Last weekend, Andy and I had the opportunity to do something we had
not done before, to spend an entire three-day weekend in San
Francisco. Among the things we did was to attend our first Giants
game there at PacBell Park. What a great experience! I recommend it.
We had a great time. It was a sleeper of a game for seven
innings, and then Barry Bonds came on the field and the energy level
rose (even though he never did get a bat on the ball). For me,
though, the energy level rose because n the Jumbotron announced that
after the game there would be what was called a "Day of
Fellowship," and a few of the players from today's game would be
sharing, quote, "their spiritual journeys." Andy and I
thought, "Mmm, that's kind interesting. We're not in a rush to
leave or anything, so why don't we go see what's going on."
Two players from the Colorado Rockies and two players from the
Giants, along with a chaplain, stood before a few hundred people in
one section of PacBell Park and shared their testimonies of faith in
Jesus Christ. It was the first time they had done that. It was an
experiment, but it generated a lot of positive feelings.
I got very frustrated, though. I gave them a C+ because, even
though they were very heartfelt, and they shared their experience,
they never told us anything about Jesus Christ. One of them didn't
even mention him. Now I have no question that their faith was
genuine. I think they were scared out of their socks. And they were
dealing with this big echo from the park PA system. Can you imagine
that? I have a very generous heart towards them, but wishing for more
moved me to think in terms of our ability to articulate our faith in
Jesus Christ - and not just our experience and the benefits of being
a Christian, but tell me, please, who is Jesus? And what did he do
exactly, that changed your life? And how did he do it?
The Presbyterian Church in June met in Louisville, Kentucky just a
week or so before Billy Graham's crusade there. Unfortunately, this
assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA backed off from a clear
statement of who Jesus is, Savior for the world, the only Savior for
the world. We're going to talk about that later in this preaching
series. But even Presbyterians get all mushy-mouthed when it comes to
expressing who Jesus is and what he did.
Furthermore - see, I'm building a case for relevance here - our
church has introduced an element of controversy in the last 12 months
as an opportunity arose for us to redirect our preschool to be an
overtly Christian preschool. The reason why this is controversial is
that not all our teachers were able to express faith in Jesus Christ
in a clear way. The contract of one of them was not renewed as
a result of that, causing some furor, some disappointment and some
feelings over whether it really matters what a person believes.
I'm here today to proclaim to you the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that it does
matter what you believe, and it matters what you say, and it matters
how you say it. I'm here to tell you that Jesus is some things, but
he is not other things. And what he is, who he is, and what he
has done is so important for the church that we shape our life around
his identity.
You know the movie Jurassic Park (the original)? There's
this famous paleontologist who spent his life studying bones and
fragments and has been led to believe that dinosaurs existed.
But his faith, so to speak, came alive when he was face to face,
eyeball to eyeball, with a real dinosaur. Great moment!
You know, so many of us have been picking at bones and fragments in
our entire lives and never really come face to face with the living,
breathing, preaching, miracle-working, death-defying Savior, Jesus
Christ, and I'm hoping this Fall that you meet him.
Today we are going to talk theologically about the very nature of
Jesus. It is essential to our Christian faith to understand that
Jesus was both God and man, both divine and human. The church has
been chewing on this and working on this for almost 1700 years. The
church in the early 4th to late 5th centuries worked this out
meticulously, and the product of those church councils was the Nicene
Creed. But it was about 150 years later when a council of Chalcedon
finally said, "We've been grappling with the humanity of Jesus;
we've been grappling with the divinity of Jesus, but now we must say
we cannot separate those two. We must not diminish his humanity, and
we must not diminish his divinity, and we must certainly not divide
him into two beings."
Somehow Jesus is fused: of God, from God, yet completely human while
completely divine. At the risk of doing what Chalcedon just said not
to do, let's take a look at the human side of Jesus, just for a
minute. We'll look at the divine side also.
What are we talking about when we say that Jesus was human? Well, the
obvious things: He was born. He came from the body of a woman, Mary,
born in Bethlehem of poor parents. He became flesh and blood; he had
a circulatory system, and he breathed and he ran and he skipped and
he laughed.
He made his dwelling among us, the Scripture says. He took on a race.
He lived in a particular location. He spoke a language. Now it wasn't
Latin, and it wasn't Greek. It was Aramaic. It wasn't even Hebrew; it
was Aramaic. He located himself in a specific space in a time, and
related with a group of people.
He had friendships. Mary and Martha and Lazarus in Bethany were dear
friends of his. The 12 disciples, of course, and even among them,
three special dear friends with whom he shared his life. That's
human, to enjoy friendship.
He experienced fatigue. When he met the woman at the well in John 4,
he was there because he was tired. He was so exhausted one day after
a full day of preaching and healing that he fell asleep in a boat and
slept through a storm, practically causing a panic attack in the
disciples in the boat with him. He was tired. He was exhausted.
He experienced hunger and thirst. We see those most markedly in the
accounts of his temptation in the desert when his ministry began
(Luke 4). But even at the end of his life, on the cross, John records
that he said, "I'm thirsty."
And finally, of course, the common human experience, he died. He was
crucified on the cross. He died a death that physiologically is
absolute torture. He bled. He was exhausted. He was in pain. He cried
out. He felt abandoned by his heavenly Father. He experienced the
despair and the depression, the temptations, and finally, physical death.
Nothing more than that could convince us that Jesus was a complete,
full, human being. He experienced what you and I experience in
everyday life. It is no heresy to say that he experienced pain, that
he would forget things, or encounter the normal sorts of things that
we experience every day that remind us of our limitations. He located
himself in human form, fully human, from birth to death.
But there was something else at work in him. The things he said, the
things he did, how people perceived him would indicate that there was
something more to Jesus than a mere human being. He is hard to categorize.
Phillip Yancy in his book The Jesus I Never Knew writes about
the fact that you could not categorize Jesus. "He said little,
for instance about the Roman occupation, the main topic of
conversation among his countrymen. And yet he took up a whip to drive
petty profiteers from the Jewish temple. He urged obedience to the
Mosaic Law while acquiring a reputation as a law-breaker. He could be
stabbed by sympathy for a stranger, yet turn on his best friend with
a flinty rebuke, 'Get Thee behind me Satan.' He had uncompromising
views of rich men and loose women, yet both types enjoyed his
company. One day miracles seemed to flow out of Jesus; the next day
his power was blocked by people's lack of faith. One day he talked in
detail of the second coming; another day he knew neither day nor
hour. He fled from arrest at one point and marched inexorably toward
it at another. He spoke eloquently about peacemaking, then told his
disciples to procure swords. His extravagant claims about himself
kept him at the center of controversy, but when he did something
truly miraculous, he tended to hush it up."
Now what was going on? What's the part we can't see? Who is
this Jesus we're convinced was human? The historians do not doubt
that he existed. But who was he really? There is evidence that points
to the other side, to the divine side of Jesus.
Where do we see his divine nature popping up in the Gospels?
The angels announced his birth, that he was conceived of the Holy
Spirit, the son of God. The Scriptures here say that he had glory
reflecting the One and Only. Where do we see that glory? We see his
dominance over nature. He walked on the water, scaring Peter half to
death, but he walked on water. He calmed the storm; just gave a word
and the wind and the rain stopped.
He did other miracles. He cast out demons. He forgave sins. He
verified his power to do so by healing bodies. He even raised two
people from the dead.
Now another moment of glory was what we call The Transfiguration.
Three of the Gospels share this account of three disciples taking a
walk with Jesus, and all of a sudden he just kind of walks away and
takes on this glow, this blinding light. They realize Jesus'
heavenly reality, that Jesus has simply taken the mask off for a
while and related directly with his Heavenly Father. The
Transfiguration, a moment of glory!
And so is the resurrection, accompanied by blinding light on that
early morning of Easter. He came to Mary. She mistook him for the
gardener, didn't recognize him, because something about his persona
at that point was so different, she couldn't discern the Jesus she
had known. Glory reflecting the one and only. Jesus let loose every
once in a while.
And verbally he would share, "You know if you've seen me, you've
actually seen the Father. If you've known me, you've known Yahweh
God. If you receive me, you receive him." "I tell you the
truth," Jesus said, "before Abraham was born, I am." Ego
emi. The Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Yahweh. "I am that
I am." At this, they picked up stones to stone him for
blasphemy, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple
grounds. He came from the Father, and he was full of grace and truth.
One of my favorite stories in the Gospels is in John 8 when a woman
is caught in adultery. The advocates for the law come and dump
her in front of Jesus and ask him what to do. The law would require
her stoning. He says, "Okay. So whoever is without sin, why
don't you be the first one to cast the stone." Gulping, they all
slinked away, realizing none of them qualified. He didn't turn to her
then and say, "It's okay. You've done nothing wrong. Don't worry
about it." What did he say? "You're free now. Go and sin no
more." Somehow in one encounter, Jesus is able to display
incredible grace and get to the truth in a way that can be
received. We presume that she went and sinned no more.
"Full of grace and truth." So we see now intertwined,
moment by moment, day by day, two natures in one being, Jesus Christ.
It's a mystery. I don't stay up nights worrying about it. How can it
be? I don't know. But I won't trade in either side of his nature. He
was completely human, and he was completely divine. And we can't
separate him into two. Jesus is God come in the flesh.
Now why is this assertion so important? Why does it make a
difference? I'm sure that you have had internal debates over whether
God really understands you and what you're going through. Because
Jesus was human, we have no doubt that God most certainly experienced
full humanity himself. (We must hasten to add that God could
understand us whether or not he became human because God is all-knowing.)
What was really important about the Incarnation (God coming in the
flesh), was that God could show himself to us without scaring us to
death. God took his mask off, and what we saw was Jesus Christ. Here
is the one we would not be frightened of, one who spoke our language,
one we could hear from because he was one of us. God disclosed
himself, revealed himself, in terms that would not frighten us and
send us away.
God, through the Incarnation, also demonstrated his love in terms we
could understand. God has always loved his people. God has always
looked graciously upon his people. But coming in the flesh, he could
touch faces. He could pat heads. He could pray with people. He could
heal them and feed them and love them and embrace them. Every once in
a while, you and I know we need "God with skin on," and
Jesus came with skin that could feel our tears and our tension and
our trials. We can understand the love he showed.
It's really stunning to me that God considered our needs and the
worth of our relationship to him to be sufficient reason to go
through the trauma of changing places, which is what he did.
We add a last reason why the Incarnation is important. Not only
because he disclosed himself, and he demonstrated something of his
love to us, but he also did something we could not do for ourselves.
Only a perfect human being, God himself taking on human form, could
do what needed to be done to reconcile us to God. Only a perfect
human being could put himself in our place and die in our place as
the perfect sacrifice for our sin.
Now I realize I've said something just now that's kind of technical,
and there is going to be a sermon in this series that will explain it
more fully. But take it from me now, and read the Scripture yourself,
to know that Jesus did something a human being had to do, but none of
us was good enough to do it. The perfect one, the sinless one, the
Savior of the world, died to atone for our sin.
This is a great mystery. We live with mystery in the Christian faith,
and maybe that's why we're shy are about sharing it. But it's so
clear and should be stated. The mystery is this, that God became a
human being for us and for the world.
Here's how Charles Spurgeon put it:
"Infinite, and an infant.
Eternal, and yet born of a woman.
Almighty, and yet nursing at a mother's breast.
Supporting a universe, and yet needing to be carried in a mother's arms.
King of angels and yet the reputed son of Joseph.
Heir of all things, and yet the carpenter's despised son."
Two realities in one person, the key to our faith: Jesus, Son of God,
Son of Man. As we get to know him, to see him face to face, we commit
ourselves to ministry in his name.
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