death
in Gethsemane as the epitome of His humanity. Oscar Cullmann translates
Heb. 5:7: "He was heard in his fear (anxiety)". That very human anxiety
about death is reflected in the way He urges Judas to get over and done
the betrayal process "quickly" (Jn. 13:28); He was "straitened until it
be accomplished" (Lk. 12:50). He prayed to God just as we would when
gripped by the fear of impending death. And He was heard. No wonder He
is able therefore and thereby to comfort and save us, who lived all our
lives in the same fear of death which He had (Heb. 2:15). This
repetition of the 'fear of death' theme in Hebrews is surely
significant- the Lord Jesus had the same fear of death as we do, and He
prayed in desperation to God just as we do. And because He overcame, He
is able to support us when we in our turn pray in our
"time of need"- for He likewise had the very same "time of need" as we
have, when He was in Gethsemane (Heb. 4:16). Death was "the last enemy"
for the Lord Jesus just as it is for all humanity (1 Cor. 15:26).
Reflection on these things not only emphasizes the humanity of the Lord
Jesus, but also indicates He had no belief whatsoever in an 'immortal
soul' consciously surviving death.
The
Lord's fear of death was, it seems to me, to a far greater extent than
what even we experience- doubtless because He knew all that was tied up
with His death and how much depended upon it. He spoke of how
"I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it
be accomplished!" (Lk. 12:50). There was something in His body language
during His last journey to Jerusalem which was nothing short of
terrifying to the disciples: "They were amazed; and as they followed
Him, they were afraid" (Mk. 10:32-34). All this came to a climax in His
extreme sweating in Gethsemane as the great horror of darkness began to
actually descend on Him (Mk. 14:33-42). Contrast this with the calmness
of suicide bombers or other religiously persuaded zealots going to
their death. The Lord- our Lord- was too sensitive to humanity, to us, to His own humanity, to His own sense of the possibility of failure which His humility pressed ever upon Him... than to be like that.
Contrast
all this with the words of Ignatius at the start of the 2nd century
A.D.: "Our God, Jesus the Christ, was carried in Mary's womb" (Ephesians 18.2). How could God
get inside the womb of an ordinary woman? If the very founders of
popular Christianity, the 'church fathers', could be so totally
astray... surely we have to get back to the Bible for ourselves and
give no weight at all to the accepted wisdom of 'orthodox / mainstream
Christianity' as a religion.
The Real Jesus
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 himself 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. The biographies of Jesus which open the New
Testament are in essence a précis of the Gospel of Jesus. His life was
and is His message. We are to follow Him. This is His
repeated teaching. A Marxist follows the ideas of Marx, not merely his
personality. But a Christian follows Christ as a person, not just His
abstract ideas.
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" . The person of Jesus, as the person of each of us in Him,
makes the ideas, the doctrines, the principles, real and visible; He "
embodies" them. It is only a concrete, real person who can be felt to
call and appeal to people. What I am saying is that if we present the
principles of the Truth as they are in Jesus, then this will be far
more powerful in its appeal than simply presenting dry theories. " The
truth as it is in Jesus" is a Biblical phrase- surely saying that the
doctrines of the one Faith are lived out in this Man. Because of this,
the person hearing the Gospel will feel summoned, appealed to, called,
by a person- the risen Jesus. And then later on in the life
of the convert, it will become apparent to him or her that this same
Jesus, by reason of His very person, makes demands, challenges,
invitations to them, to yet greater commitment. 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 I 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 forgot
things at times, didn't understand absolutely everything (e.g. the date
of His return, or the mystery of spiritual growth, Mk. 4:27), 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.
And 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?
Did He… ever know sexual arousal? Why not ask these questions? If He
was truly human, sexuality is at the core of personhood. He would have
known sexuality, responding to stimuli in a natural heterosexual
manner, “yet without sin”. He was not a cardboard Christ, a sexless
Jesus. 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 record of Jn. 8:8 seems to imply that it
was the way Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust which convicted
the accusers of the adulteress in their consciences. As He kept on
writing, they one by one walked away. It's been speculated that He was
writing their deeds or names there, fulfilling Jeremiah's prophecy of
how the names of the wicked would be written in the dust. But I'm not
so sure they'd have just let Him do that with no further recorded
comment. My suggestion is that He stooped down and looked at the ground
out of simple male embarrassment, but His 'writing' in the dust was
simply Him doodling. If this is so, then there would have been an
artless mix of His Divinity, His utter personal moral perfection, and
His utter humanity. Embarrassed in front of a naked woman, crouching
down on His haunches, doodling in the dust... that, it seems to me,
would've been the ultimate conviction of sin for those who watched. It
would've been surpassingly beautiful and yet so challenging at the same
time. And it is that same mixture of utter humanity and profound,
Divine perfection within the person of Jesus which, it seems to me, is
what convicts us of sin and leads us devotedly to Him. Maybe I'm wrong
in my imagination and reconstruction of this incident- but if we love
the Lord, surely we'll be ever seeking to reconstruct and imagine how
He would or might have been.
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 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 cash value 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. You can see this expressed in
novels and fine art very often. Some examples would be novels like D.H.
Lawrence, The Man Who Died; Miss Lonelyhearts (Nathanel West); Faulkner’s A Fable. Nikolay Gorodetsky wrote a book entitled The Humiliated Christ In Modern Russian Thought where he brings this out well(2).
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. The idea of a personally
pre-existent Jesus likewise arose out of the same psychological bind.
The Jews wanted a Messiah whose origins they wouldn’t know (Jn. 7:27),
some inaccessible heavenly figure, of which their writings frequently
speak- and when faced with the very human Jesus, whose mother and
brothers they knew, they couldn’t cope with it. I suggest those Jews
had the same basic mindset as those who believe in a personal
pre-existence of the Lord. The trinity and pre-existence doctrines
place a respectable gap between us and the Son of God. As John Knox
concluded: “We can have the humanity [of Jesus] without the
pre-existence and we can have the pre-existence without the humanity.
There is absolutely no way of having both” (3).
His person and example aren’t so much of an imperative to us, because
He was God and not man. But if this perfect man was indeed one of us, a
man amongst men, with our very same flesh, blood, sperm 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 guy 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 must 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 more we think about it, the idea of
Jesus as a Divine comet sent to earth chimes in with some of the most
popular movies. Think of Superman and Star Trek- the
hero descends to earth in order to save us. Or take the "Lone Ranger"
type Westerns, set in some wicked, sinful, hopeless town in the
[mythical] American West... and in rides the outsider, the heroic
cowboy, and redeems the situation. The huge success of these kinds of
story lines suggests that we like to think we are powerless to change,
that our situation is hopeless and beyond human salvation... an
outsider is needed to save us, as we look on as spectators, feeling
mere pawns in a cosmic drama. And this may explain the attraction of
trinitarianism and a Divine comet-like Christ who hit earth for 33
years. It breeds painless spectator religion... go to church, hear the
Preacher, watch the show, come home and spend another rainy Sunday
afternoon wondering quite what to do with your life. Yet the idea of a human
Saviour, one of us rising up above our own humanity to save us... this
demands so much more of us, for it implies that we're not mere
spectators at the show, but rather can really get involved ourselves.
In The Real Devil I often found myself making similar points
in relation to the misunderstanding of Satan as a superhuman being
involved in a cosmic battle with God, which we watch from afar here on
earth.... whereas the Biblical 'satan' refers to the 'adversary' of our
own natures, internal codes and dysfunctions, which we ourselves must
struggle to master, following the example of the Lord Jesus. His
victories become ours; until His very death becomes our personal
pattern too.
The relationship of the Lord Jesus with His
Father was evidently intended by Him to be a very real, achievable
pattern for all those in Him. He wasn't an aberration, an uncopyable,
inimitable freak. John's Gospel brings this out very clearly. The
Father knows the Son, the Son knows the Father, the Son knows men, men
know the Son, and so men know both the Father and Son (Jn.10:14,15;
14:7,8). The Son is in the Father as the Father is in the Son; men are
in the Son and the Son is in men; and so men are in the Father and Son
(Jn. 14:10,11; 17:21,23,26). As the Son did the Father's works and was
thereby "one" with Him, so it is for the believers who do the Father's
works (Jn. 10:30,37,38; 14:8-15). Whilst there obviously was a unique
bonding between Father and Son on account of the virgin birth, the Lord
Jesus certainly chooses to speak as if His Spirit enables the
relationship between Him and His Father to be reproduced in our
experience.
The Challenge Of Christ’s Humanity
The undoubted need for doctrinal truth about the nature of Jesus can so
easily lead us to overlooking the need for obedience to His most
practical teaching. As Adolf Harnack put it: “True faith in Jesus is
not a matter of credal orthodoxy but of doing as he did (4). In this
sense we need “to rescue Jesus from Christianity (5). We need to
reconstruct in our own minds the person of Jesus and practical teaching
of Jesus which so perfectly reflected His own life, free from the
theology and creeds which have so often surrounded Him. As a result of
this, our preaching of Christ so often ends up stressing those elements
which the unbeliever or misbeliever finds most difficult to accept,
rather than focusing on the Lord’s humanity and His practical
teachings, which they are more likely to accept because as humans they
have a natural affinity with them. The Lord Jesus was not merely human,
as a theologically correct statement. He passionately entered into
human life to its’ fullest extent. Thus B.B. Warfield comments:
“[Jesus] knew not mere joy but exultation, not mere passing pity but
the deepest movements of compassion and love, not mere surface distress
but an exceeding sorrow even unto death" (6).
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 Christians 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 many 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. It has been truly
commented that “if we believe in the fact of his humanity, we must
affirm our own”. And the same author perceptively points out that “Just
as we have sought a mythical model of Jesus Christ whose humanity is a
sham, so we have sought a mythical model of the Christian life” ( 7).
Because 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. Yes we are human, with all that this involves,
negatively and positively. I interpret the image of the baby Jesus
maybe rather differently from how the Christmas cards do. For a baby
and young child to survive, there is an element of desperate
selfishness from the first struggling breath. The Lord would've been no
different, and obviously shared this basic instinct to preserve self,
right up to His death on the cross. And yet somehow He would've stood
apart from other people, even as a young person, as He never allowed
what Richard Dawkins has termed "the selfish gene" to predominate in
Him (8). It was this difference in Jesus, throughout His life, which was and is so crucial. For it is exactly this aspect of Him which is our moment-by-moment challenge, inspiration and saving comfort.
The Preference Of Jesus To Be Seen As Human
When
the Lord spoke of how "the son of man has nowhere to lay his head" (Mt.
8:20), He was apparently alluding to a common proverb about how
humanity generally ["son of man" as generalized humanity] is homeless
in the cosmos (9). In this case, we see how the Lord took every
opportunity to attest to the fact that what was true of humanity in
general was true of Him. Perhaps this explains His fondness for
describing Himself as "son of man", a term which can mean both humanity
in general, and also specifically the Messiah predicted in Daniel. He
understood Himself as rightful judge of humanity exactly because He was
"son of man" (Jn. 5:27)- because every time we sin, He as a man
would've chosen differently, He is therefore able to be our judge. And
likewise, exactly because He was a "son of man", "the Son of Man has
authority on earth to forgive sins" (Mk. 2:10). If it is indeed true
that "'Son of Man' represents the highest conceivable declaration of
exaltation in Judaism" (10), then we can understand the play on words
the Lord was making- for the term 'son of man' can also without doubt
just mean 'humanity generally'. Exactly because He was human, and yet
perfect, He was so exalted. It's perhaps noteworthy that in the
wilderness temptation, Jesus was tempted "If you are the Son of God..." (Mt. 4:3), and He replies by quoting Dt. 8:3 "man shall not live by bread alone"- and the Jonathan Targum has bar nasha
[son of man] here for "man". If we are correct in understanding those
wilderness temptations as the Lord's internal struggles, we see Him
tempted to wrongly focus upon His being Son of God,
forgetting His humanity; and we see Him overcoming this temptation,
preferring instead to perceive Himself as Son of man. Twice
in Mark, Jesus is addressed as "Messiah" but He replies by calling
Himself "the Son of man" (Mk. 8:29-31; 14:61,62). If this was His
preferred self-perception, should it not be how we perceive Him?
Him And Us
Heb.
2:6-9 is an example of the inspired writer using expected reader
response and expectations in order to make a point. Having spoken of
how the world to come will be given to redeemed human beings and not to
Angels, the writer goes on to quote from the Psalms to prove that
point: "Now it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come,
of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, "What is
man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for
him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have
crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection
under his feet." Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he
left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see
everything in subjection to him. But we see him who for a little while
was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and
honor because of the suffering of death". We begin reading the
quotation assuming it's talking about humanity generally; but as it
goes on, we realize it's talking about the pre-eminent Son of Man, i.e.
the Lord Jesus. Notice how He is called "Jesus", with no 'Lord' or
'Christ' added on. The point of it all is to make us perceive how
totally identified is Jesus with humanity as a whole; a passage which
speaks in its context of humanity generally is allowed to quite
naturally flow on in meaning to apply to the Lord Jesus personally.
It's a majestic, powerful way of making the point- that the Lord Jesus
was truly one of us.
Throughout the Gospels, it’s apparent that both explicitly and
implicitly, the Lord was almost desperate to persuade His followers to see Him
as their brother, one to whom they could realistically aspire- and not a
superhuman icon to be trusted in to get them out of temporal problems. We've noted His
preference for the title ‘Son of man’ rather than any more direct reference to
His Divine Sonship- although to the Old Testament mind, ”son of
man” was a title which upon closer reflection associated Him with the glorious Son of man of Daniel’s visions. The Lord’s struggle was prefigured in
the way Joseph-Jesus had to urge his brothers “Come near to me, I pray you”, and
begged them to believe in His grace and acceptance of them (Gen. 45:4; 50:18-21). This is in essence the plea of Jesus to Trinitarians today.
Take the incident of the withered fig tree in Mark 11:20-24 as an
example of what I mean. The disciples were amazed at the faith of Jesus in God’s power. He had
commanded the fig tree to be withered- but this had required Him to pray to God
to make this happen. As the disciples looked at the withered fig tree and then at Him, wide eyed with amazement
at His faith, the Lord immediately urged them to “have faith in God... whosoever [and this was surely His emphasis] shall [ask a mountain to move in faith, it
will happen]... therefore I say unto you, Whatsoever things you desire [just as Jesus had desired the withering of the fig tree], when you pray [as Jesus had done about the fig tree], believe that you receive
them, and you shall have them”. I suggest His emphasis was upon the word you. He so desired them to see His pattern of faith in prayer as a
realistic image for them to copy. How sad He must be at the way He has been
turned into an other-worldly figure, some wonderful, kindly God who saves us
from the weakness and lack of faith which we are so full of. Yes, He is our Saviour, and our hearts surely have a burning and undying sense of
gratitude to Him. But He isn’t only that; He is an inspiration. It is in
this sense that the spirit of Christ can and does so radically transform human
life in practice. Of course, we have sinned, and we continue to do so. For
whatever reason, we are not Jesus. But our painful awareness of this [and it
ought to be painful, not merely a theoretical acceptance that we are sinners]...
shouldn’t lead us to think that His example isn’t a realistic pattern for us. It
makes a good exercise to re-read the Gospels looking out for other cases of
where the Lord urged the disciples to not look at Him as somehow separate for
themselves, an automatic Saviour from sin and problems. Thus when it was
apparent that the huge, hungry crowd needed feeding, the Lord asked the
disciples where “we” could get food from to feed them (Jn. 6:5). In all
the accounts of the miraculous feedings, we see the disciples assuming that
Jesus would solve the situation- and they appear even irritated and offended
when He implies that this is our joint problem, and they must
tackle this seemingly impossible task with their faith. The mentality of
the disciples at that time is that of so many Trinitarians- who assume that ‘Jesus
is the answer’ in such a form that they are exempt from seeing His humanity as
a challenge for them to live likewise.
Repeatedly, the Lord Jesus carefully worded His teaching in order to
use the same words about Himself as about His disciples. He was the lamb of
God; and He sent them forth as lambs amongst wolves; He was “the light of the
world”, and He stated that they too must be likewise. As He was the source of
living water to us, so we are to be to others (Jn. 4:10,14). I have tabulated
many examples of this kind of thing in A World Waiting To Be Won chapter
3. John grasped this, by using even some of the language of the virgin birth
about the birth of all God’s children. It’s as if even the Lord’s Divine
begettal shouldn’t be seen as too huge a barrier between us and Himself. Many
of the Lord’s parables had some oblique reference to Himself. The parable of
the sower speaks of the type of ground which gave one hundred fold yield- and
surely the Lord was thinking of Himself in this. And yet the whole point of the
parable is that all who receive the Lord’s word have the possibility of
responding in this way. Or take the related parable of the mustard seed [=God’s
word of the Gospel] which grows up into a huge tree under which all the birds
can find refuge (Mk. 4:31,32). This image is replete with allusion to Old
Testament pictures of God’s future Kingdom, and the growth of Messiah from a
small twig into a great tree (Ez. 17:22). Here we see the power of the basic
Gospel message- truly responded to, it can enable us to have a share in the
very heights to which the Lord Jesus will yet be exalted at His return.
I suppose most challenging of all is the Lord’s invitation to us to
take up our cross and follow after Him, in His ‘last walk’ to the place of
crucifixion. This image would’ve been chilling to those who first heard it, who
were familiar with a criminal’s walk to his death. Quite rightly, we associate
the cross of Jesus with our salvation. But it is also a demand to us to be like
Him, not only in showing the courtesy, politeness, thoughtfulness etc. which is
part of a truly Christ-like / Christian culture, but in the utterly radical
call to self-sacrifice unto death. It is in this matter of bearing the cross
after Him that we would so dearly wish for the crucified Christ to be just an
item in history, an act which saved us which is now over, an icon we hang
around our neck or mount prominently on our study wall- and no more. But He,
His cross, His ‘last walk’, His request that we pick up a cross and walk behind
Him, the eerie continuous tenses used in New Testament references to the
crucifixion- is so much more than that. If He washed our feet, we must wash each others’ (Jn. 13:14). Everything He did, all He showed Himself to be
in character, disposition and attitude, becomes an imperative for us to do and
be likewise. And it is on this basis that He can so positively represent us to
the Father: “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (Jn.
17:16).
Notes
(1) F.D.E. Schliermacher, The Christian Faith
(Edinburgh: T& T Clark, 1928) p. 414. Clement of Alexandria, one of
the so-called "fathers" of the Christian church, "Argued that Jesus,
being divine, did not need to eat or drink, but merely did so to keep
up appearances" (as quoted in N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) p. 69). It's hard to square this with
the Lord's cry from the cross: "I thirst!" and other Gospel references
to His need to eat and drink. The founding fathers of 'Christianity' as
a religion, it seems to me, utterly missed the point of the real
Christ. Thomas Hart, To Know And Follow Jesus (New York:
Paulist Press, 1984) p. 44 adds more nonsensical verbiage: "He has a
human nature but is not a human person. The person in Him is the second
Person of the Blessed Trinity. Jesus does not have a personal human
centre". Any Biblical reflection upon the sensitivity, the love, the
death, the kindness of the Lord Jesus... reveals He had the most
wonderful "personal human centre". And that is obscured by this
hopeless mess of words from Trinitarian apologists. The idea of having
"two natures" seems to me quite unBiblical and would imply a lack of
integrity to every word and action of Jesus. It would be like a man
saying "I've got no money in my pocket" and showing an empty pocket-
when he has 1000 Euros or $ in a money belt, and a fist full of well
charged debit cards.
(2) Nikolay Gorodetsky, The Humiliated Christ In Modern Russian Thought (London: SPCK, 1938).
(3) John Knox, The Humanity and Divinity of Christ (Cambridge: CUP, 1968) p. 106.
(4) A. Harnack, What Is Christianity? (5th ed., London: Benn, 1958), x.
(5) R.W. Funk, Honest To Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) p. 300.
(6) B.B. Warfield, ‘The Emotional Life Of Our Lord’ in The Person And Work Of Christ (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1950) p. 142.
(7) Nigel Cameron, Complete In Christ
(Exeter: Paternoster, 1997). He perceptively sees a link between the
false notion of an ‘immortal soul’, and a wrong view of the nature of
man and of Jesus: “There is the idea, as unbiblical as it is common, of
the ‘soul’- understood as an animating spirit which inhabits the body
but in fact itself constitutes the human person, the essential self.
Then there is the related idea of the life to come as an ‘after-life’
in which the soul survives while the body departs. These are notions
which derive from ancient Greece and have become parasitic on Christian
thinking. They foster a lasting suspicion of man as a corporeal being,
and undermine our confidence in the Christian life as a human life” (p.
110). I find these sentences very incisive and true in their analysis.
(8) Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: O.U.P., 1993).
(9) Oscar Cullmann, The Christology Of The New Testament (London: SCM, 1971) p. 154.
(10) Cullmann, op cit p. 161.
