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November 14, 2004
Jesus Christ—Begotten from the Father Before All Ages
Jesus Christ—Begotten from the Father Before All Ages
Psalm 2 / Isaiah 25: 6-10
John 1: 1-2, 14.
November 14th, 2004
Last weekend Bonnie and I were in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. She read to us a brief summary of her life, with some details of how things have changed since she was a little girl. Think of all that has changed in the past ninety years. My mother rode a horse to her early piano lessons. Can you young folk picture that? Does your piano teacher’s house have a hitching post? Her country home as a child didn’t have indoor plumbing or telephone. Imagine going to an outhouse in mid-winter! Do you all know what an outhouse is? Imagine a world without telephones. Radio wasn’t very common yet. But one thing that has stayed pretty much the same is human nature.
My mother was born the year the First World War began. This was then called “the Great War.” The machine gun was introduced in World War I. It mowed down young soldiers like grass because the military still used the old-fashioned battle tactics, waves of soldiers charging at the enemy. Two of my Scottish great-uncles were among the millions slaughtered in France in 1915, clad in their Gordon Highlander kilts. Wouldn’t it have been better if we kept getting places on horseback, and outhouses, and changed what makes for war.
We’re used to the idea of war now, and can hardly imagine a world without people killing each other somewhere. But try to imagine a world where it is different than this. Imagine a world where the kind of environment you wish to live in were the common condition of all people. No war. No selfishness. No poverty. No law courts. None of the miseries people inflict on one another.
I say, “Try to imagine” such a world because you and I know that this is just an idea now. We have to adjust to the real world, and get on in it the best we can. The way people—ourselves included—really are.
We say we want to do this as Christians, that is, living a way of life as taught by Jesus. This takes some doing. We know we all fall short of Jesus’ way. One reason we emphasize the great doctrine of justification by faith alone, that we are not and cannot be saved by doing good deeds—besides the fact that it is true--is that we are painfully aware how defective, spasmodic, temporary, off again, on again our best deeds are.
Without the grace of God, His unmerited favor, we haven’t the ghost of a chance of being people God would find the least interesting to include in heaven for eternity. There are some people you and I would not want to have at our dinner table. Bad manners make for miserable dinner company. You and I would be that kind of people at God’s dinner table—miserable boors without a trace of heavenly etiquette.
We cling to songs like “Amazing Grace,” even if it means we have to sing, “that saved a wretch like me.” Why? Because we know that if we were put under God’s magnifying glass we’d all really look pretty grim. “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” King David prayed, “and renew a right spirit within me.” Others can see we need this. We don’t always notice.
Instead of seeing ourselves as others see us, we play at seeing others as we imagine God does. When your little daughter listens to your hear-beat with her toy stethoscope in the play-doctor kit she got for her birthday, you think it’s cute. She puts the plastic thermometer in daddy’s mouth and tells him to keep it under his tongue and not talk—just like the Dr. said to her at her last check up. We love to see children playing games like this that might result in a career as a doctor. It’s cute to see their impressions of what a doctor does.
But it’s not in the least cute when we presume to know the innermost secrets of the hearts of others, judging even their intentions. In our attempt to play God, we have short-changed loving as God loves, forgiving as He forgives, and giving with His lavish generosity. We who are not God, play God-games badly.
It was something like this, I think, that must have been in the minds of the men who hammered out the words about Jesus in the Nicene Creed. Aware of the grievous problem afflicting us human beings who play God with each other in all the wrong ways, they stressed how God “played” being a human being to teach us how to play the game of humanity right, which is our real game.
We have come to the section of the Creed that hones in on who and what Jesus Christ really was. This second section that tells of God the Son starts out: “And [we believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only born, the one born of the Father before all ages.” Three times the Creed stresses the idea that Jesus was born—He is Son, only born, born of the Father.
These ideas do not correspond to what really goes on in heaven because there is no marrying and so no being born in heaven. These are ideas that have to do with this world. “Born” is a word that only makes sense in earthly life. You and I all were born. We are sons or we are daughters.
In being born, in starting life as everyone does, God began “playing the game of human life.” He would play it exactly as we ought to, beginning with the very beginning as a baby. I proposed to you how you and I play God in condemning even the innermost motives of people—and doing a pretty bad job of it. Well, God turned this project on its head, playing at the game of humanity. He Who always was started from the very beginning with birth.
The Gospel lesson this morning made this clear. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here is the basis of the Creed saying, “before all ages.” John is talking about Jesus, the one born to Mary in Bethlehem, who had an analogous relationship in the Godhead to the Person we call “the Father.” John makes clear something Matthew and Luke’s Gospels left to him to stress. “He was in the beginning with God and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” This is the God-stuff that people had no way of recognizing when looking at Jesus.
What could be seen, that John wants to help us understand is that God really began playing the game of humanity. He writes in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” How did He become flesh and not just seem to be a babey, with baby skin—such a crude way of putting it, really? Underneath the skin we see is flesh. We don’t want to see the flesh. It’s the baby’s skin we love to touch.By being born a baby.
The word “dwelt” comes from the word “tent,” in Greek. He “tented” among us. You who love to go camping leave your comfortable homes and put up a tent out in the forest somewhere and love to rough it away from civilization. You pretend you are frontier folk again. This is similar to how God “played” our game.
We try to play God and fail badly. God played the game of humanity and did it well. John describes the impression Jesus made: “We have seen his glory as of the only Son of the Father.” There was no mistaking Jesus had flesh and blood. Cut Him and he’d bleed. “But boy! how magnificently he lived real life before us, “John says.
What was this “glory” of which John wrote? Jesus didn’t have a halo around his head calling attention to him. He didn’t use “King James Bible” kind of language, different from how others spoke. What John saw was “grace,” that is, unfailing graciousness toward others, and truth—personal honesty to the core.
We tend to “theologize” these two comments and think John meant that Jesus’ displayed a loftier kind of behavior than we can imagine when we say, “a gracious person.” Perhaps we want to imagine that the “truth” of which John wrote was of a higher sort than the honesty we expect of one another. But I don’t think this is necessary.
Jesus “played” the role of human being better than we play the role of God. Jesus, God made flesh, played man at his best, gracious, truthful. Why? Because beyond doing the big work of grace, dying to pay the penalty for your sin and mine, He needed to show us how to play the game of life. Scrap the idea of trying to play God. Instead, take up the ways of grace and truth.
I proposed that we read two passages from the Old Testament as well as John’s well known statement about Jesus as God who became flesh. First, in Psalm 2 we read David’s words describing God’s view of the world, with its ambitious nations that each one thinks it is the reason for the existence of the world itself. “He that sits in the heavens laughs.”
We who live in the most powerful nation in the world should remember that God laughs when He sees any pretentious nation thinking it is the reason for everything. David may have thought he was writing about himself, since God appointed him to the heavy duty of being King of Israel with long-range task. But he wrote of someone else in writing God’s remark, “I have my king on Zion, my holy hill . . . He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.”
David died and his dusty remains are in a Jerusalem graveyard. But someone was born into his family line to whom all of this pertained. Isaac Watts summarized this in his great hymn, “Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun does its successive journeys run. His kingdom spread from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and reign no more.”
Isaiah wrote of this one in a section of his prophecy where he peers into the future with great hope. “It will be said in that day, ‘Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
How would anyone recognize this One to come? Because He was born a man. He entered life, he played our game. He came to us who play God with one another so badly, and played the game of humanity perfectly—so winsomely. “Perfectly” probably sounds cold and sterile. But Jesus’ perfection was winsome.
We are apt to think of Jesus as “man” at Christmas and on Good Friday. We picture the humble baby boy and all the charm of the manger scene. We picture Jesus suffering excruciating pain on the cross. But in between Jesus birth and death, and upon His resurrection, we have styled Jesus as being more God than man. Indeed, the temptation for devout folk is to so stress the Deity of Christ as to make insignificant Jesus full humanity.
But the Creed emphasizes Jesus’ birth—stressing that he was son, a human category, and twice that he was born. When we say “God the Son,” we are dabbling in describing an eternal relationship within the Godhead for which the terms “son” and “father” are the best analogies in human language. But when we speak of Jesus as “son” we are accepting as well as we can a fact actually true: Jesus was a son, a born human being. Jesus played the game of human life, starting at the very beginning. Why? Because we human beings were playing so badly the game of Deity, judging, condemning, underplaying tragically the Divine roles of love, forgiveness, and grace.
As I think about the Nicene Creed that Christians have taken so seriously for the past seventeen-hundred years, I realize that God does need us to explain to Him what He is like. But we need to try to understand what God is like because He went to such effort to make Himself known to us and in a way that shows how we should live—who were made in the image of God. If we think of God aright, we will live not only by faith, but by gratitude.
I am grateful that God did not impose on us some crazy mythology, mystical “cartoons” such as the ancient Greeks and Romans had as they tried to probe the heavens and got no farther than Olympus. Their gods behaved like the worst human beings. We don’t think of God as the Incas did, who slaughtered their most beautiful daughters and sons in rituals that tried to give their best, costliest offerings to God as they thought of him.
Instead we think of God most accurately when we take in the fact that He became as we are, to lift us up to life together and life with Him. As Clement put it, “He became as we are, so we could become as He is.” Jesus was really born so we could see Him in human terms—the only terms we can really understand.
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, only born Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.” And all this for you and for me. I pray that we may remember this and be thankful, and thoughtfully live out our gratitude.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bless you for creating us in your image, and then for taking on our likeness in Jesus Christ, born for us. Help us to trust in Him, and so to find life. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 14, 2004 09:30 AM