Where do we begin?  How do we speak of you?

We say that Jesus is the Son, eternally begotten from the Father.  We are still not sure how this works.  We say that the Father and the Son are analogous terms, used to describe something of the nature of God and how God relates to humanity.  These terms, though, speak of things that are in eternity.  We do not understand eternity.  We might recognize that eternity is not forever, that it is a state of being outside of time, but all that we know has been revealed in time.  Time is limited.  Humans are limited.  We use terms to describe what we perceive and what we believe has been revealed, but the words are lacking.  So, we are not sure what it means to say that the Son became human.  We do not understand the Christ’s divinity – any more than we understand eternity.  Instead, we only accept that the ultimate truth is something that we can ponder.  The words we use are intended to stretch our perception and make us aware of what might be.

The Holy Spirit, which I believe is present and loving us even now, will have to wait for another post.  What has been continuing to enthrall me lately is the experience of God and humanity.  Human experience is, after all, something that we can account for.  Our experience with the source of being we call God, and our accounts of the human Jesus, they lead us to a worldly experience.  Even when our encounter with God is described in supernatural terms, the words are still human terms.  It is the humanity of Jesus that enthralls me.  It is the ways that he was described that draw me into contemplation of him.  I can believe that there was a man named Jesus.  He was born of woman.  He had the same muddy beginning as us.  At the same time, there was something about the way he was that set him apart.  This difference was so powerful that people intentionally spoke of him in terms that were different from the ways that they spoke of others.

The words that people used to speak of their experience with Jesus were not the same glowing variety as used to describe mythological gods or ancient heroes.  He was not the mighty, yellow-haired Achilles or the courageous Odysseus performing feats of strength and daring.  His greatness did not reveal itself in an ascendance to worldly power or with righteousness rewarded by material wealth, like the heroic David or the stalwart Job.  In fact, it was just the opposite.  His miraculous feats gave others strength.  His power healed those who were injured.  His ascendance to power was without reward and without acclaim.  He was great because he served and cared for others; he shared in their struggles and rejoiced with their return to wholeness.  He did not pursue titles, and when they were given, he demurred.  He looked at his life, even when speaking of his Father, not as the right to do as he saw fit, but as the choice to do as he thought the Father saw fit.

I sometimes wonder what prompted the author of John to write, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.”  These passages are some of my favorite in the bible, some of the first that I came to believe, and some of the first that led my mind into a new way of thinking.  Still, I do not know what they mean.  The words we have for Jesus cannot adequately describe his divinity – only what people have experienced of his humanity as it related to divinity.  The way of Jesus was different from other people’s ways.  How Jesus revealed God was different than what people expected.  He defied categorization.  He was something other.  Perhaps since people did not understand this, they gave him names that described just how “other” they perceived him to be; these title came not from his likeness to God (which they did not and could not know), but came from a way of being that was so unlike what humans had experienced that he must be somehow divine.  And so they say, he was like us in all things but sin.  That he was born of a virgin and became man.

At the same time, perhaps it was that he allowed people to experience something of their own call to divinity, too, that he was able to open people up to their experience of relationship with God, present in their lives, in a new way.   I like the idea that Jesus was a bridge, both God and human, introducing the grace of the divine into human existence.  Was the way Jesus experienced the divine different from what we can experience?  I am not so sure that it was.  I mean, obviously, his union with God, to the extent that he was God, cannot be known to any of us.  However, much of what Jesus experienced of God was a human experience of God, and that can somehow be understood.  It has been posited that Jesus, sharing in human ignorance, might have come to know the fullness of his nature over time.  Perhaps, then, like Jesus, we can come to know something of the fullness of our nature, even as we live in the flesh.  We can come to experience the love of God and give that love to others, just like Jesus did.  We can offer ourselves to the possibility of transformation through the contemplation of his life.  We can commit ourselves to pondering the meaning of the confusing words used to describe him.  We can learn better how to perceive the intersection of the human and divine.  Recognizing him creates a space of grace where we can come to understand, if not the eternal nature of the Son, at least how divinity looks when it is fully human and bound in time.

Related posts:

1. Let Him Easter In You
2. Living in the Tension