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For worship planning ideas on Lord’s Days 14 , please link to our ministry partner at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and specifically to this page where you will find ideas for constructing a service around the theme of the identity of Jesus’ miraculous conception and birth as well as on his two natures of divine and human:
(posted
on 10/30/2005)
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider
- In just a few short words in Q&A 35 the Catechism manages to capture and briefly summarize what had been, for the Early Church, one of the most tortured and longstanding debates in all of church history: the nature and identity of the Christ. In truth, it took the church close to four centuries to figure out what the creeds and confessions can now state with such apparent ease and precision: namely, the belief that Jesus is both human and divine.
- A sermon on Lord’s Day 14 surely presents an opportunity to summarize the key Christological debates that animated the early councils in places like Nicea and Chalcedon. Unlike the Doctrine of the Trinity, the topic of the two natures of Christ lends itself more readily to analogies that people can understand fairly readily. The equal but opposite errors of Docetism and Ebionism can be understood through relatively simple examples like Superman (he only LOOKED like a mild-mannered reporter but really was the man of steel who was completely unlike the real human beings around him) or on the other side there is the Jesus Seminar prattle about the Galilean cynic-sage who was thoroughly human but who did manage to say some really clever things about God. The equal but opposite errors to avoid are God-in-Disguise on the one side (divine only) and the wiser-than-most human teacher on the other side (human only).
- But as many pastors know, many people in the church unwittingly err in the direction of Docetism, of a Savior who was more divine than human (and who saved us on account of his divine power, not on account of his being truly human). Indeed, sometimes pastors can get into trouble by talking about Jesus in terms that some people judge to be altogether too earthy. People seem uncomfortable picturing their Lord with a chive stuck between his incisors or suppressing a burp. Neal Plantinga once talked about how Jesus was just like us, mentioning at one point that perhaps in his father’s carpentry shop, even Jesus occasionally “stubbed his toe or carefully sawed a board two inches too short.” But not everyone is comfortable picturing Jesus with common human foibles and characteristics.
- So a Lord’s Day 14 sermon can be an opportunity to correct the nascent Docetism that lurks in many’a pious heart. As the Catechism reflects, the Christian tradition has long insisted that Jesus needs both the divine and the human to do us any saving good.
Possible Biblical Texts
Hebrews 2:14-3:6: This passage highlights the true flesh-and-blood humanity of Jesus. More that that, however, it also reveals the theological reason why it is so vital not to compromise on the true humanity of Jesus. Jesus’ solidarity with all of us who struggle and are tempted (and who, unlike Jesus, also fall prey to temptation) reminds us that Jesus is a compassionate Savior as well as a powerful one. The salvation Jesus offers to us is a knowing salvation—it comes to us at eye-level from one who knows how we are made, who sympathizes with our weaknesses, and who is in a grand position, therefore, not only to save and to forgive us but to do so in a loving manner.
Matthew 1:1-17: This may seem like a really strange passage to preach on at ANY time and yet it can make for a fitting Advent/Christmas text. Because tucked into Matthew’s apparently dry family tree/genealogy of Jesus are some delightful surprises that speak of both Jesus’ utterly human nature and of his strikingly divine nature. As New Testament scholar David Holwerda has said, Matthew took what could have been a standard, run-of-the-mill genealogy and he spiced it up with some “holy irregularities.” First, Matthew was careful to include (or directly allude to) the names of four women. This was a highly unusual practice in Jewish family trees. More than that, the women referred to (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba) were all foreign women (non-Israelite by birth) three of whom had some measure of sexual scandal associated with them. These are the skeletons in Jesus’ family closet and yet Matthew takes pains to display them precisely to show the true humanity of Jesus’ lineage. What’s more, the non-Israelite status of all those women was Matthew’s first hint that the gospel was never going to be a Members Only, Israel-only phenomenon. But having established Jesus’ lineage in such utterly human (even tawdry) terms, then comes the big holy irregularity when that long string of “the father of, the father of, the father of . . .” is suddenly snapped when in verse 16 Joseph is identified only as “the husband of Mary.” He’s Mary’s husband but not Jesus’ father. There is a whole lot of theology tucked into that little detail!
Philippians 2:1-11: Here is the classic text of Jesus, the pre-existing Son of God, being born in humble form, emptying himself of many divine perquisites to do so. These verses reveal what is sometimes called the parabola-shaped curve of Jesus’ work. In geometry a parabola is a U-shaped curve that begins from a definite point high on the graph but then plunges down to a low point before swooping back upwards to an infinitely high point (higher than where the curve began). This shows the trajectory of Jesus: he was the divine Son of God who had all the power in the universe and yet he came down here to earth and died a hellish death. Yet after that death God raised him up to an even higher point. How can one ever get higher than where Jesus as God’s Son had been to begin with? It can happen because now Jesus is also ACCLAIMED as the cosmic Lord of lords. So this passage likewise captures the two natures of Christ as presented in Lord’s Day 14.
Illustration Idea
Illustration Idea #1: A few years ago theologian Stanley Grenz claimed that you could detect the shift from the modern era to the postmodern era through observing, of all things, the television show Star Trek. After all, Grenz noted, who was the most intriguing character of the original show from the early 1960s? It was Mr. Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human science officer whose core struggle was to beat back and try to get rid of his mushy, emotional, irrational human side so as to let his vastly superior Vulcan nature allow him always to be cool, serene, methodical, and logical. This, Grenz said, is a good reflection of the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. Led by Immanuel Kant this movement tried to rid humanity of its childish, irrational, emotional side. If only we can dare to think, dare to let our intellects rule us, we will then enter the full maturity of the human race.
In the late-1980s, however, a new version of the Star Trek series came to TV, but this time the most intriguing character was quite different. This time the science officer was an android, a machine, known as Mr. Data. Data, as his very name suggests, was no more than a walking, talking, computer bank of information and data: a robot. But unlike Mr. Spock who so wanted to shed the messiness of humanity, Mr. Data's dearest dream was to go beyond being a mere computer so as to become also human, replete with the ability to feel joy and sadness, laughter and tears, happiness and fear. And this, according to Grenz, reveals the shift to the postmodern era in which we no longer seek to be rid of our emotional humanity but to embrace it in all its raw sensuality.
What does it mean to be human? Are emotions good things or irrational things that get in the way of solid thinking? Is it good to have a body of flesh and blood or were ancient Greeks like Socrates closer to the truth when they called the physical body the prison of the soul--a jail cell from which our hearts are eager to escape once we die? The church, too, long wrestled with the nature of humanity and how a true humanity could square with Jesus’ also being truly God.
Illustration Idea #2: As God's eternal Son, Jesus had had divine power from before all time. But that power alone was not going to save anybody. Incredibly, Jesus had to become a real human being! We must pay attention to the utter humanity of Jesus because the Bible says it was only after Jesus became every bit as human as the rest of us that salvation finally burst onto the scene. We're not saved only through divine power, we are saved also through divine vulnerability!
And yet we have a hard time with this. Of course we are correct to reject those Jesus Seminar folks who want to get rid of the divine part of Jesus. But we become guilty of an equal but opposite error if we all-but get rid of the human part of Jesus. And so also we quietly imagine that Jesus only looked surprised sometimes, only faked being hungry or tired. After all, he was God! And being God rules out, we theorize, the messy, physical side of human life. But that is a concept of God more akin to what the ancient Greeks thought about gods than what the Bible says. In fact, in Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play The Frogs there is a scene in which a real god and a human impostor both claim to be gods. So someone devises a test to smoke out the fake: both of the men would be whipped and the one who cried out in pain would clearly be the impostor. The truly divine, the Greeks thought, are immune to pain and emotion.
But the Jesus we meet in the gospels, though truly God, did feel pain. He could cry and it was no act. He could claim to be hungry and it was not fake. And when one day he was whipped mercilessly until his back looked like a bloody set of Venetian blinds, the screams of pain were real. But the miracle of the incarnation is that though he cried out as any one of us would, that did not reveal him to be a divine impostor. It just meant that somehow God had pulled off as stunning a miracle as has ever been: the utterly true combination of God and humanity.