The creed in plain words - (4) The everlasting presence

This oak has seen and will see many human generations.
Use such images as a reminder that Jesus lived,
and will live, for ever. 

On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

“My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known…friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future when they die.”¹ The writer A.N.Wilson has long had an on-off relationship with Christianity and his theology is hardly orthodox (he has just written a strange book on the Bible), but his experience highlights a truth that will not go away: Jesus lives.

This section of the creed is like a cereal variety pack; three different ideas united in a single brand: Jesus is alive and active for ever. The resurrection is the core of practical Christian faith. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile,” wrote St Paul (1 Corinthians 15:17). It reminds us we are not alone in the universe and it gives us hope for the future.

If Jesus was God in human form, the creator and sustainer of all life, then almost by definition he had to defeat death. God is the author of life; “he gives all people life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:25). Whatever human beings did to his incarnate body, they could not destroy the (in his case) immortal spirit that animated it. His resurrection was even hinted at in the scriptures which his disciples at the time didn’t understand, and he told them often enough that it would happen (e.g. Matthew 16:21; they didn’t understand or, frankly, believe that, either).

The nature of his risen body is unclear and there have been many suggestions as to what happened to his bones. Interestingly, his tomb never became a place of pilgrimage as happened with saints in later years; everyone at the time knew that the body really had gone. St Paul directly addresses the question, “How are the dead raised?” by suggesting that there are different kinds of “body”. The physical body, he suggests, is transformed into something different and imperishable.

In our age it isn’t so hard to understand as it might have been in the past. We know that matter cannot be destroyed but only transformed – burn something, and you turn it into energy; all the atoms that exist today existed when the earth was formed. They are just recycled into different shapes. And now quantum physicists exploring “dark matter” and sub-atomic particles have shown that what we think of as solid matter is a much looser collection of spinning atoms than hitting one’s head against a brick wall might suggest. There really are different kinds of “matter”. So the possibility that someone could be transformed into something which behaves differently to common matter (like suddenly appearing in a closed room) yet be physically visible is perfectly plausible.

Jesus’ final resurrection appearance was the “ascension”. It was a visual demonstration to the disciples that from then on Jesus would be universally available; wherever they were, he would be too. It wasn’t so much that he went “up”, as the stained glass windows love to depict, but that he went away, beyond space and time. (Going up in the world is, of course, a common idiom for going to a better place or role, and the idea was current in ancient times as well as modern.)

It also signalled the resumption of his role “at the right hand of the Father”, the place of authority over all creation. Jesus is (and always was) Lord, before whom all creation shall bow in homage and service. One day, we’ll have no choice but to do so when he “comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead”.

That will be the end of the world as we know it. And end it must, as physicists tell us, whether with a bang or a whimper. Their projected timescale is millions of years but ignores the possibility of sudden catastrophe. God’s timetable is unknown and Jesus ruled out any kind of speculation (see Matthew 24:36) although sadly that hasn’t deterred some Christians from speculating to the point of causing major church divisions. In any case, we don’t know when our personal residence on earth will end, as accident and disease as well as old age take their toll. But with our death the opportunity to encounter the living Christ on earth also ceases. What happens after that is covered in a later clause of the creed.

Meanwhile, a person’s relationship with the risen Christ on earth can be a foretaste of the future experience of eternity, and therefore well worth working at and developing (see John 10:10). Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas and funerals.

Think and talk  

1.  Look up and meditate on the verses quoted above. What can you learn about the nature of life from them?

2. Jesus has promised to be with us for ever For what purpose? Matthew 28:20; John 14:18-19; Hebrews 4:14-16, 7:25, 13:8. How does that make you feel?

3. What difference should his constant presence make to the way I conduct myself each day?

Reference

1.  Quoted by Alison Morgan, The Word on the wind, Monarch 2011, p.102.
 
© Derek Williams 2015

The material in these posts may be freely reproduced for private and small group study, with due acknowledgement.

 

The creed in plain words – (3) The great rescue plan

Crucifix in St Mary's Church, Peterborough

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.

When we look at the vast expanses of space and recall that an infinite God is even greater than an infinite universe we may wonder with the Psalmist “what is man that you [God] are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4). And when we see the headlines about crime and corruption, war and violence, we may cry with the prophet, “Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?” (Habakkuk 1:2).

The creed offers a clue: “for us”; “for our salvation”; “for our sake”. God is people-centred. He has our interests at heart. Jesus wept over social corruption and religious distortions and over the indignity of death and bereavement. He gave immoral women a fresh start, restored hope to grieving families, warned a rich man to give rather than hoard and told pompous clergy to stop harassing faithful worshippers.

He did it for us, but not as some might wish. God made one attempt to summarily rid the earth of wrong-doers through the almost total destruction of the flood. He then vowed never to repeat the exercise. Instead he used a more subtle and costly approach. Over centuries he sought to woo people back to himself before finally becoming human to show as well as tell what he is like and what he requires.

The death of Christ

In order to rescue a human race drowning in a turbulent sea of self-will God himself jumped into the water to offer a lifeline. In the process, the waves pulled him under and he died in the attempt.  “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…” (John 3:16). By doing so he fulfilled the Old Testament religious requirements (“without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”, Hebrews 9:22). The sinless God-man, judicially murdered by jealous leaders, made it possible for fallen humans to be reconciled to a perfect God. There’s no easy way to explain how his death “atoned” for human beings in this way, but it was the way God chose to demonstrate the extent of his love.

The creed names Pontius Pilate, who cynically washed his hands of the affair and allowed the man he believed to be innocent to be crucified in order to avoid further conflict with the baying crowd of local leaders.  It reminds us that these events took place in real time in recorded history. Pilate is known from other sources; he was later sacked for misgovernment, which is saying something in the ruthless Roman empire.

The birth of Christ

The previous clause may give us problems: “incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary”. The Christmas crib is one thing; virgin birth another (technically it is “virginal conception”). There are other hints in the New Testament that Jesus’ birth was unusual. The Pharisees called him illegitimate and he was described as “Mary’s son” which was derogatory in a patriarchal community.

Virgin birth is not unknown in the animal kingdom but usually results in female offspring; the Y chromosome needed to develop a male foetus is passed only through the male parent. There are rare cases of genetic abnormalities with women carrying the Y chromosome yet remaining fully female, and of men without it yet who are fully male (although sterile).

A person born normally has two natures but is a single person: he or she contains the natures of both parents derived from the union of their chromosomes. If Jesus was the pre-existing Son of God, fully human yet also fully divine, a simple divine exercise in genetic engineering or special creation would perfectly fashion the unique person of Jesus and demonstrate the fact. He would have both human and divine natures, fused into one person. It’s the sort of thing God would do to enable a one-off intervention in history. For us.

Think and talk  

1.  How New Testament writers explain Jesus’ death: Mark 10:45; Romans 3:21-26; 5:6-11; Colossians 1:15-23; Hebrews 7:26-27, 10:19-22; 1 John 2:2.

2.  Suggestions that rumours about Jesus’ unusual birth were circulating: he was accused of being illegitimate, John 8:41; he was called Mary’s son, Mark 6:3 (but in parallel passages in other Gospels the paternal line is noted without comment; note too Luke 3:23, “he was the son, so it was thought of Joseph”); Galatians 4:4 refers to Mary, not Joseph. Ignatius (about AD 110) also refers to the virgin birth.

3.  “God waits for the chances we give him to show his great generosity” (John Chrysostum, 4^th century Archbishop of Constantinople). “God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home” (French proverb). Why are we slow to respond to the Gospel challenge to trust Jesus because of his loving sacrifice?

© Derek Williams 2015

Material from these posts may be reproduced with appropriate acknowledgment for local and small group study

 

 

The creed in plain words: (2) Jesus is who he said he was

The ascension of Jesus depicted in a church window
in Edith Weston, Rutland

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.

If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. That is really what this huge mouthful of theological shorthand is saying, although historically it was crafted for a different reason.

The early church struggled to define the nature of Christ (and hence the relationships within Trinity). Some people (called Docetists) said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Others (later called Adoptionists) claimed that a human being was “adopted” by God as his Son. Some settled for Christians believing in two gods (after all, much of the rest of the then known world was polytheistic). Even today Jehovah’s Witnesses may claim that orthodox Christians believe in three gods. The rest struggled to maintain the difficult (and orthodox) view that Jesus was a unique being who was both fully God and fully human at the same time.

We can’t comprehend it, of course, but the closer we can get to expressing it may help us to enter more fully into the practical riches of faith. The early church wrestled with words like person, substance and matters came to a head in the fourth century AD when Arius reverted to the belief that Jesus wasn’t fully God. He was opposed by theologians such as Athanasius and the Nicene Creed was the result as the church officially took the both/and view.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Disputes about words continued and in the fifth century the eastern churches wanted to stress that Jesus had one whole nature, not two (divine and human). Western churches begged to differ and a split resulted. That split might be on the way to healing. In 2014 an “Accord” was reached between Anglicans and representatives of eastern Orthodox churches. It stated that “Christ has one incarnate nature” that contains “two natures distinguished in thought alone”.¹ So that’s clear, then.

Fully God

Back to the Nicene Creed, which stresses (at length!) that Jesus is fully God. This is what really matters and which can make a big difference to personal faith. Jesus is worthy of spiritual worship as God, not merely hero worship as a great man. The term “Son” differentiates Jesus from the Father but doesn’t imply that he is an offspring. He has existed for as long as the Father existed; long before he emerged from Mary’s womb, long before the Big Bang. He’s not like the children of the mythical Greek gods.

There is only one God, comprising three persons (the third appears later in the creed). So Jesus is “one Being with the Father”: the same God who is revealed to and experienced by us in different ways. Any analogy is flawed, but for most of us any analogy is probably better than none. So for example I am a son, a father, and a husband (and several other things too). I appear or act differently in each role, but I am still fully “me” in each “person”.

The Trinity is important for two reasons. First, it tells us that God is multi-dimensional. Like a ball, we can see all sides of God in one glance. Like a multi-faceted diamond, we see God from different angles at different times and each one sparkles with colour and surprise – but none can be taken in isolation but seen as part of the whole. And secondly, God is a “community” in himself. He does not exist in splendid isolation; he was never so lonely that he had to create humans to keep him company but did so out of love and a desire to share his riches; and he is a model for human community: unity in diversity.

The creed labours the point about Jesus’ divinity. Jesus was eternally “begotten, not made”. The word is important. What we beget is the same nature as ourselves: our children are human, not less than human. Jesus was God, not less than God. What we make, like a home or a model, has a different nature; God made the universe and it is separate from God, it has a different nature. On earth Jesus claimed to be equal with God even though he was in certain ways distinct from the Father. Ultimately that was why he was crucified. Occasionally of course he demonstrated divine powers through his miracles, and his true nature was most clearly seen in the transfiguration and resurrection.

C.S. Lewis put it memorably in Mere Christianity: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”²

And that is the relevance of this theological complexity. Jesus really is the human face of God; the creator who became one of his own creatures; the author who took the lead role in his own drama; the king who allowed himself to be his own subject. So when we want to know what God is like, Jesus is the image to focus on. For a creator to become a creature – to descend from the sublime to the subordinate – in order to help the rest of creation out of the hole it had dug for itself is by any standard an extreme action that can only be described as love, especially when it resulted in God experiencing the full horror of a painful and undeserved judicial murder at the hands of the very people he came to help.

Think and talk

1.  What do these passages tell us about Jesus’ pre-existence before he was born as a human being? John 1:1-5, 8:54-59; Colossians 1:15-17.

2.  What do these passages tell us about Jesus’ claim to be fully equal with God? Matthew 26:63-64; Luke 22:66-71; John 5:18, 10:30, 14:6-11; Philippians 2:5-7; Colossians 1:18-20; Hebrews 1:1-3.

3.  References to the Trinity as such are rare in the New Testament (it took centuries for people to even start to get their heads round it). Each “Person” is seen as acting in a specific way. But there are a few places where all three are mentioned as acting in a co-ordinated manner. What might these tell us about how God works in our lives? Matthew 28:19-20; John 14:23-26; 2 Corinthians 13:13-14; Ephesians 2:17-18, 4:4-6; Revelation 1:4-6. Notice too ow they work together in Romans 8:1-39.

4.  Why do you think we always want to bring God down to our level and size rather than embrace the mystery of a multi-dimensional God who is beyond human understanding? How might this limit our view and experience of God?

References

1.  Reported in The Times, 1 November 2014

2.  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Fontana books 1973, pp.52f

 

© Derek Williams 2015