The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Last Sunday’s sermon at this service was hard work. We were focusing on three crucially important things to say about God. One, that God is not like anything else in the universe; God is not a thing. And two, God is the reason why there is something and not nothing, God is the uncaused cause of everything there is. And three, having created us God leaves us space to be ourselves, space to work out how to be ourselves. God opens up the space for relationship with God. Then we considered that thinking about God in this way invites us  to respond to God and to be always truthful and always humble in our response.
    Now you might think that being rational about God in this way is not good subject material for a sermon or that it’s a way of thinking that should be left to the experts. It would be far better if we in the pew simply got on with our worship and private praying and trying to help people, and we in the pulpit preached sermons which helped us to do that. And you could be right, except that as Christians we are called to give account of the hope that is within us. We need to be able to explain in today’s world why we choose to be Christian, and why we think the claims of Christianity are not naive or irrational.
    So this week we are moving on to think about Jesus Christ. What does it mean to call Jesus the Son of God? What does it mean to say that he was human and divine? And what difference does it make to our being Christian that we say these things? What consequence does Christian belief have for Christian living?
    Thinking about Jesus has often fallen into one of two categories. On the one hand many people nowadays will think of him as a good man, a kind of prophet; what he did and said is more important than who or what he was. On the other hand, though more so in the past perhaps, people have thought of him as an entirely supernatural agent, able to do anything and know everything.
    From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy both of these views are wrong because neither of them says enough. Christian orthodoxy says that Jesus was both human and divine, ‘without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.’
    So if we believe that Jesus was human and divine, that doesn’t mean that a bit of him was human and another bit divine, or that the two bits were mixed together. You can’t have bits of divinity because as we saw last week God isn’t a thing you can have bits of. Divinity is not a characteristic. We can’t say Jesus was divine in the same way that he might have been tall or had dark hair. When we talk of Jesus as God we aren’t saying anything about his psychology or his self consciousness. We are saying something a lot stranger than that. But to understand that we have to look at what it means to say that Jesus was Son of God.
    First of all of course we don’t mean that Jesus was biologically son of God. This has nothing to do with the Virgin Birth – and the claim that Jesus is son of God isn’t dependent on his being born of a virgin. Jesus is in relationship to God as Son. To be a person is to be in relationship, who we are as human being is defined partly by our genetic make up, but more significantly by our relationships from when we were in the womb to the moment we die. Jesus relationship to God defines who he is.
    In his life time Jesus called God, Father – it was for him the defining characteristic whereby he understood his relationship with God. And that meant that he had a profound sense of receiving from God; he lived a life of radical dependency. And that dependency was illustrated by the fact that in the gospel story we are never told that Jesus possessed anything or lived anywhere. ‘The Son of man has nowhere on earth to lay his head’. And people did not resent the fact that Jesus was a looked after human being. His relationship with God communicated itself to them, embraced them. At the start of his ministry the narrative of the Temptation establishes that he listens to God, he does not put God to the test, he serves God and seeks no power for himself. Throughout his ministry his miracles are attributed to the faith of the individual; he is the conduit for the power of God; he is obedient to divine inspiration, he waits for direction, he suffers and accepts the way his story has to go if he is to remain obedient to God. His life is a life of response to the Father. And it was this that made it credible for his disciples, that he should be called Son of God.
    By the time the fourth gospel was written, some sixty or so years after the death of Jesus, this understanding of Jesus son-ship had advanced a stage further. What the faithful had come to see, was that this relationship in its historical setting in Galilee was a relationship that exists in God eternally. It wasn’t just a special relationship experienced by a special human being, it was a relationship which tells us what God is like. This relationship of fatherly giving and son-like receiving, defines God in an essential way – though there is of course more to be said when we come to think about the Holy Spirit.  There is a relationship of giving and receiving in God and what that might look like to us is revealed in the relationship of the human Jesus to the God he called ‘Abba, Father’.
    How does this relationship affect the humanity of Jesus? In what I have said about Jesus obedience and receptivity I might have made him sound just a little puppet like – an automaton performing God’s will. And yet that was not how Jesus struck his disciples. They saw him weep, they laughed at his jokes,  they experienced his love, they knew his family, they saw him afraid, they witnessed him changing his mind, they even heard him say that ‘No-one is good save God alone’. They knew him as a person whose humanity was not compromised by his relationship with God but rather fulfilled. To say, therefore, that Jesus is divine, is to say that his humanity was thereby perfected. Divinity is not alien to humanity. Divinity enables humanity to fulfil itself. And to say that his humanity was perfected is not to set him up as a kind of superman – a perfect model of a human being. Humanity cannot be reduced to a type, a supermodel, a once for all perfect human being. The perfecting of humanity takes place in the particular circumstances which shape that particular human being at that particular time. So in the perfecting of Jesus’ humanity the disciples witnessed the fulfilling of a human being which released in them the desire and the hope to be the fulfillment of themselves as Peter and James and John and Mary Magdalen, and Martha and Lazarus. To say that Jesus is divine does not compromise his humanity, but fulfils it.   And that must therefore mean that to be baptized into Jesus, to put on Christ, as Paul says, must mean that by sharing in the relationship the Son has with the Father we begin the journey whereby our humanity begins to fulfill itself and to be perfected.
    At this point then we begin to see why believing in Jesus like this is important. Believing has consequences. Believing in Jesus in this way is not like thinking he was a good man and respecting his values. Believing in Jesus in this way stirs a hope and   a belief that something like this might be possible for us. Through belief and an acting on that belief, we can be changed. Christlikeness stirs in us  manifesting itself in a particular way which will be unique to each one of us – the Christlikeness of a Peter or a Martha, as the humanity of each begins to be fulfilled. Amen