JESUS CHRIST: HUMAN AND DIVINE

Isaiah 9: 2-7; Colossians 1: 15-20

Barbara Brown Taylor, a girl who grew up in Alabama, is now considered one of the best preachers in America today. Currently she is an adjunct professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She tells a story to which I, and I think many of you, can relate, whether this has happened on a doorstep or in a college dorm: it is being hit with either the

D. James Kennedy “Evangelism Explosion” question: “If you died tonight, do you know for sure that you would go to Heaven?” or the Bill Bright “Four Spiritual Laws” booklets that have been shared by Campus Crusade for Christ members for over 30 years. Here is Barbara Brown Taylor’s story modified just a bit for brevity: “One afternoon when I was a sophomore in college I was sitting in my dormitory room minding my own business, when there was a knock at my door. I opened it and found two young women clutching Bibles to their breasts. My heart sank. With my parent’s help, I had avoided organized religion most of my life, and these two—with their gleaming eyes, earnest faces, modest plaid skirts, and sensible shoes—these were just the sort of people I had hope to continue avoiding as long as I could. The Holy Spirit had sent them, they said. (‘Oh know!’ I moaned under my breath.) Could they come in, they asked, and while I was thinking of a suitable excuse, they came right in, and I knew I was a goner. They sat down on my bed, opened their Bibles, and began to ask me questions: ‘Are you saved?’ one asked. ‘Well,’ I answered haltingly, ‘that depends on what ….’ ‘No’ the other one wrote on her paper; ‘not saved!’ ‘Do you want to be saved?’ asked the first one, and both of them gleamed at me in a way that I thought it would be awful to say no. ‘Sure; I said lamely, and the leapt into action, pulling me down to sit beside them on the bed, one of them reading certain passages of Scripture, while the other drew an illustration of my predicament on her pad for me to see. ‘Here you are’ she said cheerfully, drawing a stick figure on one side of a yawning chasm; ‘And here is God,’ she said, drawing another figure on the other side. ‘In between,’ she continued, ‘is sin and death’ she said ominously, filling in the space with many dark scribbles from her pen. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘the question is, how are you and God going to get together?’ To which I said ‘I don’t have a clue,’ and they both looked delighted. The one bent over her drawing and connected the two sides of the chasm with the shape of a cross. ‘That’s how!’ she announced triumphantly, ‘Jesus laid down his life for you to cross over. Do you want to cross over?’ they asked. ‘Sure’ I said in a white flag surrender kind of way. The look in their eyes was like one of those old cash registers where you crank the handle and the little ‘Sale’ sign pops up. They told me to kneel by my bed, where they knelt on either side of me and instructed me to repeat after them: ‘I accept Jesus Christ as my person Lord and Savior and I ask in to come in to my life. Amen.’ Then they got up, hugged me, gave a schedule of Campus Bible studies, and left. The whole thing took less than twenty minutes.” THE PREACHING LIFE, Cowley Publications, 1993, pp. 103-104. Has that little event, or one like it, ever happened to you? It has happened to me. The thing our text draws us to today is the bridge between the chasm from ourselves on one side, and God on the other. The bridge, they said, was the cross, and in one sense that’s exactly right. But in another sense, the passages we read today, and countless others point not only to the man on the cross, Jesus Christ, but also to the very same being startlingly identified in Scripture: that he was also the Son of God. He was mortal; he was God. There was competition for that title in Jesus’ day but no faithful Jew believed it. Augustus Caesar was one of the many Caesars to rule the Roman Empire over the years, and it was he who ordered the title “Lord and God” to be added to his name. “Blasphemy” Jews believed. What did the Roman citizens do? They kept quiet, that’s what, for the Pax Romana, which was the peace of the Roman Empire in their day was achieved by squashing riots, objections, or challenges with brutal crucifixions and sporting dismemberments in the Circus Maximus. They kept peace by making everyone tow the line that Caesar himself drew.

The group of Jews in Israel and Judah were part of that kingdom, since they themselves had not controlled their own destinies for over 200 years. From that group, one preacher named Isaiah, ages earlier, proclaimed words that gave hope to Jews and were dismissed by non-Jews as wishful thinking. What were those words? “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; they who dwelt in the land of deepest darkness, upon them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder.” And what will this child’s name be, or what title will be given to him? “Wonderful counselor;” Isaiah first said. Okay, the world had wonderful counselors before; they could have another. But the next title caught in everyone’s throat: “Mighty God.” Mighty God!!!! Wait a minute! Jews knew that the Lord their God was one God! Romans would not have thought a Jew was predicting such a birth of a Roman boy! What was this announcement, early in Isaiah 7, that said a young woman would conceive and bear a son, that would mean she was having a human child, except for the curious title to be given to the child: “Emmanuel: God with us?” Other children’s names meant things like “God’s peace,” or “Jesus Saves.” But this child was to be called “Mighty God!” Which was he? God or man; Divine, or mortal; Heavenly or human? Yes. Yes is the bewildering Scriptural answer: The one born years, later, according to John, was not only the Lamb of God, the Good Shepherd, the Door, and the Way, he was “The Word;” and the word was God.

Three centuries later, in defense of the words that are in our Bibles today, Christians fought, and prayed and studied and sweat to make sure this amazing and powerful claim did not get swayed to one weak side or the other. Jesus is truly and fully a human being, the Bible says, and truly and fully God; not half and half, not more one than the other. If Jesus were just mortal, he might have fine teachings and be inspiring, but he would have no more ability to save us than any other fine rabbi. If Jesus were God alone, then all of the testimonies about him shedding human blood, and being tempted, and getting tired, and needing sleep, and needing food, would have been a lie. So St. Paul mounted his Asia Minor pulpits and proclaimed, especially in Corinth, that “God was in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 5:19) He was in Christ on the Cross, during the miracles, during his arrest, and as he taught. It was John who said that the Word was God, which became flesh and lived among us; (John chapter 1) and it was Jesus himself who said “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) So to keep Christianity from drifting into false teachings, defenses and rebuttals were set up with official and prayerfully adopted documents that were not Scripture, but protected the integrity of Scripture. The one that finally got called the Nicene Creed protected the idea that was shared by the girls in Barbara Brown Taylor’s dorm room; it’s the idea brought forth from the prophet Isaiah; it’s the one solidified in St. Paul and St. John’s Scripture texts: that Jesus was of one substance with the Father; not similar to, not close to, but the same as. And it was the Son of God and Son of Man who died on the cross for you, and for me. It took the blood, sweat, and tears of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. and finally the revision by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. (over 125 years!), for the church to come up with the document- the defense of the faith- that we have in our statements of faith, and that every other creedal branch of Christianity has in theirs: Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox: the Nicene Creed- the creed of Communion: the other famous creed is the Apostles’ Creed- the creed of Baptism, but it is not used in Eastern Orthodox Churches. The statement in the Nicene Creed: “of one Being with the Father” has to do with both how Jesus knows our pains, our sorrows, our deep despair and depth of sin; and, how Jesus also has the power to save us from them. Only Jesus has the power to both walk beside us and lift us up; to know our sorrows and how to save us from them; to empathize and sanctify; Jesus can do it all.

If there is one place outside of Scripture where the Jesus who relates to human suffering and the Jesus who lifts us up from suffering is most demonstrated, it is in the power of the Spirituals and gospel songs: In the spiritual, “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” did the writer of that song want the carpenter who drove nails into wood and stone with a hammer, or the Savior who had the two edged sword? YES! In “What a Friend We Have in Jesus;” did that writer mean the human man Jesus or the holy God Jesus? YES! And in “Were you There When They Crucified My Lord?” did the writer mean the man who stilled the waters and calmed the sea, or did he mean the Son who bled and died when God in Christ took away our sin? YES! Thank God for spirituals that connect the Heavenly Christ with the Human one. Thank God for creeds that mount a formidable defense against those who would twist the meaning of Scripture to fit their own teaching; and thank God for faithful witnesses like those two girls in a dormitory room years ago, because the fine preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, names those 20 minutes as her conversion to Christ that brought her to seminary, to the ordained ministry, and to the Christian pulpit. God was in Christ, reconciling you … and me, and countless others to himself. Is your life so good that you don’t need him? Is your soul so weak that you can’t call on him? Find a way, a way to call on the Savior: the bridge, over your chasm of sin.

Let us pray: “I accept Jesus Christ as my person Lord and Savior, and others here do to; if still others here wish it now, I ask for Jesus to come in to the life of all who invite him; today, here, and now. May conversion begin for them today. In His name I pray. Amen.”

Now, you might be saying, out of all those good gospel hymns he named, why are we going to sing this hymn??? Listen to what Hymnologist Austin Lovelace has written about "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence:" “This ancient prayer is one of the oldest in the Christian Church, traditionally ascribed to St. James, the brother of Jesus. Its first written form existed in the mid fourth century [while the Nicene Creed was being formulated] and it was written in both Greek and Syriac, and is still sung in Jerusalem on Sundays after Christmas. It is appropriate for the celebration of the Incarnation.” [When God comes to earth in the person of Jesus Christ.] [HYMN NOTES FOR CHURCH BULLETINS, GIA, 1987, p.61.]

Jeffrey A. Sumner January 13, 2008