Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Person and Work of Christ, the Vicarious Humanity of Christ, Resurrection, Ascension, Conclusion

Resurrection

            As was mentioned earlier, there is a tendency by some Christians to view the humanity of Jesus as simply instrumental.  In this case, the only reason that God had to become a human being and live a perfect human life was to provide a perfect sacrifice that would be good enough to atone for the sins of humanity.  If this is the case, the significance of the resurrection is reduced to simply being God’s divine “yes” to the crucifixion.  The resurrection proves that God has accepted the sacrifice of Christ.

            However, though this is indeed a part of the significance of the resurrection, if we view Christ’s humanity to be of pivotal importance for our salvation, that is, if the life of Christ is intrinsically salvific, the resurrection has much more to say about the dynamic nature of atonement and reconciliation. We will discuss three conclusions we can make about the resurrection.

            First, the resurrection is the manifestation of God’s victory over death, but it is not simply God’s victory, it is God’s victory from within our humanity.  The resurrection was not simply a show of brute force, showing us that God has authority even over death.  Rather, it shows us that God’s victory over death, through Christ and in the Spirit, extends to humanity.  Humanity is not simply consigned to death and decay, but has been utterly implicated in the resurrection of Christ.

            The second aspect, which is very much bound up with the first, is that Christ’s resurrection is the promise of the general human resurrection.  With the example of Christ, we can see that death is not the final end for humanity, that God’s lordship extends even over death, the one force that is utterly out of human control.  Human beings will be raised.  God has promised that this will be the case and has proved that he is able to do what he has promised because Christ has been raised.

            This is the focus of Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15.  There were those who were saying that it was ridiculous to believe that a human being would be raised from the dead because, as everyone knows, dead people simply do not come back to life, they are especially not resurrected in glory!  Paul’s response is that this line of argumentation undermines all of Christian hope.  If people are not raised, then Christ was not raised.  If Christ was not raised, the work of redemption is not done; God has failed to bring his act to completion and we are still dead in our sins.  Paul explains that, if Jesus has indeed been raised from the dead, which he has, every human being is implicated in this in one way or another.  This means that Christians do not only live this life, but have a life that is to come.  If Christ has not been raised, there is no forgiveness, no redemption, and we have only this life.  If this is the case, Christians are the most pitiful people on the planet.  Thanks be to God that this is not the case!

The last main point that will be made here (though this discussion is by no means all that could be said about the resurrection) is that the resurrection is the healing of our humanity.  Though Jesus was God in flesh, it is clear that he was still liable to death, as was made clear in the crucifixion.  However, once Christ’s body was raised from the dead, he was no longer susceptible to the death and destruction of this world.  There is continuity and discontinuity between the body of Christ before the resurrection and after it, inasmuch as the nail marks were still in his hands and feet but his disciples could not recognize him at times; he could walk through walls, yet he could still eat fish. 

The point is that the resurrection is the overcoming of death and all our weakness and disease.  If not even death could contain Christ’s resurrected body, how can there be sickness and infirmity?  Again, this points beyond itself to the implications it has for us in the general resurrection.  While we are still in these broken bodies, these earthen vessels, we will always be susceptible to weakness and disease.  However, God has revealed that these are not part of his plan and that they are ultimately temporary manifestations of the brokenness of the created order that is not how it should be and will be healed before the end.  Though death will take most of us (indeed all of us until the last generation), when God delivers us from the bondage of the tomb, we will be simultaneously delivered from our infirmities.  The resurrection is the central promise of the gospel and we would do well to remember it on a daily basis.

Ascension

            The ascension is an event that is often neglected in the life of the church, and yet, if it is ignored, we miss a very important aspect of our salvation and the mighty work of God.  To begin with, the doctrine of the ascension is a necessary consequence of the affirmation of the resurrection.  Once you have the empty tomb and Christ alive in such a way that people can see him and touch him, you need to answer the question, “Where did  Christ go?”  If Jesus is alive forevermore and yet has not ascended, then he should be able to be found as a physical reality here on earth.  However, the New Testament bears witness to the fact that, though Jesus remained on earth for forty days after his resurrection, he did not remain forever, but ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God.

            Though the ascension answers the questions of where Jesus’ resurrected body went, it is by no means the only consequence of this event.  The ascension is directly related to the reception of the Holy Spirit by the church at Pentecost because it is only after Jesus is ascended to heaven that the church received the Spirit.  This is why Jesus told us it is better for us if he goes because the Spirit would not be given so long as Jesus was on earth (John 16:5-15).  This theme will be taken up again when we speak of the Holy Spirit.  It is important that we do not forget that Jesus was adamant that the Holy Spirit would not be given until he departed, not just in death, but in ascension.

            The reality of the ascension tells us that the Incarnation of God in and as the man Jesus endures forever, that it was not just a passing thing that God did for a relatively short period of time and is utterly in the past.  God did not just become a man two thousand years ago; he did not simply live a human life; he did not simply die a human death; he did not simply raise that humanity from the dead; God has committed to being eternally bound to human nature in the particular human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and is thus eternally bound to us as human beings.

            This is the basis of all the discussion in the New Testament of Jesus as our high priest, especially in the book of Hebrews.  A high priest must be taken from among the people.  This priest must be able to empathize with our weakness.  However, though ordinary priests have to continually make sacrifices for their own sins, the resurrected Christ has no sins to sacrifice for and can truly be the high priest that is necessary for humanity and what all the Levitical high priests pointed to by their inadequacy.  This great high priest is still one of us and one with us and prays on our behalf, a human interceding for us whose prayer bears the very authority of God.  It is this ongoing prayer that lends its efficacy to our prayer.

            The ascension also assures us that, when the New Testament speaks of a return of Christ, the actual physical Christ will be the one who returns.  The human Jesus who returns will be glorified as he was after his resurrection, but it will be fundamentally the same Jesus that walked on the earth, preaching, teaching and healing the sick that we see in the gospel records.  The return will be physical and within this world of space and time, just like the incarnation was.

            What the ascension has to say about how we know God is particularly interesting.  God became a human being in Jesus in the manger, then he lived a human life, died a human death, was raised, and was ascended into heaven.  Though God has revealed himself to us in our world of space and time in Jesus, he eventually physically left our world.  What this does is consecrates the earthly, pre-ascension ministry of Christ as the covenanted place where God meets with us.  This means that we do not need to transcend space and time to meet with God but that we must meet with God where he has met with us, that is, in our world of space and time, in the earthly and physical Jesus.

            Perhaps the most breathtaking implication of the ascension is what it says about our humanity.  God has always been a Triune community of persons, but, before the incarnation, humanity had nothing to do with this divine community, except in the ways that God condescended to make himself present to Israel.  However, in the incarnation, one of the persons took on human flesh and entered into our world.  In the ascension, it is this earthly and physical man Jesus, though resurrected in glory, that entered back into the divine communion and is united in complete Trinitarian fellowship.  It is an astonishing thing to think that God loves humanity so much that an actual human being would be incorporated into the Trinity, where there had never been a human being before.  This has astonishing implications for our hope for the world to come, but this will be taken up in the chapter on eschatology, or last things.

Conclusion

            This chapter has been particularly long.  This is because Christ, as the personal point of contact between God and humanity, is the beginning, middle and end of all our reflections about God, humanity, and the relationship between the two.  As we turn to consider the other persons of the Trinity and the Trinity as a whole, our thinking will be fundamentally shaped by the actual event of the incarnation and what it tells us.  Then, in the discussion about eschatology, or the culmination of God’s kingdom, what we have to say will be grounded in what we actually see in Christ.  Finally, when we speak of individual salvation and the corporate expression of that salvation in the church, they will not be topics that are completely different than what has already been accomplished in Christ but fully integrated with the content of this chapter.

With the exception of a short chapter of introduction and a relatively short discussion of the prehistory of the Incarnation in Israel, this is the first chapter because, in terms of what we know and how we know it, Christ is the point on which all of our discussion turns.  Theoretically, we could have begun with a Christian doctrine of creation or an extended discussion on epistemology, or theory of knowledge, as other works do.  However, since Christ is truly the center of the Christian faith and the beginning and end of our theological reflection, it is fitting that we view all of theology and the Christian faith in and through Jesus Christ.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, the Person and Work of Christ, the Vicarious Humanity of Christ, Crucifixion

  Crucifixion

            This is, understandably, one of the most important points in the life of Christ.  These final three points in Jesus’ life are of absolutely pivotal importance.  In fact, in some Christian circles, these final three (and, most often, just the first two of them) are seen as the entirety of the work of Christ.  However, as we will see below, the ascension is indispensable to our understanding of the Gospel.

            The crucifixion is a meeting of two very strong forces:  The unbridled evil of humanity and the extravagant love of God.  This is not the first time that these two forces have collided.  They met in a partial and incomplete way throughout the entire history of Israel, where God’s interaction with the people resulted in a painful reshaping of Israel’s life and worship.  It happened within the life of Christ, in his very person.  Now, at the crucifixion, it happened between God and all of humanity.

            The evil of humanity in the crucifixion is a theme that is not always taken seriously.  Once I had a conversation where the other person saw the crucifixion as not being that bad of a thing from humanity’s point of view.  This argument is based on the idea that, since the results of the crucifixion were so positive for humanity and since God’s will would not have been brought to fruition if Jesus had not been crucified, then the people who had Jesus killed were really not sinning inasmuch as they were carrying out the will of God and bringing about a blessing for all the people of the world.

            However, I think this interpretation has more to do with a theological agenda that emphasizes the sovereignty of God at the expense of human agency than with the actual Biblical evidence.  This view often refuses to recognize the fundamentally broken character of things like death, disease, war and other tragedies.  The argument goes more or less this way:  God is utterly sovereign.  Because of this, we logically deduce that absolutely nothing happens without God’s express command, even if there are secondary causes involved (Biblical support comes from passages like Matthew 10:29, but such a reading has more to do with reading the theological conviction into the text rather than deriving the theological conviction from the text).  If finally everything that happens is good because it comes from God as the “first cause” (to use Philosophical terms), then nothing is really ever tragic.

            However, if the Christian doctrine of the fall of humanity teaches us anything, it teaches us that things are not as they should be, that all of the created order is broken and in need of redemption.  Some of the implications of this observation will be fleshed out in the chapter on God the Father, but what matters at this point is to allow the cross to be a truly tragic event, something that ought not to have happened, for only when we allow the tragedy of the cross to stand will we understand the goodness of God, be able to make sense of how God acts to overcome evil, and foster in us as human beings the appropriate humility as we see the depths of evil of which humanity is capable.

            There are two main points that we must consider when we reflect on the significance of the cross.  The first of these is the cross as a sign of the evil of humanity.  In spite of the fact that many evangelistic and revivalistic sermons operate this way, we never find the Biblical witness developing a doctrine of sin in isolation from the redemptive work of God in order to provoke an existential crisis to which the cross is the solution.  Instead, we find that the moments of the greatest human evil are simultaneously the moments where God’s grace is most fully and clearly manifest.

            The cross is the single most evil act of humanity in the entire history of world.  This might seem to be a ridiculous claim from a purely secular point of view.  After all, there have been many evils perpetrated over the years, some of which have been committed under the pretence of furthering God’s kingdom.  One needs only to think of the elaborate purging of human beings throughout the twentieth century to see some of the depth of evil of which humanity is capable.  And yet, though we can come up with many startling examples of man’s inhumanity to man, in the crucifixion, we are dealing with the murder of the Son of God.  When God condescended to be one with us in our humanity, we responded by putting him to death.  Joan Osborne wrote a song in the 1990’s where she asked the question, “What if God was one of us?”  The answer, as was demonstrated when God did indeed become one of us is, “we would kill him.”

            There is a sense in which God is the cause of this evil act.  After all, if God had remained distant and aloof, finally unknowable to humanity and content to love without demonstrating that love, humanity would never have been provoked to such a pitch of evil.  Indeed, we never would have had an opportunity to murder the Son of God if God had never become incarnate.  And yet, though one might say that God “caused” the crucifixion in one sense, God brought about this tragic act, not by forcing the people to nail Jesus to a cross, but simply by bringing his holiness into direct contact with the sinfulness, evil and rebellion of humanity, exposing it for what it is, provoking it to its highest pitch, and standing in condemnation over it.

            This is extremely important.  When Jesus was speaking with the woman at the well in John, chapter four, he exposes her sins to her.  While modern sensibilities might cringe at such behavior, the woman runs off, joyfully, and tells everyone that they should come and see this man who told her everything she had ever done, that is, has told her what a sinner she was.  If Jesus had not plumbed her sin to its depths, she would always have been in doubt as to whether she could trust him.  She could always convince herself that Jesus didn’t know how bad she really was and that, if he did, he never would have made those promises.  When Jesus showed her that he knew her sin in all its stark evil, she knew that his offer could not be undone by her sin, but rather that her sin had become the bond by which she was united to Christ, because it was the forgiveness of her sin that proved to her the sheer depths of God’s love.

            This is something of why the tragedy of the cross is important.  If humanity had not been driven to the heights of evil, we might always run from God, somehow imagining that our personal sin could nullify the promises of God.  As it is, the single most evil act of human history is taken up by God, endured, and utterly transformed into the very same act by which God unites humanity to himself.  Therefore, we rest secure in the promises of the Gospel because if God can so transform the crucifixion, surely God can transform our sin.

The other major point that must be considered is the cross as a sign of divine love.  Jesus himself interpreted his death this way when he told his disciples that there is no greater love than to lay one’s life down for his friends (John 15:13).  It must be pointed out, however, that the love of God that is demonstrated in the death of Christ is not the same as the love demonstrated in classic stories of self-sacrifice.  When Jesus died, it was not simply a human being dying, but God himself.  God entered into our brokenness so completely as to take it to its ultimate conclusion.  In the act of dying on our behalf and in our place, simply so that he would not have to be without us, God demonstrated to us that God loves us so much that he loves us even more (as astonishing as it may sound) than God loves God’s self.

 The reason that the cross is a sign of divine love and not just a tragedy is because, though Jesus, an innocent man, was indeed put to death, he is by no means only a man.  The Christian Scriptures portray the death of Christ as being pre-eminently an act of God.  However, this act of God is not the same thing as the pagan idea that God is angry and can only appeased by the sacrifice of an innocent human being.  Rather, it is a ­self-sacrifice on God’s part from within our humanity and within our guilt and moral responsibility.

This self-sacrifice of God is a sign that God not only loves us but loves us more than God loves himself.  The justification for such a claim lies in the very facts.  God, who has no ontological need (that is, a need latent in who God is) to become incarnate and die, chooses to do so because it is the means by which humanity can be reconciled to him.  The fact that God would freely choose to redeem humanity in this way rather than to be only the divine community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, shows us that God’s love for us to be with him is greater than God’s love to remain alone as he has always been, that God’s love for us is indeed greater than we would ever dare to claim apart from the reality of Christ.

Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, the Person and Work of Christ, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, Baptism, Temptation, Teaching, Prayer

Baptism

            If we think of Jesus’ humanity and human life as being nothing more than instrumental, that is, if we think that the only reason that God became a human and lived a perfect human life was because he needed to have a perfect sacrifice to atone for sin, then there are few scenes in the Gospel accounts that are more baffling than Jesus’ baptism.  Now, Jesus’ humanity was indeed instrumental, but it was not merely so.

            When John the Baptist was baptizing people in the Jordan, it was quite clearly understood as a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  The question that might arise in our minds when we see Jesus going forward for John’s baptism is, “Why would Jesus need to be baptized if he had never sinned?”  This is a question we can see that even John was asking, because of what he says to Jesus that day (Matthew 3:13-17).  “I have need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”  John was well aware of the fact that Jesus was greater than him and that he needed the baptism that only Jesus could give, and yet Jesus responds, “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”  Jesus saw his baptism as being more important than John could imagine.

            So, if Jesus had not committed any sins and he underwent a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, whose sin was he repenting of and confessing that day at the Jordan?  If we really take seriously the idea that Jesus took our place in order to offer an appropriate human response to God and that everything he did on earth was done on our behalf and in our place, the answer to that question becomes clear.  Jesus was confessing and repenting of our sins.  In his baptism, Jesus took our sin and brokenness upon himself and repented on our behalf and in our place because, all too often, we do not even repent appropriately, because we either hold on to our sins or cling to some worthiness of our own instead of relying solely on God’s mercy.

            As will be clearer when we consider the role of baptism in the life of a believer, we must think out our understanding of the meaning of baptism in light of what Jesus has done at this point in his life.  We are joined to Christ’s repentance and appropriate human response to the realization of our sinfulness.

            Another important point that must be observed is that, at his baptism in the Jordan, Jesus received the Holy Spirit, descending on him like a dove.  When we remember that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and had never been without the Spirit, we might wonder what it means for him to receive the Spirit at his baptism.  We must always remember the reactions of faithful people when they encountered the Lord in the Old Testament.  After coming face to face with God or one of his angels, the response was that of dread.  Often, the person would claim that, because they had seen the Lord, they needed to die.  When they did not, they were astonished.  If this is the response of people who have merely an external encounter with God, we must not underestimate the crisis that would occur if the Holy Spirit simply began to indwell people without any kind of mediation.

            When Jesus received the Holy Spirit, he did not do it only for himself, but for us.  In Jesus, God invited the Holy Spirit to dwell within our humanity in such a way that it learned to compose itself, so to speak, in our broken humanity without consuming it.  Only after Jesus took this Spirit-indwelt humanity through life, death, resurrection and ascension, were the disciples given the Holy Spirit as well.  This reception on the part of Christ is absolutely crucial to our reception of the Spirit at Pentecost and ever after.  Without Christ mediating the Spirit to us, we would be consumed by the indwelling of God in our lives.

Temptation

            Jesus’ temptation, as found early in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, is an extremely important moment in the life of Christ that is all too often ignored.  There is a tendency to trivialize the temptation of Christ, as if the temptation was merely a show and had no actual reality.  The concern would seem to be that, if Jesus was really tempted, which carries with it the possibility of committing sin, it would imply that Jesus is less than God.  This is a problematic interpretation because it presupposes what can and cannot have taken place based, not on what God has actually done and revealed to us, but on what we assume God can or cannot do.  We are presented with an actual assertion that Jesus was indeed tempted.  We must deal with it in one way or another.

            The key texts that help us to understand the temptation of Christ as having a fundamental soteriological (that is, having to do with salvation) importance are found in the book of Hebrews.  In this book, we read statements like (2:17-18), “He had to be made like his brethren in all things, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.  For since he himself was tempted in that which he has suffered, he is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.”  We also read (4:15), “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all thing as we are, yet without sin.”  Hebrews interprets Christ’s temptation as being the overcoming of our sin from within our broken humanity.

            This is what sets the temptation of Christ apart from the temptation that other human beings endure.  When most people are tempted, they give into the temptation; when Jesus is tempted, he endures by applying the very power of God to the temptation from within our humanity.  In the person of Jesus Christ, temptation has been overcome and defeated.  This is not a promise that ordinary human beings can do what Jesus did, as if Jesus were merely an example and nothing more.  What it tells us is that we can also conquer sin and temptation inasmuch as we are united to the victory over sin and temptation of Christ.

            Something we learn from the gospels about the nature of temptation and the triumph of grace over sin is found in the garden of Gethsemane.  In one account (Luke 22:39-44), we read that, while Jesus was preparing to go to the cross, he was being tempted to abandon his mission, which included his death.  We read, “Being in agony he was praying very fervently; and his sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.”  We learn from this that Jesus experiences temptation in a more intense way than we often do, precisely because we often give into the temptation before it comes to its full strength.  It also shows us that temptation has incredible power that would crush us if we were not united to the victory of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.  It shows us that any attempt to resist temptation while somehow bypassing the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit is futile at best.

Teaching

            It might be argued that the teaching ministry of Christ is primarily an example of God condescending to humanity and teaching us the truths of God.  This is indeed an important dimension of this idea, but it is by no means the only one.  Equally important is the part it plays in Jesus fulfillment of the obligations of humanity.  In many ways, the teaching ministry of Christ forms the basis on which we trust that God can use human words to communicate his truth to us.  We also, because of the unique nature of Christ, can trust that, when Jesus teaches something, it is God teaching it.  Though God indeed spoke through the Old Testament prophets, those prophets were not hypostatically united to the being of God.  They were messengers; they were not also, simultaneously, the message.

            It is also through the teaching ministry of Jesus that the actual activity of God is interpreted to human beings.  Surely human words cannot capture the depth and richness of the divine will and mission, but they point beyond themselves to indicate far more than they can fully articulate.  Again, the fact that Jesus is indeed fully God and fully man comes into play in a strong way.  When we encounter the teaching of Christ, we do not have to do with a merely human interpretation of God’s activity in our midst, but a fully divine interpretation spoken by human lips and articulated with human language.

            Further, if Jesus was able to articulate and interpret God’s will and mission among humanity in human language, he must have been able to comprehend these same things within his human mind.  Again, this is not to say that there is nothing that is true of God that cannot be comprehended by the human mind, but rather, because Jesus understood the gospel and taught the gospel, the gospel is indeed understandable within humanity and our humanity is not intrinsically a barrier that inhibits us from understanding it.

            We must be ever aware of the danger of thinking that Jesus is simply a teacher of truths and not also the very Truth of God in his own Person.  Thomas F. Torrance put it extremely well.  “He [Jesus] is Truth communicating himself in and through truths, who does not communicate himself apart from truths, and who does not communicate truths apart from himself.”

Prayer

            The prayer of Jesus is also important both to our understanding of God and of our own prayer.  The first thing we see is that Jesus, as one who is fully God, prays at all.  What is further, when Jesus prays, we do not get the sense that he is praying to himself, but to the God he calls Father.  This prayer has been an argument against the divinity of Christ, but there are many places in the Gospel accounts that point to the unique union that Jesus has with his Father.  Indeed, “Father” was a term that was only ever used in the Old Testament to say that God is the Father of the nation of Israel, but never as the Father of individual faithful people.  Jesus’ use of Father to speak of God was interpreted by the Jewish leaders as him considering himself to be equal to God and it nearly got him killed  on the spot (John 10:30-36).

            There are a few moments of prayer that are particularly illuminating.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, as referenced above, Jesus prayed that God would take the “cup” away from him and was in great agony of soul.  On the cross, Jesus cries out, “Eloi eloi lama sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  By taking these and other prayers onto his own divine-human lips, he truly enters into our brokenness and takes even our god-forsaken cry onto his lips.  In light of these things, we can be confident that our prayers, which are often not as faithful as they ought to be and sometimes quite faithless, are taken up by Christ and redeemed.  God is not afraid of even our faithlessness.

            The connection between our prayer and the prayer of Christ is extremely important.  This entire section has been about how Jesus takes our humanity from us and lives out a fully obedient life to God from within our very humanity.  Indeed, this is the same way we should understand Christ’s prayer.  Our prayer is often weak and not what it should be.  If the efficacy of our prayer is dependent on our ability to find the right words and to pray with the right attitudes, we would have little hope to ever have our prayers heard.  However, our prayers are taken by the Spirit and united to the perfect prayer of Christ and presented before God.  This is why we pray in Jesus’ name.  It is not just a convenient way to end our prayer, nor is it simply a way to remember Jesus when we pray.  It is an acknowledgement that our prayers are not our own.  We are saying to God, “We know our prayers are not good enough, we know that we are weak and broken and not worthy to come before you, but we come not on our own authority but on that of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who died, rose again, ascended to heaven and lives forever to intercede on our behalf.  Hear our prayers, not for our own sake, but for his.”