The Human Condition as Revealed in the Incarnation
In 1896, Charles Sheldon published a book called In His Steps, where the pastor of a church challenged his congregation to spend a year asking themselves “What would Jesus do?” before they did anything. There is a certain profound truth in this question and a corrective comment that must be made. The truth is that we must base our Christian lives, not on whatever we think that we should do, nor on the norms of our culture, nor even on the ideals of generations gone by, but solely based on the reality of God in flesh, Jesus Christ. The correction that needs to be made is regarding the tendency of many people to make this question nothing more than speculation, thereby separating it from the revelation that God has actually made known to us. That is, if we do not root our answer to the question “What would Jesus do?” in the answer to the question “What has Jesus done?” we will very quickly do precisely what we shouldn’t, that is, root our decisions in an abstract concept of morality that is more the product of our own imagination and culture than of God’s revelation.
It is when we actually look at Jesus that we get a clue into what our lives ought to be about. It is in Jesus that we actually see what godly living consists of. There has been a question that has been asked throughout the ages. “Is something (like murder) evil because God condemns it or does God condemn it because it is evil?” This seems, at first glance, like a harmless question. Does it make a difference why something is evil, so long as we can all agree that it is indeed evil? In actual fact, our answer to this question is very important. If we claim that things are evil (or good, for that matter) independently of God and that God can only ratify this, we are saying that there is an ethical code, independent of, and indeed superior to, God to which God is subject. Once we make God subject to an independent morality, or, which is effectively the same thing, once we make Jesus merely the example of all goodness rather than the definition of that goodness, we have said that, whatever God may be, he is surely not almighty, nor ultimate in any meaningful sense of the word. Taking a step like this means that, when we say, “God is good,” we mean that God conforms to our previous understanding of good, rather than being its very definition.
The point is that we simply cannot understand the human condition or even begin to understand the implications of the gospel for our daily lives if we do not begin with the presupposition that Jesus is the incarnation of God and that God is the source of all being as well as the source of all that is good. So we must look first and foremost at the actual person of Christ as the center of all our reflections about the Christian life.
One of the things that we must certainly avoid, though it must be admitted that it is extremely common in contemporary times, is thinking of Christian faith in existentialist terms. Existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes existence as a virtue in itself. It promotes self-reflection and living with conviction and decision. There are certainly some areas where this overlaps with Christian faith. After all, who can deny that the Christian needs to have a life marked by decision for Christ? And yet, the reason why existentialism emphasizes decision among other things is because, in the end, there is no reality outside of the self. The person must live with conviction and decision because, in the final analysis, that is all there is. Decision is a virtue in itself, regardless of the content of that decision.
When we attempt to apply this way of thinking to Christian faith, it often looks something like this. I begin to think about the perfection of God (often considered in abstract terms, rather than in light of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ) and I think about how I measure up to it. I come to realize that God is perfect and I am not, so I decide that I am going to pull myself up by my bootstraps and save myself. However, I quickly realize that I cannot do it. I lament and wonder to myself, “How can I be saved?” Finally, I convince myself that God has come to my rescue. At the very end of this line of reasoning, Jesus is often brought in, saving it from complete existentialism. However, when we think this way, the perfection of God is not something that is understood by examining what God has actually done or who God has actually revealed himself to be, but by projecting our highest ideals back into God, or, as we might say, making God in our own image.
The problem with this whole way of thinking is that the entire motivation for salvation is based on our perception of need. The real goal of preaching and ministry in this view is to reveal to people their need for something outside of themselves, then showing that that something is God. The difficulty with this is that we do not find this approach anywhere in all of the Bible. The Old Testament prophets spoke words intended to drive people to repentance, but it was always within the context of Israel, a nation whose very identity was shaped by what God has done through mighty deeds. The conviction was not meant to foster decision as a virtue in itself but to remind the people of God’s covenant with them. In the New Testament, the closest to this way of thinking is found in the book of Romans. However, even here, Paul is speaking, not to nonbelievers who he is trying to crush under sin so they are ready to receive the gospel, but believers for whom he is analyzing what God has actually done, especially trying to make sense of the apparent rejection of God by Israel.
What we actually see in the Biblical witness is that God does not wait until we have an existential crisis, trying to live up to an impossible human ideal, and then ride in on his high horse to rescue us. What we actually see is that God takes the initiative, giving of himself in a way that we cannot even begin to fathom, long before we ever had any realization that we needed saving. The people at the time, before the resurrection, followed Christ because he healed people or because he was hoped to be a political leader who would overthrow the Roman authorities. Their thoughts were in no way dominated by an idea that they were sinful at their very core and needed atonement and reconciliation that only God could work out.
God is both the cause of and the solution to our existential crisis. It is not as though we could discover the problem of sin on our own; we needed to be shown the problem in a piercing way. We needed God to show us that there was even a problem, or else we would never have figured it out. God is indeed the source of our salvation, but he is also the source of our lamentation over our sin. Without Christ we would neither have redemption, nor have any idea that we needed redemption.
But is it true that we cannot come to an understanding of the problem of sin apart from Christ? Surely we can understand that human beings are sinful and in need of help. After all, it doesn’t take much to see that our world is no better off today than it was thirty or fifty years ago. We have wars, genocides, an abused environment, human trafficking, and greedy corporations everywhere we look. Our best attempts to legislate morality have shown that, while we certainly can restrain the outward manifestation of evil in our society, that evil is still alive and well, finding new and creative ways to make itself known.
And yet, is this really all that we mean when we say that Jesus shows us the sin of humanity? Do our observations of the evil in the world really push us to no other conclusion than that, if God did not become a human being, and suffer and die on our behalf, we would surely be lost? This is not the case. The fact that it is not the case is evident because there is no shortage of people who are full of ideas about how to make the world a better place and to eliminate the evils that are practiced throughout it. We come up with educational programs, newer and more creative laws, we protest injustices and hope that those in authority will take care of them; all of which are good, but none come close to doing justice to the human condition as revealed in the incarnation.
Part of the problem with allowing our thinking to be grounded outside of Christ is that, by doing so, we are rooting our thinking outside of the one objective reality that calls our whole way of thinking into question and exposes our situation in all its harshness. So long as we think of our problems as something that human willpower can fix, we will always convince ourselves that our situation is not all that bad, that the problems can be solved if we were to all just decide to live differently. We will never think that, left to our own devices, our situation is hopeless. This is exactly what the gospel shows us.
When we allow the fact of Jesus Christ to determine how we think about our human condition, what do we find? We find that, when God became a human being, he became a complete human being. In doing so, God revealed that what we really needed was not information or more careful teaching, but that our alienation from God went down to the very core of our being. Our entire humanity was assumed by God because our entire humanity was in need of healing and redemption. When we look at what God has done, we see that nothing short of the Second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh, living the human life, being hated, mocked, spit at, and finally crucified, could wrench humanity out of the clutches of evil. We also see that our human condition was so fearfully sinful that our deepest and most natural response to the grace and mercy of God is hatred and rebellion. When God came in flesh to reach us, we nailed him to the cross, because we could not stand to be in the presence of God.
If we actually allow Jesus to show us who we are, it is a fearful picture. However, divine judgment is never revealed by itself, but only within the context of redemption and divine love. Paradoxically, the moment that our desperate condition is revealed (the crucifixion of the Son of God) is the exact same moment that God reveals his boundless mercy, love and compassion. The cross was the single most evil act of human history and yet it is the moment we remember with joy, not because it reveals the evil of humanity, but because it reveals the compassion of a God who loves us with a love that will not let us go and has proven it by staking his very life for us and our salvation. The two ideas, that of the revelation of the incredible depths of human evil and the revelation of the even more astonishing heights of divine love are the obverse of one another, that is, they are like two sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.
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