If we ask the question, “What is God like?” our answer is simply, Jesus Christ. If we want to know what God is like we look to him. He is the primary revelation of God to us. But, more than that. If we ask the question, “What are humans supposed to be like?” the answer is the same, Jesus Christ. This is the beauty of our Lord’s incarnation. Because our Lord is divine, he reveals God to us. On the other hand, because our Lord is human, he reveals what humanity is supposed to be.
John
Calvin famously argued that if we really want to know ourselves, we must first
know God. Okay, fine. But, how in the world are we to know God? Well, that’s
part of the problem, isn’t it? God is not a thing in the world, like so many
other things. God is not an object that is subject to our gaze. God is not a
thing that we can find, examine, analyze and experiment with so that we might
come to understand it, in the way that we come to understand so many things in
the world. Simply put, the Creator is not a part of creation. So, how in the
world (since that is where we are, we are in the world), how in the world are
we to know God?
“No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” Since God is not a part of the world, and since we can’t leave this world to go in search of God, God has come to us. The Word became flesh and lived among us. We don’t go and find God; God comes to us and reveals himself to us. This can be such a hard thing for humans to accept. We want to know. We want to be in control. We want to take something, break it apart so we can understand how it works. And, then, once we know how it works, we like to use it for our own purposes. That’s the kind of knowledge we like; knowledge we can use, knowledge we can manipulate, knowledge we can control.
Knowledge is power, as they taught us in school. And, very often that is true. But, when it comes to knowing God, our usual way of knowing things doesn’t work. If we want to know God, all we can do is accept what has been revealed. “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”
Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father.” How can that be? He goes on to say, “I and the Father are one… the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.” Saying things like that is what so angered the religious leaders, because as they put it, Jesus was making himself equal with God. And yet this is an essential part of the good news, that God has spoken to us most clearly through his Son. Everything Jesus did, everything he said, communicates something of God to us. And, more than that, through his death and resurrection the character of God is most clearly seen. That much beloved passage, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life” that one statement tells us so much about God, not the least of which is that God loves us.
Love is a very difficult thing to communicate from a distance. When people love each other and yet they are apart; they still love each other, but they long to be together. They want to be in the same space. The sense you get from the scriptures is that God has always wanted to be with humanity, with us. That was the design from the very beginning. Go back to Genesis and you have this image of God and humanity walking together, through the garden, in the cool of the day. That’s an ideal picture of what God intended. Then you go to the end of the scriptures, in Revelation 21, and we are told, “Behold, the home of God is with mortals, He will dwell with them and they will be God’s people and God, himself, will be with them.” Those who love each other want to be together, they want to be in the same space.
God has always loved us. Paul says God loved us before it ever occurred to us to love God. And so, instead of just communicating that love from a distance, God the Son comes into the world to show us God’s love, to reveal God’s love to us. That God the Son would come into this world so that he could be seen and touched, so that we could see how God would live the human life with all of its joy and sorrow, so that we could hear him teach us how to live, and then to see him live it in practice, even to the point of sacrifice for our sake, this is true love. It’s the kind of love that draws near, into the same space as the one who is loved.
If we love someone, and see that they’re doing something in the wrong way, we might tell them the correct way to go. From a distance we might say, “Hey, that’s not going to work.” In fact, if we love them and want what is best for them, we will certainly try to communicate to them the best way. But nothing is going to speak so loud as getting in there and showing by example right way to do it, so they can see not only how it is done but the outcome of doing it the right way. That is exactly what God has done for us, through the Son.
Christ comes into this world and shows us by example what it means to be truly human. Our passage says, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Our Lord’s obedience to the law, his observation of the spirit of the law, put to shame the outward religion of the religious leaders. Later, when Paul says if we have love we fulfill the law, we can look to Christ and see that love in action.
The mystery of our Lord’s incarnation, that he is fully human and fully divine, is not some archaic doctrine that’s of use only to theologians. On the contrary, this simple truth that the Word became flesh and lived among us is the very essence of our faith, for in him we see God, and in him we see what we are created to become. By God’s grace, we are becoming just like him.
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth…From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”
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